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Building a Town-Wide LAN?
"I would imagine that there will be an enormous secondary benefit because we will become an attractive town to technically inclined people and businesses.
At the same time, Is this a good idea? I, personally, think it would be wonderful, but (as an IT major) the technical challenges of laying fiber and maintaining a network to serve 9000+ citizens are mind boggling. Policy decisions, network abuse, outages, spam, filtering (god forbid), all nightmares that will require a dedicated, 24/7 network maintenance team. Any network engineers out there have any juicy morsels from their work on large networks?
I know the town manager, so I'd like to feed this discussion to her, after moderation has taken its toll (probably at a level of +3), so she can see what the technical community thinks."
I think you should lay down a clear TOS. With all the trouble recently, you should make everything transparent from the start.
Then hell yeah. $40 a month is nothing.
What else do you need?
I believe they have a community internet/cable company, providing some sort of broadband, and I think it's fiber. It is also a college town, of the small liberal arts type. I'm sure googling will give you some info on their setup and history.
I hope no one is making high-level decisions based on the average slashdot thread. It could be the most expensive mistake of your ever shortening career.
Go ask Senegal.
Oh, I'd love it! You could have multiplayer FPS games with your neighbors at LAN speeds! What kind of connection to the rest of the 'net would there be, though? A 100 MB/s connection to your neighbors isn't much good if there's only a 1 MB/s connection to the rest of the internet. Could a non-edu get connected to Internet2? That would be even better!
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
What kind of out-of-town bandwidth will be provided? Sure, 100 Mbps to the local POP would be cool, but really useless if the whole place has to share a T1. Would out-of-town traffic be limited on a per-connection basis, or will I have to suffer with slow page loads because my 31337 neighbor wants to run a 64 user Wolfenstein server?
That town is going to be the Quake Capital of the World!!
My little town (less than 500) just had one heck of a backlash when we went to municipal (read: mandatory, billed with your water) garbage collection. If half of our citizens felt it was their constitutional right to pile garbage on the back lawn, I can only imagine how we'd do with muni internet.
I pay like $75 a month for digitasl cable and cable internet, $40 for fibre sounds liek a sweet deal.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
How about teaming up with some local ISP for the internet-part? The technical divison of the town could take care of running the fiber network while most of the other issues you mentioned could be outsourced to another company which actually know what they're doing.. My former university (~30k students) ran a city (150k citizens) wide network covering most of their installments in the city and they made it work like a charm. I'm suspecting that this was in cooperation with the local telco, but its absolutly doable.
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
have to claim that instant pr0n is the opiate of the masses?
First and foremost: is this going to be a for-profit venture or a "Public Service"?
Is this $40/month a flat rate or a minimun rate without "extras"? Will everyone have the same benefits?
Obviously, bandwith *will* have to be limited. Who will admin this? City Hall?
Expect AOL to SMTP-block your netblocks as well.
How is the fiber going to be terminated in every drop? Ethernet transceivers? ST/SC/whatever...
No sig
I attended a session run by Ericsson on fibre to the home (FttH) and its benefits/pitfalls... the obvious upside is the ease with which you can upgrade as/when fibre tech improves (constantly it seems) but you need more than just fast net access to really deliver the goods - TV is an ideal companion because it works even for those that don't care about the net. Tivo like functionality is easily done with FttH, without upsetting network operators (delayed TV in effect - all programming stored on a giant server for several days - watch it when you want).
F 07D7C0F 0E6CDCC256CF60013877F
o ad band_breakthroughs.shtml
New Zealand-centric story on it here:
http://www.idg.net.nz/webhome.nsf/UNID/7EA
some case study stuff from Ericsson here:
http://www.ericsson.com.au/network_operators/br
I am a leaf on the wind
...he really didn't when you think it through.
please elaborate
they can hire and fire the cable company
and the ISP.
Local control!
I hate having to use a converter box at my television sets. Why would the typical user want to deal with this trouble just "to have fiber" when the same channels can be delivered with good ol' (cheap) coax? Plus, homes are already wired for coax, what would someone need to do to watch TV on the fiber set-up?
Of two possible uses for such a network:
;)
1) Instant LAN party, without the party. "Hey guys I heard Front ST. is loading up Quake III, want to join in?"
2) High quality video conferencing with the hot redhead two blocks down.
By "town network", your post seems to imply that it will be entirely run by local citizens... how close is everyone in your community? Are they typically generations of families there? I could imagine this sort of cooperation working if the skills were local and the population relatively static... but what would you do if key people decided to leave town? Also, do you have a better breakdown of what that $40 per month covers? Will all citizens agree to flat rate fees? A flat rate is good for the 20-something year olds who use gigabytes of data a month, but I'm sure the granny's emailing wouldn't put much of a tax on the system. If you think about how flat rate for electricity would work in a similar environment, you might start to look at pricing models differently.
99% of your users have neither the intention nor the desire to run their own SMTP server. They'll use your mail server - that is, they'll talk POP or a similar protocol to whatever server you set up for them. That's enough for them - they just want email, and they'd rather not have to provide it for themselves.
The other 1% of your users are smart and clued enough to set up their own mail servers, and probably have legitimate reasons to do so.
Now, back to your 99% who have no intention of talking on port 25, anywhere. Of them, 10% of your users probably will set up an open proxy, or run an open wireless node. Whether they do so with malicious intent (unlikely) or out of ignorance (highly likely!!) doesn't matter.
What matters is the fact that these nodes will be abused by spammers.
So, if you want the 1% of your geeky-and-clued customers to be able to send email to the rest of the world from their own MTA, it's up to you to make sure that the 10% of your clueless customers can't.
Otherwise, expect your users - clued and clueless alike - will be talkin' to the 550 like 24.0.0.0/8, 4.0.0.0/8, 12.0.0.0/8, and 200.0.0.0/6, four big chunks of netspace I - and others - don't wanna hear from, because they have a million open proxies spewing spam for every legitimate customer.
I'm not saying block outbound port 25 for everyone. I'm saying block it by default, and lift the block for anyone who calls the support center and says "I can't send mail. Yes I'm running my own mail server, and I need to run my own mail server for $REASON", where $REASON is basically anything other than "The guy who sold me the Millions Of Addresses CD said port 25 blocking was censorship!" :-)
Remember also that fiber in the street is fine, but you have to look at the connection at the house. Would this require that all new and existing construction remove coax and install fiber? If not you will have to have the hardware at every house to convert the signal. Overall sounds good, but as usual the Devil is in the Details
A link to my apartment in Merrimack? ;)
another entire neighborhood linked together. I live in a neighborhood that has 700+ houses connected by fiber optics. Some of the problems I've had is that during peak usage hours, my internet will slow down considerably (maybe because we don't have a very good server. I don't know specs on it). My computer also seems to be hacked a lot more in this neighbor hood than a non-wired hood. I personally prefer not having a centralized network, but thats just my opinion. Also, the support here is not well maintained at all.
First of all, you're assuming 9,000 people will be on this network. Knock that number in half. With the fact that not everyone owns a computer and there will be more than one person living in a house, you've got 4,500 people requesting cable. Why is this potential profit being taken from the cable companies and given to the government? What is the reason for it? Is it that the government has to do it since this is a service the people need but one the private sector cannot provide due to the size or the financial feasability of it? No, certainly not. Cable companies are doing well.
So forget about the challenges of this project - think about the need. I don't see that getting people on high-speed for $40 a month (to the government) outweighs the cost of having the government tightly coupled with my flow of data. Carnivore fans? Are you out there? Pipe in.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
What else would use that kind of bandwidth?
Why not a private company? Moreover, if this is feasible, why hasn't a private company already done it? Maybe this is just the insane libertarian in me talking, but I've worked for local government and they're a bunch of blockheads, on the whole.
The town I live in, San Bruno, has one of the very few remaining municiply run Cable Companies in the state (US?). It's really great. I used to use them for Internet access, which they farmed out to a 3rd party. Unfortunately, the 3rd party ISP got bought out and moved on to focus on greener pastures. When the cable company decided to move to @home, I took off (seeing the writing on the wall at that time).
Anyway, my advice:
If you figure that $20-$30/month goes to TV, that leaves somewhere between $10-20/month to an ISP. The upside is that the city is going to take care of the cable issues (and hopefully do it well...). $15x3000 (1/3 of the folks actually want internet) is $45K/month. That may not enough to run a new ISP, but it might be a nice additional chunk to an existing ISP.
The real trick is to find a GOOD ISP that is willing to pick up the extra customers. There may be a local (or nearby) ISP that is willing to pick up a job like this. My advice is to try to find a local house that will do it, and avoid the nationals if you can.
On the other hand, if someone was willing to set up a municiple ISP as a not-for-profit, they may be able to do well at it.
Good luck.
I am from Palo Alto, CA
there is a fiber optic ring there...and they did an experiment with bringing it into residential areas (very limited number), but the internet speeds were only 7mbps BURST downstream and 4.5mbps sustainable upstream....that sounds like some crappy service if it's using "fiber optics"
i know that fiber optic is FAST...but once you have a lot of people on it and it's actually being brought into your home...what kind of speeds can we expect?
thanks!
To me the big red light is when they say "give it to everybody" and then start talking about how much they plan to charge you.
$40 a month for broadband is a nice deal, obviously, but in the name of making sure "everybody" has equal access, will they be requiring people to pay the $40 monthly fee even if they don't plan to make use of the available service?
My hometown similar pop, university, implemented a city-wide cable internet system.
Ashland Fiber Net
The city now offers TV, Internet, and hosting at around $40/mo.
Travis
I hate to get technical here in slashdot (cuz I know all the trolls are readings), but a city wide network is called a metropolitan area network. Networks that go from one city to another are called a Wide Area Network (aka WAN), and networks within a building are called Local Area Networks (aka LAN). A LAN does not exist when the network leaves the building, and a WAN doesn't exist until you leave the city/town. Get it right people! City wide networks are not that impressive when you consider the phone company already has you connected to the phone system, and a T1 line is nothing more than a standard phone line.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
You'll have people that have no interest in this. Perhaps they don't use the net much or are perfectly happy with their $20.00/ month AOL dialup (or whatever they charge now). So do people subscribe or do they get charged with the local taxes, water, garbage or whatever? How do you deal with someone that abuses the TOS...if they have to pay for it in their local taxes or other "fees" I don't think you can leagally cut them off.
Also, if you put a locally run cable company on this, usually you'd end up with a few locals + a few cable channels. Forget any choices with special pay channels or DirectTV or so on. "Wait, I pay $40 a month for this thing and I don't even get TiVo service?"
My sugestion would be to setup a local ISP to handle the accounts and service with infrastructure (fiber) provided by the town and leased to the ISP. The infrastructure could be built using standard tax stuff (find room in the budget, try to pass a bond, etc), but since there's a private ISP running the accounts they can sell the access, maintain the network, and deal with TOS issues.
Just my $.02 of course.
- Alinraz
Dartmouth already provides wireless access in virtually all buildings on campus. Unfortunately, 802.11 doesn't have the range to cover the town with what's there.
Wow... I can't believe I actually got it.
I have so many people to thank... where do I begin?
Seems like we're good to go.
I think another huge benefit would be that the community would own the infrastructure, keeping you from getting gouged by Adelphia or whatever phone/cable provider is in your area.
Not only that, but it creates local jobs, too -- physical maintenance, system administrators, tech support and such.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
It is coming and there will never be enough bandwidth into end points. This is an opportunity to bring in a great deal that can grow as time goes one. Besides, it is 40/month that will help improve the re-sale of your house.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If this is something most of the residents are willing to pay for, they would just raise property taxes. Since $40/mo is $480/year... adding an additional $500/year to the average property tax of a house in that area is pretty minor. Estimating the taxes are in the $4000-5000/year range anyway.
Future content over the net is going to need a bigger pipe. Besides the fact that you watch this new content, having fiber into the homes and buisnesses will ensure that the town will have the bandwidth to serve up this type of content (think HDTV quality here folks). Beyond that, what could this do for students in your school system and the local college. Having the town wired with fiber will ensure that they have access to resources both now and in the future. Wireless LAN will catch up speed wise, and that could be used in schools for a very rich experience.
Then again, the abuse factor could be large. Any 14 year old guy with a penis and a brian will figure out how to serrve up the cheap porn he got off of Kaazaa to his buddys for a small fee. You might get a town full of wanna be pimps and then get shut down by the RIAA for too much file sharing. Seriously, how would your town like to be on the recieving end of the 97 billion dollar stick that they carry....
War Tux!
Years ago Blacksburg (home of Virginia Tech) did something sorta like this (except it was mid 90's, so internet access period, not broadband). Perhaps a little ambitious, and honestly I can't say I can see any real difference from other towns. But it relates. http://www.bev.net is the still existing homepage http://www.cni.org/tfms/1995b.fall/BEV.html has some other info...
just rember unless you have copper to the house dsl is not an option..
For $40/month you are dreaming, have you considered the hardware costs on this? Or will those be passed on to the tax payer through properties taxes? I love the idea, but man there is no way a household is ready for fiber to their doorstep. First, like I mentioned the hardware costs. Second, what will be people do with the bandwidth? If you do accomplish this, you might see a sudden spike of every 0day, pr0n server in the nation concetrated in the sleepy town of Hanover, OH.
dam
Useless sig.
I pay $70 for regular cable and cable modem now and I thought that was "decent" - but FIBER?!??!!
I would seriously consider moving there were I a little older.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I have been kicking around the idea of an 802.16 WMAN for the city of Philadelphia and surrounding counties, with the idea that it would be a private network address space with the option for local ISP's to provide Internet gateway services to paying customers. On the upside, local folks could set up their own ftp mirrors, p2p services, etc. without having to pay the high bandwidth costs associated with the wired Internet.
This would of course require volunteer management of the address space, DNS, etc. but there could be great benefits to a free high speed WMAN with commercial (and maybe free?) options for Internet connectivity from there.
As a future graduate student at Dartmouth I can only say that this is a fantastic idea. I wonder though how this would be implemented. Is this a plan through the college, or a municipal push?
If you want feasibility information then a good place to ak might be some of the IT administrators for very large universities. I know that the Network & Telecom folks here at KU service 25,000+ students, faculty, and staff across three campuses. They would have valuable advice about terms of service, equipment, and other lessons that only experience can provide.
And if you need any more help I will be more than happy to help when I arrive in Hanover next Fall!
Somehow I suspect a LAN shared out this far would severely restrict bandwidth...
But if they could get a really good connection to the Internet like some sort of big leased line, maybe it could be a viable option for those of us who actually have to campaign to try and get stubborn telecom companies to provide the option of broadband Internet access in a town that would probably pay 3x the asking price if we only had the opportunity!
Other than that, town-wide LAN parties organised by some sort of central body would be a good enough reason ;)
My town, Glasgow, Ky, has already done this. There is a nice article about it here. More info at this link. At $26 monthly or $260 annually, its pretty nice. Service is also offered in most of the county. It's really quite nice, especially for a little town out in the middle of nowhere. : )
I'm guessing that you've probably already included this in your planning, but I'll throw it out here anyhow: See if you can negotiate with your local cable television francise holders to use some of their right of way for your fiber. Or when they do an area build out to pay the incremental cost to put a bunch of strands in the ground for you in addition to whatever they are laying. I think that cable companies are required to offer 'Institutional Networks (I-Nets)' to the localities with the franchise rights during negotiations and from what I've gathered they have ended up in some cases of passing a $1/sub/month "Franchise Fee" onto the customer to pay for these I-Nets. I think they are required to offer this under some federal program or another. YMMV on how easy your cable company is to work with. I've been involved with a tad bit of this from the technical perspective so my knowledge on the politics and other issues is a bit lacking. But from what I've seen cable companies have rolled out provider managed as well as franchise holder managed systems around the country. But the negotiations seem to take forever. And the contracts are usually pretty long term (decade+) and the rollouts often stretch over a few years, but in the end if well planned they seem to be a cost effective way of getting bandwidth around a local region. It sounds like what you're doing may be an extesion of this, where you've looked at what you could get from the cable companies seeking franchise rights and realized that for what seems to be a minimal monthly expense you can wire the local residents up too. IIRC Ashland, Oregon has done something along these lines (I'm actually not sure if this was the City of Ashland, or the county Ashland is in, but I'd guess their City Manager could get you pointed in the right direction). :P
My only advice is just make sure you have clearly defined goals and that all the stakeholders are on the same page before you start. If all goes well the residents will be super happy. And happy constituents usually means votes, which means someone high up will love you if you can pull this off under their watch
/. of course
Visit www.seriouslythough.com
" What reasons, other than the obvious benefit of having fiber to one's house, can you think of for making this kind of commitment to the infrastructure?"
- Telecommuting. I'm assuming there'd be a huge bandwidth benefit here. As long as you're within city limits, you could hit the company server.
- Personal servers. I'm not talking about web servers, though those would be nice, rather I'm talking about leaving a box on all the time with a huge hard drive in it. I'd liike to keep my music and videos etc on it so that I can access it anywhere in town.
- DoS attacks against things like root servers would not bring down the ability for these people to communicate. The attacks would have to be community specific.
- Disaster relief. It's been proven before that the internet can be resilient to disasters such as earthquake. Useful maybe?
I should probably note that I'm not taking into account the town this is in. I'm imagining it existing here in Portland. Personally, I'd like to have my apartment complex all on a shared lan. I'd like to get to know my neighbors better. It'd be fun to have lan games etc.
Get your town to consider adding phone service to the list. Local calls free, and bulk long distance charges.
When you figure out that everything you buy has, oh, 35% - 100% or so (or more) profit tacked on to the cost, you begin to wonder why everyone isn't doing all of it on their own. Everything.
Having recently lived there, although in a townhouse with dish and internet already provided, you may want to ask them what challenges they faced. They are a little larger, non-college town, with a '99 pop. estimate of just over 19,000 (http://www.utohwy.com/s/spanishf.htm) which has definately grown in the last few years. You can see what they have done at www.sfcn.org.
"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world; unreasonable people persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves
I expect that the new centers of commercial growth are going to be the new technology centers that citiLEC Internet access distribution will make possible.
Silicon Valley had their chance to do this and blew it.
The fact that this is going to make life more convenient for the town's citizens, force competition for cable TV meaning lower prices based on experiences from other citiLEC communities is... probably of more interest to the community than a shot at becoming a techology center.
It's a win-win deal for everybody except incumbent cable / telco providers.
I suggest a setup where access is resold to ISPs as it was in the citiLEC in the Pacific Northwest, check the slashdot thread for more info.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Recently, there has been a large amount of hype for hybrid networks that use a combination of free space optics and WiFi. Basically the free space optical heads provide a high speed mesh @ 1.25GB/s or so, and the WiFi provides the breakout links. There is a paper up on IEEE eXplore by Jinlong Zhang: "A Proposal of Free Space Optical Network for Broadband Access" that comes to mind as being useful.
It occurs to me that with a city-wide lan, anybody who wanted to make their own movie would have an effective way of delivering it. Not sure how many film students you have there, but the ability to broadcast video would at the very least be entertaining. I'm curious to see what would come of that.
"Derp de derp."
Having said that, it's a utility like no other. It's the microphone, video camera, post office and infinite Wal-Mart that nobody could have dreamed of twenty years ago. It's a utility that has nothing to do with pure consumption like the water that comes through the faucet. It's a utility of giving and taking.
What better thing could you do for a community, of any size, than to provide what could be described as "the utility of perpetual community"? Let's face it. A networked town would not only strengthen the close ties and "local flavor" that the town surely has, but it would allow every person in that community to more easily access the international community. The residents could then turn around and use everything learned from the international community (maybe this is too idealistic) and, through message boards and town chat rooms, actually discuss these things.
This will almost surely have an impact on local politics. People will be more aware of their local government. "Town hall" meetings popular in small towns could be more realistic because everyone could meet from the convenience of their homes while surfing the web. This is extremely necessary because corruption is an epidemic throughout local government simply because nobody cares.
This has been a rant from a social science major, not a computer science major. Looking at the technical aspects, a few things need to be worked out. First of all, the town will have to find a solution to the inevitable RIAA lawsuit. There can't be any unlicensed p2p within the network. Whether the town would be responsible for not preventing mp3 downloads on the open Internet through this LAN is doubtful. The town could easily say that, without a warrant, they could never do such a thing because it would be a violation of the Fourth Amendment (which it would be, unless I'm missing something from the DMCA or Patriot Act).
Another thing that would be necessary, at least from an advocate of privacy, is a more two-sided TOS. The user will agree not to download illegal material such as warez, child pornography, and so on. The PROVIDER will agree not to monitor or filter any content whatsoever without a warrant or subpoena requiring otherwise. Furthermore, this will need to be demonstrated by the network admins somehow.
Anyway, good luck with this thing!
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
- Long Distance related -
1) Video phones. I have kids, and would pay to give them a video phone so that we could communicate via sight instead of just sound. If I lived there, I'd buy one too so that the rest of my family could join in -> virtual teleconference anyone? As someone who also has family overseas, this becomes even more important.
- Local Industries -
2) Distance learning. People in the town could realistically take classes from the university without having to physically attend class. Even better, the class could be taped and purchased for download (digitally) for less than the cost of actual enrollment, but the student base could go way up without major facility improvements.
3) True downloadable video on demand. Local servers in the town, perhaps even owned by the town, but with distribution rights, could sell/rent downloadable videos to the residents. Tivos can already file share within the house - why not across the neighborhood?
4) Yes, online games would rock. More importantly, localized community games would -scream-. How about hosting bridge/chess/etc parlor type games within the community? For a small fee to cover server expenses, a whole bunch of the older generation could play together from their homes, and TALK AT THE SAME TIME. Again, this is another local industry that could be started.
5) Town meeting multi-casts. Now, people don't have to crowd into some small room to discuss town policies. They can watch it online, and use VoIP to conference in (with a moderator of course).
Of course, these are just a few. If you can concentrate on local industries, more useful applications for the technology will appear. Best of luck. Maybe I'll consider moving a little further north if this is put in place. :-)
I posted this awhile ago, but it seems to fit here too..
LAN = Local Area Network
WAN = Wide Area Network
MAN = Metropoliton Area Network
WOMAN = Wide Open Metropolitan Area Network
An online Starcraft RPG? Only at
In Soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base!
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
Just for a neighborhood in Sweden, but they had 100 Mb/sec fiber to the houses. A bit smaller than an entire town, but the basic idea is there. (Unfortunatley the page linked in the story isn't there, but here is the link through the Wayback Machine.
Did someone say quake?
Dartmouth tried to go wireless before the technology was ready and it turned out to be a disaster. The founder of Cisco donated a buttload of money to get them going (he went there i think) but when they set the whole thing up it just plain didn't work. I didn't hear much about it after that, but they were talking about scrapping the entire thing. I bet he is at it again. I have family that grew up there and know the town fairly well, I bet the townspeople will not pay $40/month for this.
The vast majority of a town's population won't be die hard geeks like us. I expect only about 20% to happlily accept the $40 fee without some obvious non internet benefits.
With a fiber network in the town you can offer very high speed local networking to the people and only limit bandwidth for external connections. Most people wont know what they can do with that, so you'll need to set up a few services that people can start using right away.
A few ideas off the top of my head for people with PCs:
Free video telephony.
Your own tv channel
Local news
Video on demand
The last one being the killer app of course. It would require some kick ass servers or 9000 dvd players at the local 24 hour video store, but trust me, its what people want.
I think you need make all the services you provide available at a flat rate (at least initially) just to promote usage and experimentation.
Discuss
And if that's not bidirectional for $40/month, at least for in-town bandwidth, then do your best to fight it and let the phone companies and cable companies compete for your business. As a public utility, this only has value if it lets people communicate, rather than merely being an entertainment delivery system, ie: point-n-drool cable TV.
However, I think preventing a user inside the network to access Kazaa on the open Internet would be another thing - an unconstitutional act, perhaps, because a government would be exercising prior restraint.
Which leads me to realize another thing. The ISP would basically be the town, if I understand things correctly. Would a spam filter put in place by the town be less constitutional than AOL's fictional filter, or any other ISP's filter? I honestly don't know.
Again, good luck!
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
Check out the Ashland Fiber Network. Ashland, OR.
http://www.ashlandfiber.net/
Sasha
If your town were to do that it would undoubtly cause an invasion of File sharers looking to build a utopia of files. Those who stay behind would be enslaved. This also leads to a scary thought... a power black out... the country would be in flames in a day. One flabby muscle file sharer can easily be stopped, but a million?
Ok, it sounds great. But, I am sure there is going to be some fine print on this project.
For one, how big is the actual pipe to the Internet going to be?
Two, servers of any kind are going to have to be serverly limited or not allow at all.
Three, Terms of Service. The number one most important thing of this project. The people of this college town, including the college students are going to have to read and sign that TOS. If they read and sign it, there will be less confusion as to the punishment for people that abuse having fast connections. Plus, it covers the City's butt.
Four, cost of fiber optic cable and equipment for the city and the customers. We all know how expensive fiber is. The last mile and Customer Premise Equipment can be prohibitively expensive. Also, I don't know know how many people are going to want to work for a city to support a network of that size. I mean, I don't care where you are, government work is goverment work.
But hey, this is just my opinion, I could be way off..
eh, this sucks, I am going back to bed....
shutdown all ports not needed for browsing, and getting email. Open them by request.
Especially port 25. If one person leaves that open, your bandwidth will be sucked up by spammers.
Make it a simple request, via web.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...thats right, the taxpayers!! This wouldn't be a bad idea IF 1. The speed was decent and 2. the tax rate didn't go up to much. However unless they limit bandwidth, 1 is out the window. And knowing how municipalities work, they will jack up the taxes sky-high.
here's a link to a project in Utah that wants to bring fiber to 170,000 households and more than 20,000 businesses.
-= alphaFlight =-
I live up in west Michigan nearby a town called Lowell. Now, around where I live, we have Comcast Cable for Internet and TV, and Charter for cable 'net, AT&T, MCI, Ameritech, what have you for phone companies. My household pays roughly $160 each month to these companies for cable internet, local and long distance phone, and digital cable service. Obvisouly, these are privately owned corps.
Now, drive 10 miles SE, to Lowell, MI, where the major utilities are owned by the city. They offer local phone, broadband internet, digital cable, the utilities, etc, and it's cheap. Running about $60 average for all the services. There isn't no private corporation involved. All of the infastructure was built, and is owned by the city.
So, would I rather pay $60 than $160. Yes, especially if it ain't to a large corporation out for better interests than the consumer. Plus, as a citizen of that city, in a way, you control and have a voice in what goes on. Thats why supporting your local infastructure could be important and better off in the long run for your community.
I would prefer an extra penny sales tax. You pay taxes, forget the $40 a month.
Ad Astra Per Asper
Malachi
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Wireless operates at 2.4ghz, which is the resonating frequency of water. This unique property of the 2.4ghz waves makes them ideal for heating FOOD in a MICROWAVE. Some genius also thought they'd be good for coarsing through your body for wireless internet access.
No wonder 2.4ghz is only used by small devices like wireless hubs and telephones. If a real corporation used a powerful signal for any industrial purpose they'd get their pants sued for cooking everyone around it.
My town of Evanston (home of Northwestern University) wanted to do something like this years ago. They got lots of community activists involved, who didn't know aything about computers. They managed to form lots of committees, and bureauracies. After supposedly negotiating with companies(actually holding useless BS meetings) for years, they started offering DSL through someone else (COVAD or one of their competitors). Eventually, I think they lost some money, and the project failed.
Don't get people involved in the project unless they have useful expertise, or can actually help the project. Don'involve providing internet access with other projects. If someone wants to start some community web page or something, don't involve that with your project. It will only bog you down, and be an annoying distraction. Also, keep in mind the cable or phone company may probably won't be happy about competition.
Projects like these are a GREAT way to introduce IPv6 to the masses, because every home can be given a range of IP adresses (hey, it's Ipv6, 2^128 adresses to waste! If that's not enough, someone make IPv8 a reality, 2^512 adresses.) for different computers, possibly a small subnet per house. While the internet itself (as we currently know it) can still be adressed by a centralized (or not, perhaps a backbone connection per district?) routing point which can receive requests for IPv4 sites and cause them to get delivered to IPv6 networks. This would instantly promote the use of IPv6 networks if this "city/town network" idea were to catch on.
As for actual uses, how about making it possible to do stuff online in a FAR more safe way? Because IP adresses are clearly assigned per household, any attempt at being naughty can be traced down to a physical adress with ease. This would make the privacy people jump up in sheer disgust, but that can be worked out in detail some time. It would also be extremely good for communities. Real life ones that is, where the inhabitants of a town can discuss stuff on several online forums, maybe video conferencing as well? This would also open up possibilities for actually everyone to get involved in local politics. Even with a bit of new protocal magic (bye bye SMTP) it could even be possible to institute a city-wide email system, where just everyone would get his own email adress, per person, not per ISP account, like j.doe@district.city.nl.
Of course, there are several things hampering this, mainly telcos who will do ANYTHING they can to stop this, to DMCA/$local_equivalent fanatics who will holler in rage because of the potential file-swapping possibilities, which with no doubt WILL happen. Then there is of course the standard problem with today's internet, like the last mile, annoying people who break stuff, innocent people who get framed by the aforementioned people, privacy people who will find any little detail to pounce upon and howl in rage... (Can be good or bad.)
Ah well, to be blunt; I'll expect this will never happen in every town/city. It's not like today's local goverments aren't tight-budgeted already, they don't have the money to initialize a project like this, let alone buy of the armies of lawyers to fend of the telcos and DMCA zealots/corporate goons. Still, depsite the odds, one can hope ad one can try to contribute to the impossible. We're still in the early days of modern day networking, TCP/IP being used around 1969 for the first time on ARPANET. It's been 34 years since then. The first powered aircraft flight was in 1903, while they still flew around in propellor planes in 1937.
Questions is, when will networking in general reach it's stage in life comparable to the jet angine in flight? A new set of protocols, like IPv6 and a new SMTP would be a very good step in the VERY right direction. Oh and it's 02:09 and I've only just realized the length of my story. Please excuse any typos you encounter.
Hate me!
Why not refer to this site for more info?
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
the only applications for insane bandwidth either involve
a) large data sets for scientific research or
b) streaming video
Since I doubt anyone will be doing visible man from their home, the answer is streaming video.
I could see you expand the services from TV and internet to a standard video phone within the city limits. Everyone gets a digital camera and a reciever box that you hook up to a TV, computer monitor, LCD tv/monitor, etc. When you call someone you can switch the call over the to the video box (maybe by some button combination) and it's high quality. You could also expand this to include video conferencing abilities between a few friends.
Also for television, you'd have to invest in some serious storage systems but you could do true video on demand TV. The problem with this is of course having enough servers to stream unique video to every person watching TV. Not an easy feat, I think those Oracle guys have been trying to sell it but obviously it's not attractive.
There's plenty of bandwidth in coax to do either of these, it's just a matter of paying for the centralized hardware to serve everyone. I mean, if Time Warner Cable ran the lines I could get a full 10mbit up and down on cable but they're not about to pay for the OC480 or whatever they'd need to provide enough bandwidth so everyone gets that.
Don't want to hear from 200.0.0.0/6? You really should block 61.0.0.0/8 as well, to make sure Australia is properly removed from the map.
Your town may consider ownership of the physical network, but making it easy for local ISPs to use the network to provide services to residents. This way residents are not dependent on government monopoly, fixed rates, single "let's think of our children" policy, etc. Government gets compensated for the share of their deployment and maintenance of the physical network from ISP fees, and at the same time supports multiple local or regional businesses (ISPs), promotes competition, creates business opportunities, employment, and provides tech-friendly environment for future development.
I used to do this sort of thing for a living. Not design networks for towns, but military bases, which are pretty similar.
You have to understand that the big cost in building out a MAN is not equipment costs, but rather construction costs associated with the fiber optics. I have seen networks for as many as 200 buildings with about 600 closets get close to 30 million dollars. Doing an entire town, especially when you have right-of-ways and commercial land to deal with, you're looking at a LOT more than that.
I would highly suggust that whoever is involved in this project discuss potential build-out costs with a fiber optic company that is experienced in this thing (to drop a couple names, Henkels & McCoy, General Dynamics, or TRW).
3 cities in my area were going to do exactly this fiber-to-the-door plan: http://www.tricitybroadband.com/
It was concluded last year that the 3 cities combined could run fiber to everyone's door for $60m, which would be paid for with bonds (which in turn would be paid for by the end-users), not taxes -- naturally, SBC and Comcast lied and started a *MASSIVE* FUD campaign to try and stop this coalition -- they even lied in several different ways to do it! (claimed it would require a tax hike, asking (mis)leading questions over the phone, etc.).
Unfortunately, in the voting session on April 1, that $60m proposal "went down in flames" as my neighbor - a voting referee - told me...
So, all my area has is Comcast cable (which is damn fast, admittedly, and so far quite stable) and in *VERY* limited areas, SBC/Ameritech DSL.
Personally, I REALLY wanted to see the proposal pass. We *seriously* need some competition against our local cable monopoly and telco monopoly, seeing as there's too many trees around here for 802.11b WLAN access to be particularly-feasible (that hasn't stopped a few companies from trying, but as it stands, the only access I can get is cable)...
In summary, I wish you guys luck, because any companies in your area that even *might* want a piece of the broadband pie are going to fight you tooth-and-nail until the end -- ESPECIALLY if they are megacorps like SBC/AmeriFuck and Comcrap...
BTW, search around on www.dslreports.com for stories about this area, regarding the cities of Batavia, Geneva, and St. Charles Illinois. See what you can find...
[posted from a 1800/300 Comcast connection]
Dartmouth College provides Wireless access to most of downtown Hanover. I live on College owned property and have network access right to my home that is on the college network. Why would I want to be on a town network without access to the College network? There is already a service (www.greenwave.com) that is extended the College network over WiFi to the area college community members. IMHO this is a no go. Wireless would be a much better solution and better use of the towns money and I could choose which network I wanted to be on. Fibre Optic is so....1990's.
Perhaps this would be the optimal opportunity to build an [optical] wireless mesh network?
Of course, this would be very daring, but isn't it something to consider when you are already planning such an innovative thing like town networking?
...set up your terms of service to place your bandwidth limits on traffic that is "off your grid." and little or no limit to "on grid traffic." It's not hard to track traffic at your connection point to the Internet, and this would encourage people to use proper P2P distribution techniques to ease your traffic out.
The obvious example is that day that RedHat 10.0, or OSX 12.5 is released you don't have the grid come to a halt as 200 people from your 8000 try to simultaneously download a 3 CD set. They reserve their [generous, but limited] bandwidth for things that won't be on the Town or University mirrors later that day, and your usage hardly shows a spike on "release days."
And for the lawful sharing of uncopyrighted or justly-copyrighted materials, the local kids would be encouraged to make their buddy lists from local buddies, and not waste external bandwidth.
Ashland, Oregon has a community owned fiber network.
http://www.ashlandfiber.net/
"What is AFN?
AFN is an abbreviation for the Ashland Fiber Network, Ashland's very own Cable Television and High-Speed Internet broadband provider. AFN's network consists of fiber optic rings that weave through the city's neighborhoods.
The fiber originates from the "HeadEnd" - which is the brains of the system. The HeadEnd receives television signals from our satellite feed, and provides the connection for high speed internet and data. After traveling through the fiber optic rings, this information and technology will be delivered through a fiber or coaxial cable connected directly to customers' homes or businesses.
AFN Internet and AFN Data users are connected to the world wide web through the region's Point-of-Presence (POP) router - which will allows users to surf the web and use the internet to connect to the local or national ISP (Internet Service Provider) of your choice."
what sort of customer premises equipment is this fiber going to terminate into?
This is bullshit. Yes there are plenty of Cisco Access Points. Dartmouth is one of the most "un-wired" campuses, there is excellent WiFi coverage throughout the College. You have no clue what you are talking about, this has been a very sucess project, in fact read a story right at www.dartmouth.edu today (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2003/apri l/041403.html)
We in Epsom were completely re-cabled about 2 years ago - they ripped out the old 1/2" aluminum stuff, and put in dual 7/8" jacketed aluminum throughout both towns, and now we have broadband up the wahzoo.
Note that we're on Metrocast, NOT AT&T/Comcast !!
The former cable company (Lakes Region) was bought out by Metrocast. They *listened* to the boards of Selectmen in both towns (as well as many others, I think) and the chief complaint we had was that the old cable system was installed only in the parts of town that had the highest population density. They ignored a lot of the outlying areas (many of which were in the shadows of mountains and couldn't get a peep off the air). So, the deal was, if they wanted the franchise, *everybody* was to have access. They made it happen, by golly.
You can check the rates for yourself online at
http://www.metrocast.com
No, I don't work for Metrocast, and I didn't even subscribe. (For various personal reasons)
Perhaps this has already been brought up, but wouldn't the bandwidth provided by this MAN allow for huge Beowulf's or similar clustered supercomputers? Essentially your buildings could be superclusters. Then again, perhaps the signal latency between buildings would slow things down. I don't know.
Perhaps large corps. could subsidize the amount a person pays in rental if each person agreed to run a program like SETI@home in the background. Perhaps a computers spare clock cycles could be harnessed for grid computing activities. That would be a great use of the extra bandwidth.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
vola... now your laplop is as good as your cellphone...true mobile ip.. I am running the linux client from HUT, win32 clients can be found at birdstep.
Dartmouth Rocks!!!
Why not plan and cost-estimate for 4500 and then build the system for 9-10,000 anyway. Even if only 80% ultimately hook up to the system, the infrastructure for the additional 2700 hookups is already in place without having to tear up the streets again. This is working under the assumption that the town is already at (or near) total build-out; since I know nothing about Hanover I have no idea if that is or isn't the case.
Why the obsession over "potential profit"? If the plan is to build a system for the benefit of the community, let it be run by the community. Bill it at cost; operating overhead (power, maintence, connection to the rest of the world, administration) divided by the number of people connected to the system.
Don't let private companies run community systems. I don't see a big push to privatize water service or sewage treatment ...
Oh wait, there's no potential for big corporate profit in that.
Now if they only added mobile ip to this network ..all would be great. Seemless roaming hmmm...
Also, is it a transparent service that can connect to multiple ISPs, or not?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Many telcos are using a hybrid fiber/copper network where they use fiber to a neighborhood SLIC and then go copper to the homes. Why? There is one HUGE reason why: you can't send voltage over fiber. Having 1001 channel cable and megabit Internet is great, but I still want at least voice grade service available when the power goes out (and I'm from New England and am well aware of blizzards). I know, some of you will say "cellular", but at many locations (like inside my house) my cell phone doesn't work! Besides, many people simply don't have cell phones. Finally, would you want the liability of someone dying because they couldn't summon medical attention? How about someone who couldn't call 911 to report a fire in their house because the power went out? There's a reason that they call it C.O. battery...it literally is a bank of batteries!
hmm..town wide lan...sounds like...a WAN.
Hi!
You're not the first community to consider the idea. Kutztown, Pennsylvania has had a very successful experience in building out a Municipal Area Network--it would be well worth your while to study how Kutztown set about doing what they've done, and how they did it. Here's a brief overview PDF file from a vendor--it's a vendor's sales piece, but there's a good intro. A couple of key points:
More resources
Wired in Kutztown (Note: this is a Word document, not an HTML page)
Concord, MA study
Hometown Utilicom (Kutztown, PA)
A key point:
Note the user statistics on the HU web site, and carefully read the end of the David Allen paper: key to a successful buildout is reselling cable TV: Internet access alone doesn't generate enough revenue. That observation came originally from Frank Caruso of Kutztown (David Allen is quoting him in the paper).
Look at the existing municipal infrastructure--do you have the physical plant? Do you have billing systems, etc.? Are you overbuilding on top of an incumbent cable TV provider? Will Dartmouth College view you as a threat--or can you count on them for cooperation? What percentage of the town can you expect to subscribe for cable? For phone service? For Internet access? How firm are those figures? How did you arrive at them?
What kind of capital funding sources do you have access to? Is there any state economic development funding available?
What kind of peering/partnership opportunities do you have? If you have an incumbent cable TV provider, might you consider some kind of joint operating agreement? Might you consider some kind of joint operation with Dartmouth (considering the property taxes Hanover doesn't collect on college-owned property)?
David Allen of Concord, Ma., is entirely correct in his advice to the Town Selectmen: don't do this as a hobby, or a "let's see how it goes" kind of thing: do it as a business venture. That means a fully-thought-through business plan--and it includes key performance indicators and a hard-and-fast exit strategy if you cannot make your numbers. Kutztown has done it--learn from them, and maybe you can too.
Good luck!
Internet access as a public utility? It would be politically controlled (as are all government services). So the same people who decide what books to ban at the libarary based on "community values" are going to be deciding what content to filter and what URLs to block. I don't even want to think about the logging policy. No thanks I value both my freedom and my anonimity too much.
According to an op-ed piece in a recent edition of the Wisconsin State Journal by the mayor of that town, the cable TV companies are lobbying to pass a statewide resolution making such a thing illegal. The mayor, who didn't seem much of radical lefty, thought this was a bit over the top.
I have very little additional information. There's nothing online as far as I can tell about this controversy, which is why I didn't submit it as a Slashdot story.
Apparently, competition from the public sector is going to be illegal though. I wonder how come we still have a postal service. Anyway, your town needs to watch out for being blindsided by this.
mt
maybe hire the NetHere people to install a wireless LAN. NetHere re-launched Ricochet and it's gotta be cheaper than running fiber to every home.
Sounds like a win-win situation. NetHere gets a customer serious about networking and the town gets a less expensive installation.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I recently saw an interesting little presentation by Brisbane City Council (Australia), titled 'Living in Brisbane in 2010' which covered their future fibre roll-out plans and touched on what other cities where doing. (Brisbane is a very spread-out city so they're taking a gradual approach and currently pigging backing rollout of fibre on other projects to save costs ie. build a new road, add fibre)
Anyway, what was interesting was they pulled out a little box about the size of my cable box (forget the manufacturer but they looked readily available) which was designed for optical in, and had 2 phone jacks (voice-over-IP), 1 ethernet jack and 1 cable jack.
What would be really cool would be to tax on every home owner the building of the infrastructure, and you would then have the ability to network to your neighbors but to be allowed onto the internet, then you have to shell out $30/mo or something. That would be cool because it would promote interneighbor file sharing more. (not to mention interneighbor gaming. :) )
I understand that Adelphia's DOCSIS performance isn't very much better. The gripe board on DSLReports.Com for Adelphia Powerlink users is pretty busy. Lots of gloating when the Rigas family got busted. Enjoy pound-me-in-the-@$$ prison, John et fils.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Respectfully:
There are other benefits:
A) Lighting. Fiber distributed illumination is much more cost effective than burning 120volts- at-a-time for each fixture on the street, in store fronts, etc., and safety illumination could be enhanced: replace the white strip at the outer edge of the road with fiber-distributed, embedded illumination every two or three feet., etc., christmas decorations, light displays for traffic data and Amber alerts. The airport could be completely illuminated in a variety of colors to improve safety and to alert authorities of illegal access by emitting light through a prism and using the various frequencies to indicate the threat level and egress and ingress of intruders; police forces could turn on or off street lights/change traffick patterns from their vehicles to handle rush hour traffic, reroute traffic for emergency or special events,...and some day when your town buys a pro sports team, the celebration would be truly spectacular with a lot fewer fireworks, and then there are the romantics. They could rent the side of buildings which are close together to say,...HONEY-WILL-YOU-MARRY-ME,...a real cash cow,..huh?! Or YOU-CAN-TAKE-THIS-JOB-AND-SHOVE-IT!,...just a few ideas for starters.
Without even reading anything, they lost a lot of potential customers by not listing the price as $39.99. It's called basic marketing, basic human natural, etc. whatever camp you're in. Woops they'll say.
The thing that intrigues me most about the MANs that have been springing up is the potential for communicating with my physical neighbors at high speeds. This is a point that I haven't often seen in these slashdot discussions. Well, at least not outside the occasional reference to a city wide LAN party. To me, the benefits of this are clear, although I come from a small town background and am used to developing close relationships with the people who live near me. If you're the type to lock yourself in your lair and get all your interaction from the net, then you might not care, but I think it'd be nice to have uncapped access to the local TV station, or even just to have a fast pipe next door or across town.
I'm an embedded systems guy by trade, so I'm no network engineer. Sure, I've got some certs and some pro bono network admin work under my belt, but I don't know what goes into admining a network of this size. I guess what I'd like to know is what the restrictions are at this time, be they financial or technical, to moving the traffic shaping from the edge (eg, customer equipment, capping cable modem rates, lowering rates at the DSLAM below what is technically possible, etc) to the peering points, or even just at the long haul links. Is it just the extra horsepower required by the routers? Or would a network organized like this cost more to administrate? I don't see how it would, at least not in bandwidth costs. Or is it simply a matter of there not being a need/current use for this type of setup? Anybody shed some light on this for me?
OK it loks like you want to fiber yourself up a man, ok not a bad idea LRE ethernet may be a better use for residential (100mb deditated should be enough for anyone :) well maybe not but it should be cost justified vs terminating all that fiber in the house day one) Fiber running around the city would seem prudent if it was easily accesable and could be reached in a few days to the buildings thats a LOT better than the normal 6 month build in.
OK good services Network access obviously a good vlan or MPLS infrastructure would be a good idea so you can sell pipes as well as plain IP access. This can allso allow compatition between uplinks pretty much allow the city to take care of infrastructure not being an ISP and all those bits like TOS, filtering etc.
OK Next things is VoIP this is cheap effective and lets face it good at driving the prices of the telco down to something reasonable. Posibly partnering with somebody like vontage for that offering they drop a line in and you can get a LOT of VoIP over a T1 backhaul. There are some good solutions for this check out whatever Cox is using on cable tv as well. It would be a good thing to see about PoE on this one as it's not a good thing to have no phones working when the power is out. I dont know wether you can do LRE and PoE on the same line though.
Finaly you have cable tv. Multicast streaming on it's own vlan can be a wonderfull thing no idea if they make a set top box for this yet. PC access to cable would be a nice plus for a town with so many students.
OK some notes on the IP sode of things obviously it would be nice if Multicast works for videoconferencing etc at least inside the town. If your doing you own ISP thing definatly restrict servers a fastE link is expensive. Companies deal with you on links 200 megs a sec and over the pricing goes way down if you take the handoff as a gige and run it back yourself this can save you significat ammounts of cash.
Well thats all I could think off off the cuff.
No sir I dont like it.
Since network infrastructure is gearing towards 802.11. Why not building a WLAN city in your village. If you are interested. Please email me at pathwalker_us@yahoo.com. Thanks
This sort of early, government-sponsored infrastructure reminds me of the interstate highway, universal telephone service, and regulated spectrum initiatives. Each has granted benefits which not only were not imagined at conception, but could not have been. Nobody could have envisioned Amazon/UPS when the interstates were first built. e911 was beyond comprehension when universal coverage was introduced, much less 555-TELL.
Of course, look out for effects like the network affiliates, one of the principal unintended effects of the TV spectrum allocations.
-- Brian T. Sniffen
Sounds like you are trying to do exactly what cable from (here) shaw does. They deliver tv and radio content, plus internet, all for around 40 dollars a month, at least here in canada.
How is what you are proposing different?
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Specialization Fiber Optic Networks from 417 Megabits/sec - 1.6 Terabits/sec
[1.6 TB That means one reaaallly big pipe for lots of data to fly down]
By the way if they are looking for someone to run the network maintenance I am able to relocate!
Optical networking is generally used as a carrier for what ever type of digital data is being sent. For example say you have an Optical Carrier Signial uhhh lets say about an OC3 (3 T3's in optical format) All of the data that the OC3 is carrying is considered a payload; Electrical siginals like T3 to multiplexed with other peoples T3 (or 2 more from your facility). This would constitute a very basic and crude example of optical networking in the realm of todays technology.
For a clearer definition of this example go to a search engine and try SONET
First of all the logistics of spam etc. is an issue left to the individual. I would imagine that considering current Local Loop technologies, that the badnwidth to the home would be limited. This is easily done now with various types of high end optical routers (go dig through Cisco's web site if you can afford the time). Also see companies like Cox Communications (they use a cable network version of fiber to the neighborhood!) or any other Cable internet access carrier.
Second Many small cities around the US have went to Fiber-to-the-House. Not any more work than adding new copper to the same community (actually considerbly less).
3rd Hell YES bury the fiber and get it going on!!!!!
Everyone will benefit.
Finally the fiber to the house would requrie an interface somewhere between your equipment and the Optical signal, since I am sure that there are not too many tv's and PC's in the hood that can accomodate a direct optical connection?
Activity can create the wonderful illusion of productivity! ---Me
Think:
Real time audio streaming of town meetings, city council, public court hearings. You've got the bandwidth to setup and sustain a few hundred streaming realplayer connections.
Keep a consistent interface. I would suggest a web-based initiative, because you can find content management systems (I use this one, but there's more of them, where you could setup a simple username and password interface to let everyone logon, use web-based email, get local alerts etc.
Think of seeing the pictures of a wanted suspect everywhere in the neighborhood in seconds. Grab a mugshot, scan it in, and boom, thanks to integrating your phone service through this (which, if you don't, you'll look at yourself in 10 years and really kick yourself) the guy won't be able to go anywhere near a residential neighborhood without getting tagged. A phone call (or special ring?) will alert you to an "emergency message" provided via email, instead of having to hear about it through the TV (and all the rigamarole that entails, compared to just sending out an email). Think of weather alerts in this same vein. A blizzard coming and you need to warn the masses?
Keep wireless access points around town. I mean, if its in the city limits and you're going to go, go all the way. That way if their notebook has a wireless card, they can still sit in the restaraunt and eat quietly while surfing the net.
Everyone gets an email address that is not spammed and can only be used for city business and contacts. This is a peculiar idea consider, but it would assure that you would never, ever, get spam from this address. This one you can throw away, but I thought I would throw it in the mix.
Teleconferencing intra-city. With video. Nuff said. (Think X-11 or something. You can push the bandwidth.)
If you integrate your phone service through this line, the shared cost would be more than enough to keep a techie or two onhand for support, a few DNS/Web/FTP servers running, etc etc.
Just a few ideas. There is no way this cannot help your town, and I congratulate you in your efforts. Good luck.
The ongoing discussions within the town stemmed from the local Phone and Cable companies dragging their asses with broadband via cable or DSL deployment.
Verizon DSL is now active as of March 2003 for the majority of Hanover. I've been waiting nearly a year and I finally have broadband through Verizon. Deploying another infrastructure is not only redundant but rather pointless now.
Prepare computers to be used during off hours for something useful. Perhaps pro bono work like folding some protein or maybe just sell the CPU cycles to the highest bidder. Obviously residents would have to agree/ get incentiviezed to let their computers do the work; but I am sure a solution could be found. Tor
OK, here are some potential benefits, besides traditional cable TV and Internet access. Keep in mind that these applications will likely run over TCP/IP, but I'm talking about specific things you can do with this.
IP Telephony: Once this network is up, IP telephony become really easy. Suddenly, every resident can get access to services like Vonage. Heck, you can have as many IP-based telcos running on the network as your customers could support. Now the local telco can have direct competition on a scale it hasn't seen before.
Community TV and Radio Channels: A local network can allow you to experiment with offering local radio and TV in more flexible ways than traditional cable. Anyone with suitable equipment can start broadcasting. Programming could be offered via traditional netcasting, or the feed could be netcast to the cable headend, then converted to a cable channel. And getting a video or audio backhaul of a live event to the cable headend becomes a lot easier when you have connection points all over town.
Videoconferencing: You know the gist of this one, I'm sure, so I'll just add this. How would you like for citizens to be able to participate in City Council meetings from home? With this, they could. You'll have the capacity to broadcast all sorts of governmental meetings and give residents the ability to participate. Don't expect a large number to do so, but the point is that they can. And if you set up a central server, all this content could be archived for retrieval on demand. The politicians will probably hate this aspect, but anyone wanting to keep tabs on them will love it.
And finally, the beauty of such a network is that it can grow to meet future demands, provided it's properly maintained and upgraded. What the town would be doing is building--on God, must I say this--an information superhighway. As long as the infrastructure is content-neutral, you can send whatever kinds of information down it that you want.
I haven't heard anything about Dartmouth's network failing... I've been leeching WiFi from them for years. It's pretty good, and has been getting better. :)
Now that my grandmother has DSL, however, I leech her service and fix her computers. In return she feeds me cookies
--Bennett Prescott
Former Lord Of Packets
"the technical challenges of laying fiber and maintaining a network to serve 9000+ citizens are mind boggling. Policy decisions, network abuse, outages, spam, filtering (god forbid), all nightmares that will require a dedicated, 24/7 network maintenance team"
The Technical Challenges of laying this type of network are just a small portion of it... One this infastructure is in place bot the cable and the Telco's fiber networks will become idle and Cause quite a stir... Mind you in a town of that size the cable company might not be utilizing a HFC network yet unless they offer internet services if they do you can bet that they have some fiber layed out... But the Telco will definately have some... so they will surely launch a lawsuit to recoup cost of investment on infastructure not to mention revenue loss.
On another note is it feasable to have Fiber to the home at this point when WDM technology is so costly but would be a Massive cost saving technology to utilize it a roll out of this nature? When the price of this equipment drops thats when Fiber to the home will truely be viable from a finical Standpoint.
As for maintaining this type of network.. Its alot easier than you would think (from a operational standpoint).. Fiber networks are far easier to maintain due to the reduced ammount of active hardware to keep running. The real concern would be bandwidth management... for internet services anything more than a 5Mbit commection to the internet is getting wastefull for a home user and just asking for abuse to set in. While the additional bandwidth avilable for other services is definately a bonus...
Lasers are the hugest expence you would have for a project like this.. as they are Still very expencive and a minimum of 2 would be required for each home. It would make alot more sence to run fiber within 500 feet of homes and utilize other technology to take the last little bit... One could even run Multimode for this last portion. But I haven't seen any devices that have been made for this type of service..
For the most part Fiber to the home is a fair ways off from becoming Feasable due to a wide range of factors.. But getting fiber closer to the home is where the largest benefits are as it brings your infastructure closer to the home for when WDM and other technologies that reduce fiber requirments drop in price.
For 9,000 homes... You could easily feed the entire city and every home off 2 active fibers (once all the signals have been multiplexed) of backbone. So laying out 1000's of fibers in such a small area seems a bit of a waste. For Example Futjitsu's DWDM systems can run 1.76 Terabits of data/s utilizing OC192 sonnet signals.. as OC768 becomes a more viable a sonnet speed 1.76Tb/s will jump by a factor of 4.. not to mention that fujitsu's gear also is only utilizing 2 optical bands currently and will soon be utilizing a third which would allow another 88 sonnet signals. While my example is unbelieveable overkill it demonstrate the point that rolling out massive fiber counts is pointless.
But more day to day Fiber management for infastructure.. Cut Fibers and Faulty lasers are 98% of your problems and they both are quite uncommon. So the more fiber you have the cheaper your maintenance cost will be.
I think feeding 25-30 homes off a pair of fiber is still overkill but WAY cheaper to roll out this type of infastructure.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
I am currently working with a large master planned community they are running fiber to every home, and they are delivering phone/internet/tv/movies on demand to every home over the single fiber link. The ability to run everything over 1 cable is a very large benefit... I would pay $80 per month to have these services all bundled together... and at this community they are only charging $35/mo per house.. its great.
Then somebody could find a way to get the thing working for windoze and linux, and bam. Free music for everybody!!! F*ck the RIAA!!!
I can see the headline now: Entire Town of Hanover being sued by RIAA
I would laugh...
The best way to accelerate your pee-cee is at 9.81m/s^2
This is an 'educational' type project, and something that the college might not mind endorsing - especially if the college CS professors live in town. Considering colleges and universities gets bandwidth for a fraction of what a commercial entity does, they could probably offer the bandwidth to the community with that fraction in mind, with a little extra added to cover the overhead of on-campus bandwidth.
That is, unless, the college isn't already raping its students with exhorbinant bandwidth prices.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Not sure where you got your info, but it's mostly wrong. Dartmouth went wireless with equipment from Cisco by many different alumns. The rollout was a success, you can read about it in Wired, they did an article on it, and it was posted here a long time ago, about two years. The only problem there has been is authentication, but that is not a Dartmouth problem, the industry hasn't standarized yet on how wireless auth is going to play out. But that doesn't stop WiFi from being useful or successful on campus. As for going before the tech was ready, Dartmouth rolled out 802.11b equip after it was standardized, and has had no problems with compatability with cards or equip from different manufacturers.
That seems odd... I thought the whole deal with fiber optics was that they're good for data transmission because they can transmit a small amount of light over long distances *without* scatter. If you added scattering imperfections or something to they emit light, you'd run out of light in a few feet. To counter this, you'd need a light source of immense strength at the beginning of the cable, and probably boosters all down the length. In short, just about everything you put there is untenable. I could see the decorative uses, though. Just get it out of your head that fiber optics magically create light, or whatever you think.
Absolutely NOT true! For what it was the wireless network (the original Apple base station network and then the more secure and stable Cisco wireless network) allowed wireless access on the Green, in the libraries, and nowdays, in the classrooms. I worked at the Help Desk three years ago when wireless first came - and though it was limited, it provided fast, reliable service. As of my graduation last spring, you could get wireless ANYWHERE on campus. The only problems were at junction points, and some theives in Hanover insisting they had a right to use the bleed over (seriously - we logged several calls a week from townies demanding service). Reliability of the network wasn't an issue - the MORONIC USERS were the main issue. For Ivy League students, Dartmouth has some of the worst computer users on the planet. Most of them couldn't even explain what they wanted, except some magical connection to email. That and morons trying to get wireless without a wireless card.
So you'd rather have the big media companies and the cable companies tightly coupled with your flow of data? You obviously have never tried "broadband" cable internet. I'm on it now. They'll ass-fist you. Poor service, absurd restrictions in the AUP, and total crap. I only use it is because my landlord won't let me get a second phone line, and my roommates will bug me if I use the first one for net access.
How do you know your ISP isn't capturing all your packets and selling the data to anyone who'll pay? This includes the government. In fact, half of them are probably being "patriotic" and sending this info to the feds anyway.
Governments run trash duty, water, sewage, the road systems, the military, and many other things. Some things are just more practical for the government to maintain, but if they do run a computer network, they should not put restrictions on it--like a "no servers" policy. Some might say they'll try to use it to control everyone, so you have to watch them. Obfiscating your packets to protect yourself from criminals, zealots and spooks is a good idea too. If your country isn't free and they restrict such technology, then you're under an oppressive regime. If your country is full of whackos, then you're screwed anyway.
I'm not saying the government should run everything, nor am I saying others should be banned from competing with the government either. Nor am I saying they run everything well. For example, public schools should be eliminated. Seriously, when everyone is taught for 13 years, and most of them can barely read & write at a third grade level, then there is a big problem!
I think you are vastly overestimating the percentage of people eager to upgrade. In my last apartment I lived pretty much in the outskirts of town, it was my apartment complex (22 buildings with 36 apartments apiece) with two nursing homes and a fire department as the only neighbors. We had a dedicated cablemodem line for our comples with another line they can add if we managed to throttle the first one. It was complete heaven as I was one of about 10 renters that actually used it - most of the time I had the entire 1.544Mb/s line to myself. I could easily move 600 MB (pretty much a full CD) per hour sustained.
/. the pitiful OC-192 connection between the central office downtown and the rest of the web :)
...
... jpnews is probably right :)
Believe it or not, that was the selling factor for moving me into the apartment in the first place, and I couldn't believe that my entire neighborhood wasn't plugged in 24x7. Most of them couldn't care less, a few didn't want to pay $45 a month for that new-fangled interweb to view web sights, and a few were on dial-up (no joke.)
In a college community I would suspect a higher number of people that want in on it, but rather than not enough people wanting it I would pretty much bet the other extreme, 9,000 different connections all running P2P nodes and all wanting to run 1Mb/s sustained connections 24x7. At that point the bottleneck isn't the last mile - it is the central office's connection the the rest of the world. If you ran regular cablemodems to every house in your town they could STILL throttle the connection so running fiber is just begging them to
Cable is cheaper, I would imagine. Terminating the cable is also something your average cable monkey can do, terminating 9,000 fiber connections isn't going to be cheap. Wouldn't surprise me if you already had appropriate cable run the last mile already. Priced 9,000 ports of fiber optic switches lately?
Fiber is cool, but what do you honestly gain? Well you don't need to do it again in 3 years when the central office actually can handle 9,000 users wanting to run a full megabit per second sustained 24x7
If you honestly think the suscriber base will go for it, and then if you think they will do it without overdoing it, does it make sense to run fiber instead of cable? Short term, probably not. Long term
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
DOes this. Canberra has several hundred thousand people, and all those who live in suburbs with electricity on poles can get fibre to their house.
It carries broadband internet and Cable TV. Don't know what the cost is
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
How about an entire county in washington on a fiber network.
Our local University is thinking about a similair plan, though it is in a larger city and isn't envisioned to subscribe all households. Basically it is a plan to leverage the University's network connection and networking expertise to create a high speed metro network. Government and local businesses development groups are for it. Apparently, lots of businesses, not just the typical high tech ones, are starting to evaluate network infrastructure. While it is expensive to deliver such a network, it can be done and would give the area a competative advantage for attracting businesses.
Guess who is against it? The existing telecos! Not only are they against it, but they are pulling some very heavy handed lobbying tactics - basically a member of the University's board of trustees is employed by the State's teleco lobby. She is blocking the University from further work on the project. So the telecos not only bitch and moan that developing the network is so expensive that they have to be guaranteed a monopoly before they do it, but they also try to block other organisations from doing it.
Some people may argue that the University shouldn't be competing against private companies - but Universities have always played a large role in supplying internet infrastructure.
My god could you make a fun warez ftp with that...there is a reason I am being an anonymous coward. :D
of the town, causing the big LAN to suddenly be... minimized, if you will, due to a large influx of fanatical college students claiming this to be the holy place of P2P or something crazy like that and going on a pilgrimage...
fiber speeds to all my neighbor's mp3's
If you're going to pirate your neighbor's music or movie collection, you might as well just do it with good old CD-R. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a car full of CDs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think your refering to High-speed internet that uses broadband.
Within the context of this article, "broadband" means "high-speed Internet access via a broadband connection" and "cable" means "Internet access via cable modem" not "cable television". Thus, your "Any place that has Cable" isn't anywhere close to "near everywhere".
Will I retire or break 10K?
the concept of a World-wide LAN. Oh wait a second, it's called the Internet !!!
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
If they're offering, stay awat. I's only a matter of time 'til your access is limited to websites about Lacan and Foucault and about how truth is an expression of patriarchal repression, or some suicidal such.
Just grab a pizza at the colatina exit, and move on to safer climes.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
But isn't it the same with all publicly owned infrastructure? I mean, roads, pavements, town squares, buses, trains all basically come with a TOS, don't they? If the TOS is made clear from the start then you should abide by it if you want to get on board ...surely?
Provo, in Utah (http://www.provo.org) has been planning something like that for a few years now, but on a scale of about 90,000 residents. I'm not sure what is going on, but a few years ago, they were thinking about fiber to every house. You might want to contact someone in the IT department there to see if they can be of any help.
-jc
Oh, and incidentally, the Friends mailing list was hosted on a listserv at Dartmouth!
...fiber optics... good for data transmission... over long distances
. stillwater.org/extras/fiber.htm
That sums, plus "at high speed", would sum up to prescribed application of fiber in a network.
I think fiber to every household is reaching unnecessarily far and may not be feasible. A more conservative and workable approach might be similar to what the city of Stillwater, OK has done in partnership with Chickasaw Telecommunications (CTSI).
In outline:
1) fiber to every neighborhood
2) copper to each home for voice and data.
3) high speed fiber 'loops' to connect major areas, schools, city entities and businesses and to provide redundancy
Critical to the success of the plan were co-operation between Chickasaw and the city - to the point where city utility workers hung much of the above-ground fiber and the city not attempting to over-regulate Chickasaw's business interests.
The whole thing will take years to complete; it's still in progress in Stillwater, though the major, high speed portions are done, so patience and a long view will help.
One of the nicest (in a revenge sense) things is that the incument baby bell (SBC) dragged their feet from the beginning. This idea didn't fit their business model, so they tried several ways to block anyone else from doing it and became marginalized in the process when the city leaders pushed on to find a willing and capable partner.
Your city may want to contact the City of Stillwater, OK http://stillwater.ok.us for advice on how to procede. Maybe our experience will help your town avoid some of the traps and delays.
additional links:
http://www.stillwater.brightok.net/
http://www
Add Monmouth Illinois to the list of small towns that are considering this sort of action. We are about 9000 + a college as well.
I work with a gentleman from Concord, MA. The town of Concord just completed plans for a town-wide LAN consisting of fiber and are in the process of implementing the system. So, it is feasible and doable. And best of all, you have a model of how it can be done.
Don't pet the burning dog
DANG! You took my post idea away. But, you could go to alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica or alt.binaries.multimedia.dvd and download to your heart's content all the video you could ever want/need.
I think the goal of this project, as with most public infrastructure improvements, is to attract new businesses to the community. Improving the internet service to the existing community is probably not the main motivating factor for the proposal.
Hanover is a relatively prosperous enclave in the middle of a fairly unprosperous and somewhat remote region. So far, that has been one of the contributing factors to limiting the College-spawned High Tech enterprises that arise around other institutions of Dartmouth's caliber. I'll bet the computer scientists and engineers at Dartmouth are itching to spin off their research. Having a high speed data infrastructure in place would certainly mitigate some of the disadvantages of starting a company there. This would improve the regional economy, and, hopefully, create a expansive spiral.
This, of course, will be opposed by some people who are afraid of ruining the atmosphere of the upper valley. I, personally, am of two minds. I'm a Dartmouth alum, and would love to work in Hanover, but how much can it change an still retain it's attractive features?
Hope you have average $2,000 per house for the installs (digging up the streets and everyone backyards is expensive) and equipment and I'd bet thats a low estimate.
So if you have about 20 Million in the bank I'd say go for it.
Or you could spend ~500K-1 Mil and deploy 802.11g wireless, or spend 2-3Mil and deploy 100MB wireless optical.
I've been to Hanover numerous times, and I'm sure the poster is aware that not every household in town can afford to lay down $40/month for this service. The school and its surrounding area are very picturesque and affluent; however, a mile or so out you have people who live very modestly. Its safe to say most of their children will not be attending Dartmouth.
I don't mean to flame, but seriously, I think we may have folks in ivory towers who are thinking $40/month is a meager cost, when in many cases it is certainly not. Perhaps by "feasibility", they mean to find out if enough of the residents will fork over forty bucks a month to support the cost of the infrastructure. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that this is advertised as a town-wide effort, when it will most definately exclude a good number of the town's citizens.
Of course, if the millionaires at Dartmouth foot the bill, then this would seem a great public service.
The subject is just a joke, but seriously, your statement could basically be reduced to "Don't allow the people to create the infrastructure for a public network, there is already a company there who would take their money" ...
If it is owned by the people, and its use is determined by the people, and it is regulated by the will of the people, it is only a monopoly of the people.
The only control issue may be that the majority of the people may have a different view than the minority, like that doesn't happen every day... but that is what educating the masses on issues before voting is all about.
And it isn't about coupling the provided service with governement control, it is about building the infrastructure. Services can be provided by 3rd party vendors and the community would have the advantage because they own the infrastructure. Cable/Telco company A charges too much, start accepting bids from companies B, C, and D. Bye bye, company A. Just because the LOCAL govt collects the funds as if it were a municipal utility does not mean the govt is actually doing the footwork. They should collect the money and pay the 3rd party, always looking to get the best deal for the community, by vote.
There are 3 main categories of services you can provide to households over fibre: internet, phone (VoIP), and cable television. Whatever you choose, the city should be just the owner of the conduit, and rent access to competing companies for services.
:-). That way companies like AoHell/TW and local IPSs can each offer different levels of service, such as static IPs, blocks of IP addresses for businesses (and home working geeks), etc. In the home, the customer gets an ethernet port which can be plugged into a switch and feed every computer they want. This then allows "new" consumer goods to be internet connected for very little additional cost.
The internet part is the easiest. The city runs a big router or two (using ATM pipes), and allows a number of competing ISPs to provide IP/IPv6 addresses to customers (require IPv6 as part of the contract with the city, and be hailed as visionaries
The city will receive legal hassles if it tries to run its own phone service, and will also get legal hassles if it allows either one or multiple phone companies to offer services. Its just a fact of the b0rken american system that anything a city does will be challenged in the courts by companies who might lose out. My best advice would be to build a telco switch and allow a limited number of companies access to offer services to the citizenry. Then negotiate long term contracts with the area ILECs/CLECs/wannabes to provide local/LD services, calling plans, portable phone numbers, etc to the users, who could then choose which company would provide their IP dialtone. Enforce a standard VoIP phone system, SIP or whatever is the most stable in a few years time. Then the consumers can purchase whichever fancy VoIP phone from ratShack or other electronic stores in the area, or let a phone company include one in their package (local vs. remote voicemail box).
Video is the most promising use of FttH technology, it is just now starting to mature. Cable companies currently use Hybrid Fibre Coax distribution systems, the fibre can carry 800+ channels without distortion, but then the signal is converted into copper in each neighborhood for feeding into the set top boxes. The cost of that conversion equipment is pretty high, but not as high as replacing the copper investment with fibre. If the city were to make each subscriber's fibre available to a small number of cable companies (two or three is enough to keep the prices competitive), then they can't be blackmailed by AT&T like San Francisco. If the city owns and maintains the fibre system, it keeps many, many arguments at bay like who pays for the upgrades, maintenance, etc.
Depending on how many of these services the city finally decides to offer will determine which kind of technology to be installed in the homes and business in the area. Also whether a single or double pair should be pulled to each house (I vote for double at a minimum). Apartment buildings and dorms are a special case, where it might make sense to put in special distribution hubs. The topology is best left to experienced technical people hired directly by the city (fiduciary responsibility) rather than allowing corporate sales slime to make suggestions. Corporations *WILL* do everything in their power to limit the ability to grow or evolve the system in the hopes of locking out their competition. A ban on all non-residents from city council meetings to eliminate astroturfing is highly recommended.
That said, the potential for economic gain is pretty good. I've just viewed the fibre plant of a small town in Portugal, who decided to put FttH of every household as part of a rebuilding of the whole utility infrastructure. They haven't yet even decided what to offer, or which equipment to put in, and the project is still 5-6 years from lighting up. But property prices have been shooting up way faster than other towns in the area because the promise of always on internet connections are drawing all the tech crowd from Lisbon. Expect a similar boom where the tax rate can stay the same (or even drop slightly as a campaign lie^Wpromise), but with a huge increase in property values will result in more money for the council to play with.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
What I don't get is the cost. You can wire up an entire city block at about $40.00 per unit ($10.00 for a 100mbit ethernet card, $20.00 for the cat5 wire, and $10.00 per port for your switch). Have everyone chip in another $10.00 towards a wireless access point to hop from street to street, and everyone's good. Anyone who wants can then provide a proxy to the outside Internet, and limit the hosts/bandwidth that have access.
The only problem I see w. this is squirrels chewing through the wires once in a while, but this applies to any wiring.
Take a look at, and even visit, my city Umeå in Northern Sweden, where we have fiber optic cables in the entire city.
m l)
There are even villages 100 km from here with the same infrastructure!
I'm currently sitting on true 100 Mbps internet.
A few links to visit:
http://www.norrnod.se (especially how the DMZ is constructed on http://www.norrnod.se/norrnod/dmz/dmz-oversikt.ht
http://www.bostream.com (fiberstream is one service)
http://www.umeaenergi.se/default.asp?id=2942 (community power company who installed fiber all over the place)
Some information is in Swedish...
I am paying US$25 per month for this service!
I have 1 Gbps Internet access@home
I was looking at a house here but the yards are all too small (yes I'm an outdoorsy geek), but basically phone, cable, and internet go over fiber to the home. The costs are rolled into the HOA fees. I didn't get to see a breakdown of the fees but it was kind of steep. Granted it had pools, trails, and other high maintenance community features.
Brambleton
"Verizon Collaborates With Developer to Create
Wired World at New Loudoun County, Virginia Community
Company Brings Fiber-Optic Links to Homes
BRAMBLETON, Va. - Residents of the new Loudoun County community of Brambleton will live in one of the country's most-wired communities, courtesy of Verizon Communications.
The planned community, located about seven miles southeast of Leesburg, will have a state-of-the-art fiber-optic network linking homes in the first phase of the development. This will give Brambleton residents access to the latest in voice, video and data services the day they move in."
I heard this info probably 4 or 5 years ago, my uncle knew several higher-ups at Dartmouth and they said they spent every penny that was donated and still if you walked like 20 feet you would change zones and be dropped instantly. I heard they didn't know what to do and they basically thought that every penny invested was completely wasted. Maybe they had another $20 million invested over the next 2 years and then got it right, but I don't consider that a great success. And of course it was treated as a success by Dartmouth, since the equipment and a lot of money was donated by cisco people, this was basically just a big showcase for their stuff so they could get publicity out of it. Did you think they were going to let people know that their equipment didn't work? use thy brain
There's a little town in northwest Ohio, Bryan to be exact, that has done what you're speaking of. Byran is a town of 7000 to 8000 people. The town laid out a fiber optic backbone and supply to each residence via cable hookups. They provide television and internet service using this setup. They have also adapted the infrastructure to monitor/maintain city utility hookups (ie. the power and water meters at each residence). I used to live in the town prior to this setup. Some of my family still lives there however and they seem to have very good opinions. You can find the town on the interenet via the following link: http://www.cityofbryan.net
There are really two somewhat orthogonal issues here: getting a very fast data connection to every household, and providing services over that connection later.
connection: I believe that ethernet over fiber to the 'front door' of every building in Hanover is feasable. If the population excluding Dartmouth is 9000, there are probably
services: In short, the set of services that you could provide is just about endless. A short list would be
VoIP
(short)distance learning
home automation
online form filing/voting/etc.
telecommuting
really cheap thin clients for people, served from somewhere in Hanover, instead of full PCs
While conducting an inventory for the power company in American Fork, UT, we stumbled across a city-wide 100BT network (the marketing hype calls it DSDN, digitally switched data network). They have hardened switches attached to every other power poles or so, with cat5 drops to houses. The network was originally built by Airswitch (which I believe has changed names, however airswitch.com still works). When Airswitch got out of the network business to focus on the building the hardware, the city of American Fork bought the network and administrates it. I believe the monthly charge is around $35 for 100BT-speed broadband.
20 Communities Added to U.S. Optical Fiber Communities List Brings Total to 70 With Customers Served Today via Fiber to the Home. Published 3/18/03.
Download File: 031803 US Opt Fiber Commun List 2003.pdf
See Fiber to the Home Council for much more information such as case studies etc.
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
The problem with that is that it relies quite extensively on the generosity of others to share limitted things (internet bandwidth) to you for free which they paid for. That's exactly why file sharing on the internet doesn't work well.
Not only that, but wifi APs don't have the bandwidth for a setup like this, especially since they'd be in a grid fashion and be a flat network, as opposed to simply wifi internet access, which is simply an upstream network (which requires significantly less bandwidth).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I didn't declare you a 'foe' on just the basis of this conversation. Though saying factional statements like "Your liberalism is disgusting" just because I disagree with you, you deserve it.
It is a common ploy of extremist "conservatives" to label everyone who disagrees with them as a "liberal" and vice versa. I think both sides are idiots--not because I dislike what they say, but because they have pushed themselves into a cookie cutter mold. I do not want to be labeled under the name "conservative" or "liberal" or whatever, becase I don't like being told what to think. I doubt very many people naturally fall under the political beliefs of either party, but decide they must pick one and change themselves to conform.
I also looked at several of your past messages. You seem quite pissy and lame at times, plus your handle "acidic diarrhea" sounds boderline trollish to me.
I also strongly suspect you may be writing pissy replies to your replies as anonymous coward. AC should only be used when you are worried you might get in trouble at work or men in black suits may visit your doorstep. I think using AC to keep from getting a karma hit is out of line. I've posted as AC before, but only because I was afraid some spook wouldn't like what I said, and I'd "mysteriously" disappear.
I've made a bunch of pissy remarks, but mostly because I am mad at Microsoft (for creating a monopoly and delivering shoddy products), and the media companies (for trying to shut down p2p, making false DMCA complaints, and all sorts of crap). I also took karma hits for some of those posts. You don't even seem to have any purpose to your pissyness.
Setting you as a slashdot "foe" isn't anything personal. If I saw you on the street, I would not try to beat you up or anything. Most of the time I add someone as a "foe" because they seem to be a troll, shill, or stupid. You don't necessarily fit into these categories (in fact, some of your posts seem insightful), but half your posts seem to be annoying and pointless.
I noticed you marked me as a "friend" could this be to try and get a score bonus when I view your posts?
Wow! that would be one great WAN party! hehe. But I can only imagine the difficulties of keeping the thing in prime working order.
- multi-player games
- mail to their friends/neighbours/company in the same area
- copying the latest isos for our latest and greatest distros
- file sharing
I was only proposing wifi be used to jump across the street from one block to the next, saving having to string wires over roadways.The Ashland Fiber Network (mentioned elsewhere) was proposed to cost $3.5M and take 3 years to build and become profitable. Despite warnings that the business projections were a pipe-dream, it was pushed through the city council. We are now 5 years in to the project. It is still not finished, has cost $10M, and has attracted a fraction of the projected users--in part due to aggressive pricing and upgrading by the competing cable company and inept marketing. The budget overuns finally belied the projections so plainly that they cost the AFN Manager his head. Pulling the last 100 ft. to each house has been contracted out. Ashland owns it's own power grid (the poles are public property) so right-of-way was no issue and going overground is easy. But much of the town has had utilities undergrounded, so the streets had to be cut to pull the fiber--underground customers got done last, and cost the most to install. None of these are technical problems. Any business in town can have gigabit connectivity if it needs it, at agressive pricing, and homes get broadband at competitive pricing--bearing in mind the town still has to buy bulk OC connnectivity from the phone company to reach the backbone in nearby Medford. AFN, after political wrangling, agreed to re-sell NET services through local ISPs, and thus avoided 'competing' with them. AFN sells t.v. direct--with a local, appointed committee arbitrating what content is appropriate to carry. To date, no business has relocated here because of high-bandwidth connectivity...so the 'Economic Developement' argument remains...ummm...unsubstantiated. Of course it was great for the existing tech businesses; they got a public subsidy to improve connectivity and lower cost. Would you believe they all supported this? Ah, yes, the schools got connected first and cheap or free--good politics as well as civic-mindedness there. The schools need more than bandwidth...but that is another non-technical issue. Competition for cable tv subscribers forced prices down for 2 years, and helped people recover some of the tax investment. Now both AFN and Charter Cable are raising rates. Check out Palo Alto...they tried and failed at this as a business. Technically, this is quite do-able and the AFN guys could provide a wealth of information. Just be careful what lies--er, marketing language--you use to promote the project. While it is easier, politically, to lie than to spend time persuading people of the benefits, lying will bite you in the ass eventually.
You don't seem to understand the concept. What good would wifi access points do just to bridge a couple blocks together? The bandwidth isn't sufficient. The only situation I could see is use a single AP per block (exhorbinantly expensive), and wire the blocks together. You'd not save much (if any) by doing it that way. Not only that, but it defeats the point of wiring with fiber (or even copper) in the first place: wifi can do 11Mbit, but in practice it's less. Sometimes 3Mbit, sometimes 7 or 8Mbit.
If you're using a single wifi AP for even a single block, you're going to run into problems with this scenario. I don't care how fast the wires are, you're only going to get 8Mbit onto the pipe at a time, and that's amongst (say) 10 households, and maybe 5 of those households will want to use it at once. That's going to choke them down quite a lot - maybe to 1Mbit each.
That's simply not an acceptable speed for a neighborhood LAN. You're still going to be picky about people leeching from your system, because the rest of the neighborhood won't be able to use the internet or do much else while they're leeching from you, and then you'll get in trouble with your neighbors. Not cool. It might be an acceptable pipe for -just- internet, but simply forget about filesharing.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Even if all the households are on the net at the same time, as long as the burst speed is acceptable, everything should be okay, certainly with speeds akin to adsl.
If someone on the same subnet is leeching from the cat5, that's not a problem.
You can also extend the cat5 across streets as long as you don't (1) use the local utility poles (2) make sure you're over the minimum height required (3) don't run it near power lines, etc.
My point was to use wifi just to jump streets. For ordinary communications, it would be very cost-effective. And with the cost coming down to around $100 in decent quantities, it's very doable.
A caching server? You must be nuts. That cost would be exhorbinant. Not only that, but I suspect the main bandwidth hog would be large files and music transfer, etc. There's no percieveable way that such a setup could be financially competitive with fiber to every house. None. Not for a town-wide LAN.
Besides, it's a relatively trivial matter to wire from block to block, if you're going to bother wiring things at all. Certainly more trivial than a caching server per block plus a wifi AP - it'd have to be put in someone's yard, after all. Who owns it? The city? Who maintains it? There's a lot of cost involved there.
As far as someone 'leeching from the cat5', that's all you need to say to let me know you know absolutely nothing about networking. You don't use cat5 for outdoors.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This is a troll, right? You can run cat5 in a plastic conduit pretty much anywhere you want. And, lots of /.ers just hang it outside between buildings w/o any protection (search other posters over the last few months for examples). It's cheap, and if it gets damaged (ie - someone passes the lawnmower over it), anybody can just replace it without any training.
As far as a caching server being expensive, they're less than $350 (head-less/tail-less linux box w. apache / squid and cache enabled and a decent-sized hard disk). Split the cost between 20 neighbours and the cost is trivial.
As far as the wiring from block to block, you would end up needing the city's permission at some point, since you're going to be passing over public lands - my solution using wireless access points is cheaper, gives redundant coverage, each person owns his/her portion of the network, and they can all chip in a few bucks to run the servers/waps. After all, this is how fidonet worked a couple of decades ago, when hardware was much more expensive - a few people got extra phone lines, left their boxes running 24/7, and each night forwarded all the mail when the long-distance rates were cheapest. Doesn't have to be financially competitive - it's not a business.
Fibre to every house, on the other hand, would cost more, be more complicated to set up, require better physical conduits, and be a real PITA to maintain.