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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
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.
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
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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
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!" :-)
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.
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.
- 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
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In Soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base!
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
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....
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.
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 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.
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 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