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Building a Town-Wide LAN?

Posted by Cliff on from the just-think-of-the-lan-parties-you-could-have dept.

The Mainframe asks: "My town (Hanover, NH, home of Dartmouth College, the Dartmouth Medical School, and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital, non-college population approx. 9K people, double that with the college) is conducting a feasibility study on building a town network. They'd like to deliver fiber to every home within town limits. This fiber will carry (certainly) the internet and (probably) cable-like television programming access. They're estimating that it will cost $40 per month per household. I just filled out and returned my survey (one sent to every Hanover household) in which they asked a number of questions like: 'What would your primary use of this service be?' and 'Would you be willing to pay $40 a month for this service?'. 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?

"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."

10 of 304 comments (clear)

  1. Clear TOS by chrisseaton · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think you should lay down a clear TOS. With all the trouble recently, you should make everything transparent from the start.

    1. Re:Clear TOS by SlimFastForYou · · Score: 3, Informative

      If the network is correctly managed, there should be no problem.

      If P2P file sharing becomes a problem, KaZaA and any other ports (other than FTP and HTTP) transmitting too much data can simply be set to a lower priority.

      I think a clear TOS is right on the money. People don't have time to read 20 pages or whatever. Make the TOS one or two pages. It can say things like "If your internet usage excedes an average of 2 MB/s per month, your connection will be set at lower priority (if we face bandwidth constraints). Please don't make game servers with more than 20 player slots. Unauthorized usage of others' computers or networks prohibited (hacking). 50 emails per day is your limit. If you have any issues or special needs, please contact us and we can work things out."

      The point is, this is pretty much what the 20 page TOSes say. There could be an official TOS for if there are any questions, but other than that, it is good if your customers actually know the TOS. Also, things can be worked out. If 50 sent emails per day is not enough for a customer because they run a Linux email newsletter that people register for, then fine. Otherwise, no ordinary user would need to be able to write near 50 emails per day.

  2. Check out Kutztown Pa. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. team up with some local isp? by snillfisk · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  4. Fast net and TV are both essentials by Audent · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

    New Zealand-centric story on it here:
    http://www.idg.net.nz/webhome.nsf/UNID/7EAF 07D7C0F 0E6CDCC256CF60013877F

    some case study stuff from Ericsson here:

    http://www.ericsson.com.au/network_operators/bro ad band_breakthroughs.shtml

    --
    I am a leaf on the wind
  5. not a LAN, rather a MAN by JDizzy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  6. Our town already has done it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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. : )

  7. My Ramble by krangomatik · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).
    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 :P

  8. Re:Why not use wireless? by theoddball · · Score: 5, Informative
    We do.

    The college has a policy that every square foot of campus should, in theory, be covered by fuzzy blanket of wireless signal. And I mean fuzzy in every sense--feel good, and the fact that sitting here in my dorm room I get no signal.

    The trick with this is that to cover all college land, we bleed over into the town a *lot*. And since it's an unsecured network (anybody who knows the SSID can join), a not-completely-insignificant portion of the town that surrounds the school gets free internet access.

    As for "a few access points", the number's well over a thousand just for the school, if memory serves right. The town (small as it is) is still way bigger than the school. Wireless APs are *not* cheap, especially ones that will mesh well into a large network.

    Something tells me this network is going to end up tied to the college, using BlitzMail (Dartmouth's own proprietary email system, which eats it.) Of course, speaking as a student, that wouldn't be all bad...there are things at every school that can't be accessed outside their LAN, and that'd make it easier to live off campus.

    On the upside, maybe that means they'd finally upgrade our non-I2 backbone. Heh.

    Closing thought: Strange that the first I hear of a local issue is via Slashdot...

  9. Re:Besides high-speed pr0n? by robslimo · · Score: 3, Informative

    ...fiber optics... good for data transmission... over long distances

    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. stillwater.org/extras/fiber.htm