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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.
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.
--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?
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.
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
they can hire and fire the cable company
and the ISP.
Local control!
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
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.
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 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
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...
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.
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
" 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
- 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!
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.
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....
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 $160. Yes, especially if it ain't to a large corporation out for better interests than the consumer. Plus, as a citizen of that city, in a way, you control and have a voice in what goes on. Thats why supporting your local infastructure could be important and better off in the long run for your community.
Projects like these are a GREAT way to introduce IPv6 to the masses, because every home can be given a range of IP adresses (hey, it's Ipv6, 2^128 adresses to waste! If that's not enough, someone make IPv8 a reality, 2^512 adresses.) for different computers, possibly a small subnet per house. While the internet itself (as we currently know it) can still be adressed by a centralized (or not, perhaps a backbone connection per district?) routing point which can receive requests for IPv4 sites and cause them to get delivered to IPv6 networks. This would instantly promote the use of IPv6 networks if this "city/town network" idea were to catch on.
As for actual uses, how about making it possible to do stuff online in a FAR more safe way? Because IP adresses are clearly assigned per household, any attempt at being naughty can be traced down to a physical adress with ease. This would make the privacy people jump up in sheer disgust, but that can be worked out in detail some time. It would also be extremely good for communities. Real life ones that is, where the inhabitants of a town can discuss stuff on several online forums, maybe video conferencing as well? This would also open up possibilities for actually everyone to get involved in local politics. Even with a bit of new protocal magic (bye bye SMTP) it could even be possible to institute a city-wide email system, where just everyone would get his own email adress, per person, not per ISP account, like j.doe@district.city.nl.
Of course, there are several things hampering this, mainly telcos who will do ANYTHING they can to stop this, to DMCA/$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!
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.
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
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.
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.
If you've got a LAN with over 9 thousand hosts on it, many of them belonging to college-aged students, you have little, if any, need for the rest of the internet at high download speeds. Why do you need those high download speeds? Porn, warez, movies, and music. What do most college students have in plethora? Porn, warez, movies, and music.
The main difference between this LAN and a P2P network is that you're more likely to know the person, and they're less likely to throttle you back or limit your leeching because it might 'damage their performance' (you could take several gigs of anything in a matter of moments at 100Mbit).
The main problem I think you'd run into is legal - for instance, you'd have to worry about the RIAA getting connected somewhere and suing your ass. I'd think there'd be some sort of clause in the contract that says you can't use something you find on the LANeighborhood to get someone in legal trouble, nor can you allow someone else to use the network for that purpose. Granted, it's not like the MP/RIAA wouldn't -know- explicitly that almost everyone on the network is pirating anyway.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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
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?
...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