Slashdot Mirror
Answers From Community ISP Leader
Opposition from the Big Players
by Rude Turnip
Dear Mr. Oppedahl:
Your ISP reminds me much of a credit union, which is essentially a nonprofit, member-owned bank. I recall reading about large, commercial banks lobbying to prevent credit unions from gaining some of the same privileges enjoyed by regular banks.
In this age of utility monopoly abuse, do you have any concerns about any of the large, commercial telecom interests (ie Qwest) lobbying the government to make it difficult, if not impossible to set up or maintain ISPs similar to yours?
Carl:
It's a very big problem. ILECs have lobbied many states for laws that forbid state and local governmental entities from offering telecommunications services (e.g. Internet connectivity). We specifically set up a separate corporation for our DSL coop, rather than having our metropolitan district (a state-chartered entity that operates our water system) try to provide the DSL, so as to dodge the bullet if there was such a law in Colorado.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 specifically requires the FCC to preempt such laws when asked to do so, but the FCC has often failed to carry out its obligations under the Act. See http://www.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/02/08/011379P.pdf for only the most recent case where a court ordered the FCC to carry out its duties to make it possible for some Missouri governmental entities to offer telecommunications services.
How transferrable are the lessons?
by TheConfusedOne
It seems that a lot of the problems/issues related specifically to the Colorado Public Utilities Board and their laws.
What items/issues do you feel are universal to any broadband/ISP startup? [Licensing, incorporation, etc.]
Where would one go for the state/county specific issues for each particular ISP?
Carl:
To do anything meaningful in the area of DSL, it is necessary to be able to rent unbundled network elements (UNEs) such as subloops from the ILEC (e.g. Qwest). To do that, you need to enter into an interconnection agreement with the ILEC. On Qwest's web site it says that to enter into an interconnection agreement it is necessary that you become a CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier). To become a CLEC it is necessary to file voluminous papers with the state PUC and to file voluminous papers and reports periodically thereafter. The accounting burdens are profound; for even the smallest CLEC it costs many tens of thousands of dollars annually to satisfy them.
We contacted the Colorado PUC about this, and they said that their view is, as long as we were not providing voice telephone service, we would not need to be a CLEC to enter into an interconnection agreement with Qwest. Qwest fought this but eventually gave in.
Thus, one of the first stops would be your state utility commission. Hopefully they could tell you (as ours told us) that as long as you only pass data and not voice calls, you would not need to be a CLEC to rent UNEs.
Local Bandwidth Hogs?
by Vengie
Since you pay directly for your traffic, and you've said that you pay from 75-450$ per month (quite a stretch!) have you considered local caching of sites like yahoo, slashdot, etc to save on bandwidth?
Carl:
The first thing to know is that our subscribers who are likely to have higher traffic levels are using their connections for VPN and Netmeeting uses. Caching is no help with those uses. Second, I don't think caching works except if one user happens to visit the *exact same* web site within a few hours that a previous user did. If the web site has changed during that time (as it would for many news sites such as the New York Times or news.com) the cache doesn't help much if at all. We have a mere dozen users and I don't know that they very often visit the same sites as each other.
Prospects for open space wireless
by dasmegabyte
When I was in Westcliffe, CO on vacation, I loved the environment so much I considered quitting my job and starting my own business, providing internet access for the acres of sparse plots of land connected only by dirt roads. However, it seemed fairly unfeasible -- since there's no power grid to fuel wireless repeaters and no public roads or conduits to piggyback -- so it was back to the grindstone for me.
How were you able to overcome the conditional sensitivity of high speed data in a rugged area with little or no public utilities? More importantly, how were you able to offset infrastructure costs for such a risky and inherently profitless venture -- did you receive any grants or did you simply float loans?
Carl:
As described on our web site, we obtained our launch money in the form of loans from subscribers. There were no grants.
Our total out-of-pocket launch costs were about $12K. Someone in Colorado duplicating our system could do it much cheaper, maybe $3-4K, since DSLAMs have come down in cost and since they could "opt in" to our agreement with Qwest, thus saving the enormous litigation costs we incurred in our volunteers.
I am unaware of meaningful grant sources for this sort of thing.
As for your first question, we over-engineered our microwave link and it has never been affected by weather or otherwise (e.g. signal absorption due to rain or snow). Our DSL links are well within the distance limitations of the manufacturer with a comfortable margin, and good luck has favored us with good pairs provided by Qwest.
Feds wanna take a look
by Launch
Since the Federal government may now put a 'tap' on internet connectivity without a warrent, ISPs are required to let feds put taps on the ISP's system. As member of a co-op would you be contacted if the feds put a tap on the ISP? Who gets to know when the feds come in?
Carl:
Well, as one commenter pointed out, the feds might well impose the tap upstream of us, in which case we might never learn that it had happened. We use PGP for some of our email so the feds would only be able to do traffic analysis on such emails. (Unless they put a keystroke capture routine in our computers to get the PGP passwords.) And our patent law firm uses HTTPS sessions with many of our clients.
Co-ops for low income communities
by selan
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like Ruby Ranch is a fairly well-to-do area that can support the costs of running an ISP. Do you think it is possible for community groups in low income areas to run co-op ISPs? Any advice pro or con?
Carl:
For us what made the Coop possible was not so much money as the availability of volunteers with sufficient technical and legal experience. I would say that any community, low-income or not, that had such volunteers available could make a go of it. Money is not really the barrier to entry.
Barriers to co-ops
by blamanj
Are there legal or regulatory barriers to setting up an ISP co-op that you feel should be addressed by legislation?
Carl:
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 went a long way toward making our ISP coop possible. The 1996 Act is what entitled us to rent subloops and made it impossible for Qwest to say "no" to such rental. Unfortunately the ILECs (in our case, Qwest) have developed to an art form the ability to be just barely this side of breaking the law, while making it as painful as they can for anybody to actually use the 1996 Act. I doubt that in our present ILEC-friendly administration, any changes in federal law can be made to happen that would help with these problems.
What's worse, the FCC is trying to eviscerate the 1996 Act. In its most recent rulemaking it would re-interpret the wording of the 1996 Act in a way that screws would-be DSL providers. We filed comments in that FCC proceeding, which you can see at http://www.rric.net/FCC%20DSL%20Comments.pdf. Hopefully all readers here also filed comments in that proceeding.
Disciplining "Customers"
by mr.buddylee
As mentioned in your FAQ, if someone hogs too much bandwidth, you'll charge that user for the bandwidth they use. What do you do in the case of complaints against a user for spam, pornography, or other less than desirable uses? Since it's a co-op and the costs are shared, what about the responsibility? What if the ISP was targeted as a spam host or if one of the people under your ISP was serving illegal MP3s or something more sinister like child pornography? Does the entire Co-op suffer or are you able to target and remove the offending person (and avoid any legal costs that might be brought against the ISP)?
Carl:
I suppose these same issues are presented to any ISP. Let's consider the various remedies one by one.
Money damages. If somebody tried to collect money damages from our Coop they would get nowhere. We have plenty of lawyers around the neighborhood who could make it uneconomic for anybody to try to collect money from our Coop which has a negative net worth.
They could aways try to collect money from some individual user, of course.
Injunctive remedies. Somebody might try to impose an injunction on the Coop, like a court order that we must cut off some customer's access. That would not cost the Coop money as we have lawyers to spare. And if the court order were a proper order from a court of competent jurisdiction we would of course comply with the court order.
Criminal liability. If somebody tried to hold the Coop criminally liable for the actions of a subscriber, they would again get nowhere. As mentioned above, we have plenty of lawyers around the neighborhood who would help a prosecutor understand that they would be wiser to expend their energies elsewhere.
They could aways try to prosecute the individual user, of course.
What advantages to being user owned?
by Monkeyman334
I work for a small ISP that went through all the same issues as you. We had to become a CLEC, install our own DSLAM in a Qwest central office, and are currently going through IMA. So what I'm saying is your internet setup looks totally independent of whether it's an Internet Coop or a for profit company. Is there a technology advantage to making it a coop, or is it purely financial?
Carl:
It's not really relevant to your question, but I should point out that we did not have to become a CLEC because we are carrying only data.
Back to your question. A chief advantage for us arises out of the fact that we needed to put our DSLAM in a barn that was owned by the neighborhood. Being a nonprofit coop was important to the neighborhood in giving us permission to use the barn. I doubt the the neighborhood would have been willing to provide the barn location to a profit-seeking corporation.
We were also asking our would-be members to lend thousands of dollars to the nascent entity. I think their willingness to lend money was in part prompted by the realization that nobody else would be profiting from later revenues.
Finally we were asking our members to promise to pay a rather hefty $60 per month, as well as paying startup fees. Had we been a for-profit I wonder if they would have been willing to pay such money. As a nonprofit we can assure them that once the launch costs are repaid, the monthly service fees will probably drop to a much lower level.
Different approaches?
by pokeyburro
Based on the FAQ, it looks like you considered a lot of different possible options, and really did your homework. Are there any aspects of the project that weren't perhaps as optimal as you'd like, that you would have done differently? (Not counting things not under your control, like having to contend with Qwest.)
Carl:
Well, if we could have known in advance that the PUC and Qwest were so closely tied, and thus that arbitrating before the PUC under the 1996 Act was really almost entirely a waste of time, we might have skipped the arbitration and given up and signed the draft agreement as it stood in negotiations before the arbitration began.
One of the biggest problems in negotiation was that the agreement Qwest tried to cram down our throats required us to have an $11M insurance policy naming Qwest as beneficiary. We asked Qwest if any of the interconnection agreements in force lacked this $11M requirement and they said "no." A chief goal of the arbitration was to see if we could proceed without the insurance requirement at all. We finally got it knocked down to a "mere" $1M insurance policy, still naming Qwest as beneficiary.
Months later, tipped off by a smart ISP in New Mexico (CyberMesa) we learned that Qwest had lied. The Covad/Qwest interconnection agreement has no insurance requirement at all. So under the 1996 Act we could have "opted in" to the Covad agreement and ended up with no requirement for insurance after all. This would have saved us the cost of arbitration and would have saved us the $1000 insurance premium we had to pay under our "arbitrated" agreement for this ridiculous unneeded insurance policy.
There are other things people wonder, like why we didn't simply go wireless instead. That's covered fully in our FAQ.
Okay, so that bit got me curious: are there any legal consequences to Qwest, or any RBOC, lying during these sorts of arbitration hearings? If it works (and it apparently did in this case), and there aren't any consequences (which there apparently weren't in this case), why would they not do this all the time? If there is some sort of penalty, you apparently have lawyers to spare, why not go after their butts?
There's an issue here that's hit me several times. The questions get moderated right away, except some clever moderator waits until it the 'ask interviewee questions' article gets down to the bottom of the page. Then they go in and mod there non-favorite questions that were 5 down to 4, so they don't get asked. Is this fair to the people that modded it up and ensured it stayed at 5?
/. moderation system. It'd be better to switch to a scoop-like moderation method.
Next time you have mod points during an interview story, make sure you wait until it gets down far to look for abuse. It happens a LOT.
This is the major disadvantage to the
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
... because Carl answers a load of questiosnin there as well! (Looks like he couldn't wait for the final set of questions :))
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 specifically requires the FCC to preempt such laws when asked to do so, but the FCC has often failed to carry out its obligations under the Act. See http://www.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/02/08/ 011379P.pdf for only the most recent case where a court ordered the FCC to carry out its duties to make it possible for some Missouri governmental entities to offer telecommunications services.
But Your Honor! How is my cosuin Rodney supposed to earn a free living if he has competition?
I wonder if this obligation could be called on to break up that town in california where all the 'radio wave alergic' people have set up stiff resistance to anything that smacks of being more advanced than a TV.
-GiH
We filed comments in that FCC proceeding, which you can see at http://www.rric.net/FCC%20DSL%20Comments.pdf.
Hopefully all readers here also filed comments in that proceeding.
In a historic display of reader participation, all Slashdot readers filed comments on this FCC proceeding. Unfortunately, with this amazing community response came the same signal-to-noise-ratio problem that has plagued the Slashdot commenting system.
The first thousand or so comments seemed to be sent in by the same user named "Anonymous Coward" and only contained some permutation of the cryptic "fp" message, or in some cases, "All your DSL are belong to us." The next thousand simply griped about spelling and grammar errors.
Experts agree: everything is fine.
Did anyone else read that as 'buttholed'???
...volunteers with sufficient technical and legal experience. I would say that any community, low-income or not, that had such volunteers available could make a go of it. Money is not really the barrier to entry.
If you've got lawyers and hard-core tech types in the community, then you're right - money won't be a barrier to entry. Because they've already got money. How many low-income areas have legal and technical expertise? How many high-income areas can afford to hire it if they don't have it?
I hate to be classist, but I can hardly stand it when those with resources (1) don't recognize their own wealth and (2) don't realize that not everyone has it.
If a DSLAM costs X amount of dollars, and you have significantly less than that, you aren't going to get a Coop built. People power is tremendous but in the end it really does come down to money.
Troll? Hardly. Read his response to the legal questions, that is his answer to everything. We have the most lawyers, therefore we will win and be proven just. Maybe the mods should try actually reading the articles.
Here in Ohio, I've dealt some with our local monopoly Ameritech (or SBC). The marketing and sales guys all lie. Same with some of the technicians (at least the ones on the phones, not ones that actually do real work). And the management is the worst. They're all liars.
But, what I said just above isn't quite true at all. The truth is that they all misrepresent the truth. Small difference? Not quite. I honestly believe that Ameritech (SBC) and many of the other local exchange carriers hire people who are clueless, and who care more about making money for the company than laws and truth. The technicians who service homes and businesses know their stuff because they've been around a while. The managers get turned over constantly, and it's the same for support staff and sales. The turnover is so high that by the time someone actually learns the laws and how to apply them, he or she leaves, is fired, or moves up the chain.
I still bet the farm that it's mostly pure incompetence, not necessarily intentional greed or malice. Sure, managers way up at the top may have a clue, but very, very few customers ever get to share words with these individuals. When was the last time you complained to your local carrier and got to speak with a VP or other senior manager? The closest most of us get is the attorney general's office, the PUC, or the FCC. At least here the PUC of Ohio slapped the wrist of Ameritech really hard for having terrible service and quoting repairs times of 6-8 weeks (no joke), among other things.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
Have your Co-op for lawyers and rich people only.
Right, screw the low-income brackets.
I would be interested in the number of legal hours spent in order to obtain all the permissions required to start the co-op. Even at a low per hour rate I imagine this would add a tremendous amount to the total bottom line.
You can create such Community Service only if you community has enough lawyers in your community !
For every one sysadmin you need three lawyers if you want to set up and ISP.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
Regarding the "Feds wanna take a look" question and answer, I wonder if they have thought of installing a gateway running FreeS/WAN to do opportunistic encryption to other sites that use FreeS/WAN. I realize that there probably are not many networks with this capability, but as more people add them, the incentive other people have to install this. That and it'll help make it harder to sniff your traffic.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
We're gonna hire you on a temporary basis. Give the guy a project that should take about a week or a month to complete, and if he does it, hire him.
Dont ask mathmatic problems in his face, thats demeaning.
God spoke to me
A low income hood isn't packed with lawyers who will work for free.
The atitude of we cant be sued because we have lots of Lawyers comes off as elitest to me (sounds like they would drag things out in court to get there way)
It's not uncommon for a big company to sue someone even though they would never win. The expectation is that the little guy -- despite being in the right -- will give up because the cost of surrender is less than the cost of winning.
(happily for the ranch), this business model doesn't work when you're threatening to sue a community that includes a handfull of law firms.
This is also (I would guess) why they were able to afford to litigate QWEST into providing the spare loops. Litigation is expensive if you have to pay for the lawyers. If you are are self represented (and just happen to have a few decades of combined legal experience), it's a lot less expensive.
Self represented, I've managed to engage in lawsuits against some of the largest entities in this province for a total cost of about Getting a lawyer to represent me in a contempt of court accusation that was dropped in the preliminary stages cost more than that -- even after I got subsidised by the Legal Aid Society.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Anyone who has delt with lawyers knows to just give them there way or what they want, are good chance you will end up in court.
Where i live a tract home builder will not sale a home to a lawyer because about all the homes he has ever sold to a lawyer they ended sueing his company.
wonder if this helped them to not have to fill out all those papers every other ISP has to fill out.
3 Insightful. Three people thought this was worth reading.
1 Offtopic. Although he is discussing the moderation systems used in an interview, one person thought there was a better place for it. I'd like to know where that is.
1 Troll. I'd hate to see what it takes to drag an "Informative" out of this moderator.
1 Overrated. At the time this moderator subtracted his two cents, the post had a rating of 3. This is egregious grandstanding, probably by one of the moderators who manipulated the questions in the above interview.
-c.
Casey
More scratches on the cave wall, thanks be to anonymity.
This guy and group are sounding a bit stuck up, with there we can throw a ton of lawyers at any thing and win.
F that
Someone answer this question for me....what would be keeping a neighborhood of "low income" people from asking for volunteers to support a cause such as this?
There are many people that view the so-called "digital divide" as an issue central to educating and/or job-training poverty-stricken families, especially children.
I'm sure there are several people/groups that would provide monetary or other support to these groups of low-income people. I know there are groups like this in my area. Hell...I'd donate my own time if I thought it would do enough good.
So in my own opinion, his answer about having the people-resources to pull off this project stands as a good answer.
Apparently anyone who dares raise the question regarding the number of "we have plenty of lawyers so just bring it" type of responses in the article will be summarily modded as a troll. Look at the number of people bringing this up? Since when does might make right on /.? Notice how he never considers the possibility that one of their members might actually deserve to have their actions questioned. He simply replies with gems that extole the virtues of having a community of lawyers at your disposal and their ability to dissaude anyone from trying to pursue possible legal action. So post on regarding the army of lawyers angle, just be prepared to be modded as a troll in doing so.
I'm certain that I'm not the only person who is asking why a community isp couldn't conceivably disconnect itself from UUNET et. al. and become another world (read national or perhaps multistate wide) "internet".
Recurring fees for you're bandwidth got you down too? well why can't we have an internet by the people for the people. Sure....it would be a mess and who's going to be ICANN
this sig is deprecated
After all that was the standard awnser on a few questions
The MOD on this cant handle the truth (the interviewE sucked)
I'm just saying.
what good is an ISP that can't access other internet sites?
When was the last time you complained to your local carrier and got to speak with a VP or other senior manager?
Only once about three years ago. Actually *I* didn't speak to the VP. After 72 hours of swapping DSUs, cables and jacks at GTE's request (they insisted they could access their demarc from the CO even though I knew what happened: the construction next door cut our line; duh) and listening to GTE blame Southwestern Bell and Southwestern Bell blame GTE because each end of the circuit was in a different territory my manager and I were waiting at the location at midnight Saturday night for a GTE tech who was supposed to be there 5 hours earlier. My manager knew one our our VPs who knew a Southwestern Bell VP, so my manager called to wake up our VP who called to wake up the Southwestern Bell VP who somehow got hold of someone at GTE and had us TWO GTE techs out there within 90 minutes! (On our midnight call to GTE they said there were no techs within 3 hours of us near DFW airport just 5 miles from GTE's headquarters. Yeah, right.)
Of course the problem was as I said: the construction next door cut about half of our telco cable pairs. (Remember they told me they could access the demarc from their center; uh-huh.) The techs moved the circuit to a new pair; one of the dumb techs left his toner on the live pair (he came back to get it Monday when I was there), but it worked anyway.
We switched that location to MCI frame relay a week later.
So yeah, the VP's have a clue, but you have to jump through a whole lot of hoops before you can safely get hold of one.
I am an ISP in Willits, California, a small broadband starved rual
community about 120 miles north of San Francisco, and I am going down this
road right now with SBC with respect to access to their copper loops, so
that I can hot foot the process of providing DSL here.
I've encountered both incompetence ("I don't know what you're
talking about") and malice ("You need to be a clec, like north point or
covad.") (Gee, weren't those guys driven out of business by your market
protectionist and predatory behavior??). Just like the man said, that ILEC's
have developed it into an artform, of staying just on this side of acting
illegally while at the same time making it as painful as possible to work
with them. I have no reason to belive that SBC is going to cooperate with me
and will force me to force them to play ball. This is a sad state of
affairs.
My community *DESERVES* DSL internet. And my reading of the 96
telecommunications act, combined with the ruby ridge story, tells me that
I'm right about this CLEC issue - that it's a smokescreen, to protect the
ILEC against real competition. I belive that there is _no legitimate reason_
why I should be forced to become a CLEC in order to lease copper wires. I
would be not engaging in any regulated utillity service, I would not be
impacting the operation of the telephone network, I would not be imposing
any unreasonable engineering or support requirements on the telco. I dont'
see any legitimate excuse at all to deny us.
I have access to several locations that have 100 pair cables comming
in to them, and the combined loop distance between these sites and the
central office and any of our future subscribers, is well within spec of DSL
(the advantages of being a small town). We don't need a darn thing in terms
of 'services' from SBC - really, we simply need copper loops and we could be
providing DSL service here _next week_. Left to their own devices, SBC
wouldn't get high speed access here for YEARS, if ever, they just don't care
about us. The only real reason why SBC wants you to go the CLEC route, is
because they can impose upon you those tremendous legal and regulatory
responsabillities, which of course is going to bleed you dry financially. I
checked out their CLEC website (https://clec.sbc.com), and being a CLEC
partner (cough, cough) gets you all kinds of stuff - access to their
internal order entry systems, automated troubleshooting systems, line
prequalification systems, automated customer disconnection notification,
etc. That kind of stuff might be appropriate for a company doing tens of
thousands of circuits per month, but it is not appropriate for us, we're too
small and we just want to get the show on the road. I wish to god I could
get the assistance of those attorneys who did such a good just job for ruby
ridge, we could get precedent set and then the _whole country_ could finally
move forward!
Oh yeah - we are http://www.tiedyenetworks.com - Peace, love, and
Fast Downloads in the Redwoods!
Peace!
You mentioned several times that you got an exemption for not being a voice carrier. But you also commented that many use the lines for VPN and NetMeeting. Isn't NetMeeting similar to telephony technologies, carrying voice over IP?
Is the voice carrier requirement only for plugging a standard phone into the lines? So VoIP doesn't apply? (And if it doesn't, how much longer will that last?)