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Wireless Internet Co-Ops?
einstein asks: "How many other geeks out there are purchasing high speed commercial net connections to the remote areas they live, and then selling access to their neighbors to help cover costs? I know of a remote area with about 20-30 house all of which could access a wireless lan connection to share a 1.5 ADSL connection. I'm planning on bugging the neighbors to see if there interested soon, and I'd like to have some idea if this has worked for other people. So, who's doing this in a Co-Op fashion, and how is it working?" This probably won't be possible with most residential DSL providers, however would they let this fly on their commercial lines?"
I'm doing it now with my ISP's commercial connection and there seems to be no complaints on their part...
These are the good old days you'll be telling your children about. Make them worthwhile.
If you plan to do this, not only does it have to be a business/commercial class, the TOS will also have to allow you to resell the bandwidth. Just one more thing to check into.
And you might want to make sure the 1.5 ADSL has a good upload speed, because if it's something like 90k, that's going to fill up really quickly. (One person uploading could bring the speed down for everyone quickly.) If you get DSL, I'd probably look into SDSL.
I recently did this with a DSL connection to my condo. I have mostly ghetto neighbors, we can only get IDSL here (144K up/down), and I only need it for e-mail and casual newsreading.
It's $120 a month, a bit pricey, so I talked to a few neighbors, and told them as long as they won't leech or kazaa or download massive amounts of porn, they can jump in with me.
I have it as a commercial account, asked if there is a limit to the number of users (no), and let about 10 of my neighbors on.
Built a simple gateway that keeps track of ONLY the number of bytes take by each user (in order to see if anyone is abusing it). 3 months, no problem.
I dunno what exactly I'd do if someone DID start leaching, since I have no real contract, but then again, I have the switch in my condo, so all I need to do is pull the plug.
You'd be surprised how far a low-ping quality IDSL can go for as many people as are on it. Its definitely far and away better than ISDN or dial-up, even with 6 or 7 people browsing the web at once.
Oh, and when I need to download something big, I remote access a client who has a few T1's worth of bandwidth, and download it there, then dribble download it to my PC at home.
I haven't looked up other providers other than RR-Austin, but I would guess that most allow the resale of their services. A quick look on Roadrunner's site in Austin found something related in their business class of circuits. Though the writer isn't technically a developer or MDU it is sort of the same thing that he/she is wanting to accomplish. The drawback is the price; the business class circuits are always going to be much steeper in price (though this may be balanced out if enough people were interested). There are probably other more specific TOS's out there for other providers.
Reselling high capacity commercial circuits is extremely common. I don't see the difference between what the author suggests and the regular ole' mom&pop local isp and their modem banks.
I'd be concerned about liability. What if one of your neighboars does something sleazy and/or illegal like scanning for vulnerable servers and r00ting them or sharing tons of music or movies on a file sharing network and the RIAA sends a cease and desist letter? You might get your service terminated because one of these bozos does something stupid.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
...show a man your broadband connection, he will surf for an hour. Share with him your broadband connection, and you'll be his tech support for life!
Internet service has cool scruples
This article speaks for itself.
I used to work for a backbone company, and I have never seen a contract for commercial connections that do not allow you to resell the bandwidth, so this shouldn't be a problem.
Just keep in mind that if one of your 'users' does something like send out spam or does illegal activites, you may be held responsible since it's your/company name on the contract with the ISP (hence get contracts drawn up for your users who will connect, in which case you'll need to do some type of monitoring in case the cops show up investigating a possible crime).
In other words, cover your ass.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
A few of my friends in Tasmania are working on this sort of thing. It's meant to be a public access wireless network that allows users to be on the same network as everyone (theoretically) else in Tasmania. It doesn't have an internet access point, yet, and from what I've heard, when an internet gateway is established, at some point in the future, there will be a small fee for access. The URL is as follows.
http://www.tas.air.net.au/
Check out Ruby Ranch Internet Cooperative Association at http://www.rric.net/
/. a few months ago about ruby ranch.
there was also a story on
As the power flows in, the screen grows warm, another day starts, I'm at work again...
I know of a remote area with about 20-30 house
all of which could access a wireless lan
connection to share a 1.5 ADSL connection.
If you can get ADSL there it isn't remote.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I own a smallish ISP in Florida. We have been looking at this for some time. The problem is the cost of getting the neighbors equipment. Wireless equipment starts at around $100 and goes up from there. With the Phone companies and the cable companies trying to knock each other out with signup free offers this is a hard sell. Comcast is offering free sign/equipment and $20 per month until the end of the year. $40 after the end of the year. Also as stated most cable and DSL providers prohibit sharing of any kind. Some even go as far as to say it constitute "theft of servervice". Also setting up the antennas and running the coax cable inside and hooking everything up is a a very labor intensive problem. Also the range of the low end equipment along with ever present "line of sight" problem would mean selling to a fairly small radius (1/2 mile is what I think would be safe). This would mean finding enough people within this radius to make it worth while. We tested a pair of Linksys WAP11's with homemade antennas in point to point mode and got a very solid connection at 1.1 miles (across the river where we had clear line of sight) We tried starting one of these in the neighborhood where my head tech lives. We distrbuted flyers inviting everyone (about 30 people) to come over to his house for a meeting to answer questions and see the equipment needed. No one came. I am about to try here where I live and use a door to door sales technique. Since I own an ISP (www.cyberstreet.com). I am aware of the need to log everything. We would assign everyone a static IP so we could quickly track down any spammers/ DOS attacks. This would even be easer than doing this with dynamic dialup. But make no bones about it, this is a lot of work. We are activly looking for people in South West Florida who want to do this in their neighborhood. We would supply the High Speed connection and the local rep would make contact with his/her neighbors. We would take care of logging and most other server issues. I will make a future post if this goes anywhere.
I know of a remote area with about 20-30 house all of which could access a wireless lan connection to share a 1.5 ADSL connection.
Wouldn't it be funny if one of your neighbors agrees to split the ADSL connection with you and then sets up his own wireless network and convinces the other 18 neighbors to split his half with him.
I am getting ready to do this in Silver Springs, Nevada. Right now I have a Omni-Directional antenna on my roof and one connection about three miles away. We get about 5mbits/sec on the connection to my server. We are using Linksys WMP11 cards, a cantenna's at the client site. So far its working perfect.
We have about 70 people interested in joining. I'm going to charge $35 per connection. The T1 is going to cost me $1313 a month with a $1200 setup. I have a 32 mile loop (included in price). I have all the server equipment to get started. I figure it will be about $150-200 for the customer to get hooked up. The linksys WMP11 is about $65-80. The Dish is about $45-60. The cable is about $20-40. We can setup cantenna's for most people. Since this is the desert, no trees. All I want is about 100 customers. That is about all I can handle.
So far everything is working out great. I have a few more tests to do with more people on the line and if everything works, I'm ready to start.
The main problem I'm trying to figure out right now is how to have user logins. I can go VPN or PPPoE. I am leaning to PPPoE right now. All I need is a login with password to verify people and not allow free rides. I think this is going to be the hardest part.
I am going to write all the plans on how to get things going when I get things going so that other people in other places can do the same.
The above is not worth reading.
Then it dawned on me... I've been thinking for a bit that I want to install a wireless LAN in my neighborhood (even using 802.11a, so I get 54+ Mbps, as opposed to the usual 11), and be a sort of ISP for the neighborhood. Places like D-Link offer "Turbo" modes that can do 72 Mbps; wouldn't you pay $75/month or something for a 72 Mbps "broadband" connection? Even if you use the $3,000/month figure for an "ISP" Cogent line, I'd only need to find 40 customers at $75/month, and I'm breaking even. And I bet that the actual bandwidth usage would be VERY small; even Slashdot doesn't pull 72 Mbps sustained.
The nearest Cogent-served city is almost 100 miles away, and a lot of my neighbors are the "No thanks, I like my AOL" type, but if Cogent ever comes to town, this is something I'd very seriously consider.
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suwain_2
Sorry, but this actually *does* work. My condo unit splits a 1.2Mb SDSL between 20 units. That gets our cost down to $20/month/unit. The HOA takes care of billing. We had some upfront costs (installation, purchase of a switch for the basement), and it does take some time of a couple of volunteers (myself and one other) to help the less Internet-savvy folks get hooked up, but all in all, it's a great deal and everyone is very happy.
We do have to police a little about P2P systems, etc, but to date have really had no problem - education when you hook up a new user is the key. Our bandwidth usage is nowhere near capacity, and a number of people are running low-usage websites. Remember, for email and casual web-browsing, 20 users will mean 4-5 at peak, with much of their traffic interleaved. Trust me, it works.
Of course, there are loads of wireless community groups out there, with varying methods of deployment/philosophies/etc. You might look here and start browsing the different groups to see how they run things.
NoVAWireless might be a place to look at -- they seem to be involved with organization of clusters of small, neighborhood-based WISPs.
I should have used preview.... Check out Sugarloaf.net they are providing wireless broadband to a location not served by other means.... Also, you might want to check out Motorola Canopy for the wireless hardware.
--- I would prefer a prehensile tail....