Building a Town-Wide LAN?

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."

Comments

Clear TOS

[chrisseaton]

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

Re:Clear TOS

[farnsworth]

I think you should lay down a clear TOS

Uhm, this requires a *ton* of thought. The scenario of "a township setting up communication infrastructure" is 180 degrees from "an isp offers cool new service". The asker's town should absolutely seek legal advice on this. Since they are an elected government, they have an obligation to every citizen that a corporation does not have.

When they shut down quake servers because of bandwidth issues, all of a sudden all those "it's their network, they can do what they want!" arguments are completely moot. The network will be (I think) de facto owned equally by all. In any case, a government should not simply "lay down a TOS" without completely understanding what that means.

Read about the legality of putting in public toilets in NYC for a quasi-similar issue. I'm sure an amatuer can find other good case law, too.

Check out Kutztown Pa.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Over-estimating the combined intelligence of /.

[jpnews]

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.

Why not use wireless?

[yppiz]

Dartmouth could cover a fairly large area with a few dozen wireless access points, rather than running fiber to every home.

--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

Re:Why not use wireless?

[theoddball]

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...

team up with some local isp?

[snillfisk]

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.

Re:team up with some local isp?

[RealAlaskan]

How about teaming up with some local ISP for the internet-part?

How about teaming up with a BUNCH of local ISPs?

I think that the obvious answer here is to separate the ``own and operate transmission lines'' function from the ``provide services over the transmission lines'' function.

The transmission lines are a natural monopoly. There isn't going to be any competition there, no matter what (That's the standard answer, anyway), so might as well let the gov't maintain ownership and control. You could still contract out maintenance work, if you're worried about inefficiency. You could keep it in-house if you're worried about getting public employee union support. If you let ownership go to a private company, you run the considerable risk of setting the wrong incentives and getting a nasty mess.

Providing billing, internet access and/or cable programming over the fiber is clearly NOT a natural monopoly. The city could make the fiber open to any provider of any service. It would be a bit like the Telcos opening their lines to competition, except that there would be no incentive for the city to backstab the providers. It would be a lot like what you're suggesting, except that you wouldn't be giving a monopoly to any one business. Why not give out the monopoly? Think of the telephone company: ``We don't care ... we don't have to. We're the phone company.''

To summarize, what I'm suggesting is that the city could operate fiber lines, and lease them to private businesses. There would be no billing from city to individuals. Private enterprise could use those lines to offer any service that folks would pay for, just as privately owned trucks, busses and cars run on publicly owned and operated roads. Private business would bill individuals for services rendered. Since no business would have a monopoly, all businesses would have to give individuals their money's worth, or see their customers take a hike.

You could have the reliable infrastructure that comes from a monopoly provider, and the attentive service and product innovations which come from fierce competition.

Fast net and TV are both essentials

[Audent]

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

Block outbound port 25 by default

[Tackhead]

Block outbound port 25 by default. Turn it back on by request.

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!" :-)

Our town already has done it.

[Anonymous Coward]

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. : )

Interesting uses:

[Anonvmous Coward]

" 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.

Potential Uses

[canolecaptain]

Here are some realistic potential uses:

- 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. :-)

Some acronyms for ya...

[cmburns69]

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!

Lowell MI

[yamcha666]

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.

More importantly ...

[Glonoinha]

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.

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 /. the pitiful OC-192 connection between the central office downtown and the rest of the web :)

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 ... jpnews is probably right :)