Last-Mile Solution For A Rural Land Co-op?

macguys writes "My community consists of about 150 households spread out over several hundred acres in North Florida. We are far enough away from the nearest city that broadband cable and DSL services don't make it here. We're well organized, and used to working together on projects. We have a lot of home based business offices here and high speed access something that many of my neighbors are hungry for. We've looked at projects like http://www.magnoliaroad.net and know that others have addressed the issue with 802.11b/g/etc. There is no big problem getting a T-1 to the community. That part is easy. The hard part is distributing the bandwidth among those here who want to participate. Wireless works in places but in general this land is covered in hardwood and pines and the signal drops off quickly. We have a long history (community is 25 years old) of working together to solve problems. Running copper or coax is not out of the question if we can find a reasonable way of distributing the bandwidth. Any suggestions are welcome."

Comments

Have you tried

[eap]

Satellite? Start up fees are kind of high, but once you get going, it's not bad:

Satellite dish: $150
Converter box: $200
NIC: $15
Launching your own community based Internet communications satellite: $1,000,000,000

Re:Have you tried

[rochlin]

I think DirecTV is discontinuing their consumer internet satellite service. There were a couple slashdot articles about that a few months ago. Commercial satellite broadband is available but you're getting into hundreds/month/user.

Re:Have you tried

[Anonymous Coward]

Unforunately the service is terrible. It's unreliable, slow, and the optimal latency is 500ms, but often closer to 1s, making it unusuable for many types of Internet communication. Considering the price, many would consider it to be worse than 56K.

Re:Have you tried

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a joke =\

Re:Have you tried

[Anonymous Coward]

• Satellite dish: $150
  
• Converter box: $200
  
• NIC: $15
  
• Launching your own community based Internet communications satellite: $1,000,000,000
  
• Getting your town slashdotted: Priceless
  

Re:Have you tried

[malfunct]

I think they were looking for a wide area network to put in the community as getting a direct connect to the internet (T1) is easy for them. I suggest possibly working with the phone company to install DSL locally. There were some articles on /. earlier about roll your own DSL using unused copper in the phone system.

Re:Have you tried

[chundo]

Here's the previous /. article. The people that did this posted a pretty detailed FAQ of how exactly they went about it - pretty interesting read. There's also some mention of their encounters with the FCC, which may be useful in helping your community project avoid legal pitfalls.

-j

Re:Have you tried

[indiigo]

Actually every person should just get 2 way satellite, and avoid the potential for bandwidth leeching and political inevitabilities of bandwidth from a T1 or DSL or other shared line. While a regulated utility such as water/gas/electric is metered, bandwidth isn't, and if one person eats up the majority of the bandwidth, you have a small arms family fued going on in North Florida.

Re:Have you tried

[Cramer]

DTV is wasting an entire channel advertising it, so I very seriously doubt they are doing way with the service.

Re:Have you tried

[EvilBudMan]

Latency is bad with satellite. This would be unacceptable for gaming.

Re:Have you tried

[rcharbon]

Massive latency, so anything that depends on packet timing fails: -$1,000,000

Long-reach ethernet

[autopr0n]

Cisco has a system for using ethernet over regular phone wire up to 5k feet with 5-15mbps performace

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[rmohr02]

It shouldn't be much of a problem to use an ethernet connection over phone wire--if I remember correctly, only four of the eight wires in an ethernet cable are used.

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[rusko]

you are correct, only 4 wires are used. however, regular fone wiring is not graded to carry a signal that far afaik. they may need repeaters in there somewhere =]

paul

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[jo_ham]

That's true, but the problem would be voltage drop, or similar problems with long cable runs.

IIRC, the maximum run for 100baseT ethernet is 100 metres with cat 5 between switches/machines/etc.

The Cisco system must introduce some sort of line amplifier to send data that far, so you'd have to have a pair of them, one on each end. The signals and cable setup itself would be identical to standard ethernet, just with a lot more power.

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[CountZero007]

FYI, LRE works in a similar way to DSL, and requires a CPE device (box) at the client end, and a LRE-capable switch at the central point.

You can also use the line for a phone at the same time (just like DSL), and the incoming phone line connects to the LRE-capable switch (well, a splitter).

The main problem will be getting access rights to the actual copper phone lines in the ground (which would be owned by the local telco).

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[smokin_juan]

I'll reply to this becuse it reminds me of an article done by Cringley which y'all might remember... Roll your won DSL. According to him there should be some "dry pairs" that the telco's sould be able to lease as long as you ask right. But why should i tell you about that when you can read it here. you might also snoop around his site a little more as he seems to be just a little interested in net connections through (over?) thick and thin.

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[zin]

I am sure thats REAL cheap to. No one thinks about the money...

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[Tim Doran]

Yup. Cisco's LRE is great technology. But you can save yerself a fortune using SMC's Extended Ethernet. Both are VDSL implementations, SMC just doesn't carry the premium that Cisco's brand demands.

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[pillar]

You're main problem will be gaining access to the copper for a DSL or a LRE solution. I saw a similar project that did the same thing, the LEC was qwest, who if I'm not mistaken, had to be sued to finally allow the access.

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[hdflsts2002]

Cisco's LRE solution uses vdsl technology to carry data and vocie over a single telco grade copper pair. You will need an LRE switch which come in 8/12/24 port versions (the 2912 and 2924 have been and of saled but you can still find it in the channels. The switches are the 2912LRE-XL 2924LRE-XL 2950 8 LRE and 2950 24 LRE. If you plan on carrying voice over these links as well then you will also need a 48 port POTS splitter. This however is not a required item if you only plan to carry data.

At the customer end you will need either a 575 LRE or 585 LRE The 575 has a single fast ethernet port as well as an analog phone port, the 585 has 4 fast ethernet as well as the analog phone port. You should be able to find the 2950 24 LRE for around $2900 The 575's for about $95 and the 585s for around $150 For around $5200 you can get the 2950 24 LRE and 24 575 CPEs.

Cisco rates the units to provide between 1Mb and 16.2Mb up to a distance of 5000 feet (this is the distance of the copper not driving distance). While the unit is rated for 5000 feet I have personal set up a few of these with distances close to 7000 feet and still was able to pull 1Mb.

Your next step is to order a (well as many as you have customers) dry pair from you phone company. Some telcos will call these opx or alarm circuts. No matter what the case make sure that you specify that you want unconditioned (no dial-tone or battery power) with no side legs/taps (in other words a pair from point a to point b with no other connections along the way.) Depending on the telco these may cost you anywehere from a couple dollars a month to around half the price of a standard residential phone line.

The last part of the equation is some sort of high speed connection run to the location of the lre switch (T1 or higher). The great thing about the Cisco solution that other products mentioned here do not offer is QOS as well as per port rate limiting.

If you want to carrty this one step further you could become your own CLEC by adding a call manager server to this setup and a pri to bring the voice into the mix. Now not only can you provide broadband to your neighborhood you can provide dial tone as well. The pri can carry 24 simultanious calls and can have as many unique did numbers as you like.

With only 24 subscribers on the switch you are actually going to be very undersubscribed on the voice end of things. At the customer side you can either supply an ata 188 to connect to their existing telco wiring meaning that they can use all thier existing phones or you could siply provide a Cisco 7902/7905/7912/7940/7960 phone and have them be straight ip phones and then provide many additional services. The ATA 188 can provide 2 unique call paths so when one of your customers requires a second line all you do is either have them plug into the second port on the ata and configure it to go or you make a service call to them and wire it to a punch down block so that they can add the second line to mulitple phones. The possibilities are endless and while the setup costs might seem a bit high the recurring charges are minimal other than your ISP line and access charges.

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[mkettler]

You are correct that 100 meters is the maximum cable length for a single segment of 10baseT or 100baseT. (although technically they are are more limited by propagation speed for collision detection than electrical loss.)

Even without distance limits, both standards also require higher grade cable than phone service, so running plain ethernet over spare phone wires is clearly not an option for covering a 150 acre area.

Ethernet is primarily a LAN technology, and that's why it isn't designed to handle super-long cable lengths. It's mostly used for wiring up buildings or a SOHO.

Sure you can make ethernet go far if you run 100baseFX and use a good single-mode fiber-optic (15km or more), but that's pretty expensive to be pulling high-grade fiber all over the place.

This is definitely the realm of DSL-ish and T-1/3ish signaling if you're going to go copper-line. Some of the other posts mention some VDSL based ethernet-over-phoneline at a few megabits.. those products are likely to work best for this.

Probably their best bet is to run wireless links where they can, and run dsl-esqe wired links to get to spots where wireless cannot. If they plan well, they can even launch wireless from the wired spots and limit the number of wired links they need.

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[ftzdomino]

Phone wire is not category 5 and wouldn't be considered 100baseT. Therefore the limitations would be different. As far as requiring an amplifier, I'd assume that it would just use a higher voltage to start with. The signals could not be the same as 'standard' 100baseT, as phone wire has entirely different capacitance and inductance properties than category 5 cabling. Phone wire is also not twisted so it takes on more noise. All of this would require something very different from 100baseT.

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[Cramer]

Correction: a single PRI will carry 23 calls. (23B+D) PRI's are out-of-band signaled. Without the D channel, there's no way to signal incoming or outgoing calls.

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[Dun Malg]

if I remember correctly, only four of the eight wires in an ethernet cable are used

The difference between CAT5e UTP network cabling and "phone wire" is a lot more than conductor count. For one thing, there's the whole twisted pair thing. If you wanted to drive ethernet over untwisted POTS copper your first problem is resistance. The longer the wire, the lower the voltage will be when the signal comes out the other end. Raise the voltage? Then you've increased inductive interference wherever two of your conductors are parallel to one another (hence the twisted pair-- they're never parallel). I have, in an absolute pinch, temporarily rigged up a 10baseT connection over old phone cabling. It worked, but it only had to go 20' on untwisted wire. Even so, we ran tests and found the error rate was noticeably higher.

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[Dun Malg]

Cisco has a system for using ethernet over regular phone wire up to 5k feet with 5-15mbps performace

Well, from looking at their rudimentary diagram, it appears to me that it's more of a peer-to-peer version of DSL. The only reason they call it "long-reach ethernet" is that you can send ethernet into one box, have the data go X number of feet over Crappy Copper to another box, and have the same ethernet come out (and vice versa). I guarantee that they're not using ethernet to send the data over a POTS pair. I reckon its just an inexpensive SDSL-type system that doesn't require you to buy a 32-port DSLAM for one end when all you want/need is a single 10baseT connection somewhere.

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[pathloss]

siemens can implement a point-to-multipoint broadband radio access network (LMDS). it has very fast implementation (2-3 weeks). and can allow speeds upto almost 38Mbps. approx cost : lower than laying coax, and any other broadband access technology. implementation details and tech deatils would be available through your country's local siemens ICM services department. best regards

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[chef_raekwon]

there is a new technology available, that would allow you to share the bandwidth. I also hear that it is gaining speed in the marketplace. Token Ring is the technology of which I speak: just connect everyone through BNC, and on a Token Ring network, and voila!

YOu are all surfing with ease.....

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[*igor*]

During the 'DSL providers falling like leaves' period, DSL wasn't offered in my area, so I picked up 2 SDSL modems off of eBay, ordered a dry pair from my apartment to my office, and now leach bandwidth off of them in the off-hours.

For me, the costs were $400 setup for the line, $60 total for the modems, and I pay $34 monthly to keep the line open.

-jeff

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[tzanger]

Correction: a single PRI will carry 23 calls. (23B+D) PRI's are out-of-band signaled. Without the D channel, there's no way to signal incoming or outgoing calls.

More or less. It depends on the signalling -- If you're talking ISDN, you're absolutely correct until you get into NFAS (non-facility associated signalling) -- in which case you can band together 7 or 8 PRIs (I forget, we use 7 with our DS3s) so you can get 24B *6 + 23B+D to squeeze out as many calls as possible.

T1s can and do carry 24 voice calls using in-band (robbed-bit) signalling. In Canada it was called (confusingly so) PRIs as well, but they were also ear-marked CAS lines. I know they're not PRIs but you ordered them as CAS-signalled PRIs. It's similar in the US but I have no idea what they called the signalling. I thought it was D-letter-letter.

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[tzanger]

Incorrect.

It's not just higher voltage or amplified ethernet signalling. That would violate all crosstalk and interference rules that exist on those trunks. You are forbidden from causing more than xdB of interference, and you can't go much higher than about 300V or so with severely limited current (26-28AWG wire in new installations).

As another poster already pointed out, this is nothing more than an an ethernet-VDSL bridge. I install ethernet-SDSL bridges all the time, it's not magical. Consequently, your 56k modem limit is also (partially) due to this tenet of not violating your energy distribution and noise characteristics over POTS. It also has to do with the robbed-bit signalling and sampling rate of the switch, but it all plays in to the problem.

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[Cramer]

As I said "a SINGLE PRI". I chose those words carefully. If there are "more than one" PRI, then one can use NFAS to recover one channel per PRI -- it's recommends to have two or three D channels per group depending on size.

The Canuks can call it what ever they want, but the documented (and world accepted) standard for "PRI" means it's ISDN. It can be carried over the 24 channels of a T1 or 30 channels of an E1.

Re:Long-reach ethernet

[hdflsts2002]

I stand corrected. It was getting late when I sent that post last night and I had been working on some T1 issues at the office most of the night (T1 data not T1 PRI). Never the less a single PRI will be plenty of voice capacity for the number of residents in this plan should they care to add voice to the mix. I know of a company providing voice to aprox 3500 users in a Campus setup using only 6 PRIs. They would also get a break on LD charges as they would get the dedicated rate rather than the normal switched rate.

Easy

[cscx]

Run ethernet to all the houses. Maybe you want to run fiber in between and stick a transceiver at each end, for future expansion. Run them all into a Cisco and use packet-shaping to put bandwidth limitations on each house. Run them all into a pair of T1s and whee, fast internet access. (Probably won't be as fast as cable though since you probably can't pay for lots of bandwidth... for example, my local cable for example is faster than a T1 at times.)

Re:Easy

[insecuritiez]

A T1 line runs at 1.544 Mb/s. High speed DSL runs at up to 1.544 Mb/s. T1 is not the solution here. T3 is approx 48 Mb/s. Even it may not be the solution for this many households. Now say, plug in an ATM backbone or a fiber link would be getting places. The problem is distance and paying for the bandwidth they need.

Re:Easy

[Fulcrum of Evil]

T1 is not the solution here.

For 150 houses, a few T1s are just fine. Figure 15:1 overcommitment and 500Kbps, and you get roughly 5Mb covering everything. Run 4 T1s together and you have all you need. If bandwidth becomes a problem (probably won't), then you can think about Frac-T3s. The reason to stay away from T3 setups is that a T3 is expensive, as is the equipment, and these people are not liekly to be running datacenters out of their farmhouses. Email and web describe the majority of their activity.

Re:Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

According to a feature story in the Orlando Sentinel, this so called "community" is a part of the Scientologist cult known as a "rebirthing center". Community members are subjected to electronic gadget quackery in order to "regress" the victim "back to the womb".

Stay away from these creeps. Whatever you do, DO NOT encourage or enable them. They are the lowest of the low.

Re:Easy

[BuckaBooBob]

You Think Regular Grade ft4 grade cvat5 will last long out doors? You can get outdoor rated cat5 but its slightly more.. ~.60-90$ a foot.. do the math and it gets really expencive.. Also getting Pole Space isn't that easy as usually the Power/telephone companies own them and its usually 3-5$ a pole for rental. These costs add up quickly not to mention the time and equipment to properly do pole contacts. Not to mention Where do you stick all of the equipment that is needed from point A to B. Building secure sheds with power can get pricey.

Re:Easy

[JWSmythe]

500K is better than a cablemodem. :) Both my cablemodem with Time Warner in Tampa Fl, and Charter in Los Angles CA are pathetic.. Something on the order of 100K down, 28K up..

I've had times where it was faster to burn my data to a CD and drive to the office, than to upload it on their "high speed" service. I can't blame the office bandwidth either. That's graphed with 0% downtime and low latency. I can see when that gets peaked out..

I'm now setting up MRTG to monitor my house bandwidth (through my Linux firewall and a little script to convert /proc/net/dev to MRTG's fields. I want to show them a graph of where I peak out at next time I call to bitch..

I really want to direct say 600Mb/s of generated traffic towards them one day and say "Look, my cablemodem never goes over 20K!" Of course, that may have a subtle impact on Charter's ability to serve any customers in Southern California for a little while. :)

Some days, I'm an obnoxious customer.. Most of the time I'm a nice guy..

Re:Easy

[JWSmythe]

Ah, even the Scientologists deserve connectivity. I hack and serve porn. They regress back to the womb.. We all get our kicks somehow. :)

Re:Easy

[pathloss]

siemens can implement a point-to-multipoint broadband radio access network (LMDS WALKAIR solution). it has very fast implementation (2-3 weeks). and can allow speeds upto almost 38Mbps. deatils at : http://www.alvarion.com/RunTime/Navigate.asp?nodeI D=509

Re:Easy

[tzanger]

15:1 overcommit? You've got to be joking. I have not seen a cable provider or telco provider do anything under 100:1, with the average being around 300:1 overcommit on bandwidth. Throw a good forced-proxy in there and play your QoS rules right and you can probably get close to 500:1 without anyone really being offended.

Re:Religious freak

[wo1verin3]

Actually according to his FAQ page it isn't a cult, but interesting that you have to tell people you aren't up front.

9. Myth: Community members all think alike.

Fact: Because communities are by definition organized around a common vision or purpose, their members tend to hold a lot of values and beliefs in common--many more than shared among a typical group of neighbors. Still, disagreements are a common occurrence in most communities, just as in the wider society. The object of community is not so much to eliminate conflict as to learn to work with it constructively.

10. Myth: Most communities are "cults."

Fact: Many sociologists and psychologists know that the popular image of "cults" and "mind control" is distorted. Both the American Psychological Association and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion have done research that refutes the idea that religious or other groups are systematically brainwashing their members or interfering with their ability to think critically.

DIY

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh the plan.

1.Start local cable service.
2.Sell out to American MegaCorp of your choice.
3.???
4. Profit.

1st proust

Re:DIY

[yintercept]

I would start with an IPO, then hire some geeky people to think up a product while I plan for some hot marketing parties.

Oh, let's see....farm community. Hmmm, Wire costs a lot and tractor drivers in farms have a tendency to uproot cable.

Gosh, why not go wireless. Put a tower thingy on a hill, and people buy modem thingies that point to the towers...like they do in other farming communities.

Re:DIY

[Talez]

I know Slashdot people tend not to read the article but this is ridiculous.

From the blurb:

Wireless works in places but in general this land is covered in hardwood and pines and the signal drops off quickly.

Re:DIY

[fubar1971]

Is ...thingy... a technical term?

Where can I buy a ...thingy...

Is there a ...thingy... shop, or ...thingy... catalog I can buy the equipment?

How much does a ...tower thingy... cost?

Is a ...modem thingy... cheap?

Commies

[cscx]

Isn't this more like a commune, in the truest sense?

Re:Commies

[Anonymous Coward]

No. I read nothing about fantastic peyote fueled Roman orgies. Fucking cults.

Wireless mesh

[infractor]

You can extend the range of 802.11 using multiple hops and mesh networking.

LocustWorld have a system which can be downloaded and booted on a CD or via a harddisk. They also sell solid state mesh boxes ready to go. Check out what other community projects have managed to do with the kit.

Re:Wireless mesh

[tzanger]

Problem with 802.11b is that it is still CSMA/CD and as you add nodes you will start having troubles with hidden nodes and there simply not being enough time to give everyone access. It's the same as regular (non-switched) ethernet... above about 40% utilization things start going wrong.

If your uplink is on that same antenna it gets even worse. Best to go to a token-based or polled-node solution.

Re:Wireless mesh

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to see a poken based solution.

Laser

[corebreech]

Got line-of-sight?

Re:Laser

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read the part about how wireless radio is blocked? Stands to reason that visible light is therefore also blocked.

Re:Laser

[geeber]

Gotta love those transparent hardwood and pine tree's.

Re:Laser

[confused philosopher]

Land sharks with fricken laser beams on their heads.

Actually microwave would make more sense, and just build some little towers taller than the trees.

Re:Laser

[B3ryllium]

Of course, that's how they grow Transparent Aluminum.

Re:Laser

[Tyrdium]

Don't they need to have the farm animals reproduce?

Re:Laser

[corebreech]

Yes, that's why I suggested using laser light.

Wireless gets broadcast and spreads itself all over the place, and you need to get a handful of it to get a usable signal.

Laser could operate at full capacity given only the tiniest aperture. And given the number of homes and the size of the land, it's hard to see how such apertures wouldn't exist.

Moreover, there's a huge geek factor here, and one that can be responsibly indulged since they're lookng at providing for infrastructure in the first place.

Relatively novel, hi-tech as in sci-fi, and providing abundant capacity down the road. If I were doing this I would seriously investigate the option.

Re:Laser

[bestguruever]

And if such aperatures don't exists, just put a serious boost on the signal and they will magically appear. Just make sure you don't do it in the dry season

Re:Laser

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, the trees are not the issue. The leaves are. They block the wireless signal.

Since you've identified the problem, here's the solution:
Normally, it would be best to just break out the chainsaws. But they are noisy. And emit greenhouses gasses.

Acquire some Tordon (picloram), a bit of 2,4-D and Roundup RT. You'll need at least two quarts of RT per acre, perhaps 3-4 quarts of 2,4-D per acre, and maybe 2-4 quarts of picloram per acre.

All of this stuff is very toxic, and very dangerous. Roundup RT is quite safe. But 2,4-D was one of the ingredients in Agent Orange, and you remember the fucking mayhem that caused. Picloram was too.

The RT will really mess up the trees, the 2,4-D will, in high concentrations, kill shurbbery and foliage. Actually, since Tordon has picloram in it, maybe just get the Tordon. It's very dangerous. Tordon is very similar to Agent White, and you remember the fucking mayhem that caused.

Picloram has a field halflife of something up to 300 days, but the average is about 90 days. It's susceptible to runoff, so be careful.

But if you apply the tordon at about 4 quarts an acre, with some Roundup RT at the same rate, you should kill those pesky trees in no time. You will also kill all foliage, however.

This is just one option. Tordon is a restricted use herbicide, so you will need to be licensed in Florida to purchase and apply it. Get plenty of rubber gloves and respirators too.

Re:Laser

[cosyne]

The laser beam would be pretty narrow- a cordless drill and a big old drill bit should clear a nice 1.5 inch diameter path between nodes. I guess to line the hole up, you'd need GPS readings and a laser pointer, and then you just go out at dusk and drill a hole through anything the laser hits.

Re:Laser

[GMontag]

Or just use a really hot LASER to start with.

Re:Laser

[Anonymous Coward]

...when you're using a 1MW IR CO2 laser to establish your LOS, it's not a problem for long...

"do not look into the beam. your head will explode."

Re:Laser

[gujo-odori]

you'd need GPS readings and a laser pointer, and then you just go out at dusk and drill a hole through anything the laser hits.

I'd ask if you'd ever tried this, but I can tell already that you haven't. How? The thing with trees is that:

1) They grow. This could be a problem for hole alignment, not just on the trees in question, but others may be growing upwards in between them;

2) They are outside. Other things are also outside. Wind, for example. Because of wind's also being outside, the chances of getting those holes lined up in the first place are pretty small. The chances of keeping them that way are much smaller, and the chances of keeping them that way at some figure approaching "all the time" are, well, about zero.

A few weeks ago, I implemented an 802.11b WAN as the LAN/WAN engineer on a satellite + 802.11b WAN/VoIP pilot project in rural northern Vietnam. We had trees to contend with. Big ones, right between two of the sites. The way you deal with this is antenna poles. Big ones. Shoot the signal over the trees and use directional antennas.

In a situation like theirs, you could use a combination of outdoor WAPs uplinked to wireless 802.11b WAN routers , linking back to the place where the T1s (plural because 1 isn't going to be enough).

One of his questions, though, was how to equitably distribute the bandwidth. Unless you could find 802.11b WAP equipment that supported rate limiting (off the top of my head I can't think of any; Googling for it will be left as an exercise for the reader), another solution would be to rate-limit at the central router (assuming Cisco here) via traffic policing. Police traffic by netblock and have several different /24s in the wireless WAN.

Another alternative is to just not worry about it. Let the bandwidth hogs be bandwidth hogs. When there is plenty of bandwidth available, they can download big files in a hurry. When everybody is online, it will take them longer. Essentially, it's a question of "Do we make it artificially slower for everyone all the time, or do we let it become unavoidably slower for everyone some of the time, and faster for those online the rest of the time?"

Re:Laser

[Alan Hicks]

The laser beam would be pretty narrow- a cordless drill and a big old drill bit should clear a nice 1.5 inch diameter path between nodes. I guess to line the hole up, you'd need GPS readings and a laser pointer, and then you just go out at dusk and drill a hole through anything the laser hits.

I hope this was a joke I just didn't get. Have you ever been in the woods? This is simply impossible. Forests are not static things, but dymanic ever changing things. A critter could stop up your hole with nesting, or a tree could topple in its path. The wind will move trees back and forth, breaking the line of sight constantly.

Re:Laser

[confused philosopher]

As long as they don't try to reproduce in the air, in front of the dish, then they'll be fine.

Microwaves travel in fairly straight lines, without too much bleeding. And what does bleed over, just makes you all nice and warm. :^)

Re:Laser

[cheshiremackat]

Or just put the tower on top of the tree and run cable down the side...

_CMK

Re:Laser

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just use a really hot LASER to start with.

...which is great until the first big wind. There will be a few slight interruptions while the tops of various trees are sheered off and fall to the ground. Future wind storms will not be a problem unless the firefighters have actually succeeded in putting out the forest fires before all the homes in the community are destroyed.

Re:Laser

[barzok]

Until those hurricanes that Florida is so famous for come knocking on the door.

Re:Laser

[PerlStalker]

See Trango.

Re:Laser

[gujo-odori]

404

FreeBSD w/DummyNet

[Racher]

FreeBSD w/DummyNet as the main server box for the community. You can give everyone an equal share of the bandwidth.

Re:FreeBSD w/DummyNet

[TheRaven64]

OpenBSD has had traffic shaping support for a while now. We used to run it on our house router, which prevented anyone from hogging all of the bandwidth. Each person got 1/4, but could 'borrow' more if it was not in use.

On a slightly larger scale, but.....

[mickwd]

This site might be of interest.

Re:A first for the /. editors

[cscx]

Cliff usually handles all the Ask Slashdots, so I can understand this.

If you dig things up.

[oolon]

If you end up digging things up to lay coax, lay fiber as well you don't have to connect it to anything, that way you will have lots of room for expation without having to go back the the ground again. Otherwise you be in the situation cable companies are in of wishing they had layed fiber but coax was cheaper in the short term. Of course if you have cheap labour, you might not care about having to redo things in the future.

James

Re:If you dig things up.

[Blaine Hilton]

Even if you don't run fiber, lay larger conduit that will allow you to "fish" other types of cables through later (even beyond wireless)

Re:If you dig things up.

[oolon]

Normally I would agree with that 100% but they said they were in a rural setting, so the cable is going to be layed just below the dirt I would guess. So the question (and expense) of needing access covers every 300 yards or so less or more of a bother. Pulling though cables for a complete run still takes alot of time, of course a complete life saver when you have tarmac and concrete on top of what you have layed.

James

Re:If you dig things up.

[Anonymous Coward]

According to a feature story in the Orlando Sentinel, this so called "community" is actually a part of the Scientologist cult known as a "rebirthing center". Community members are subjected to electronic gadget quackery in order to "regress" the victim "back to the womb".

Stay away from these creeps. Whatever you do, DO NOT encourage or enable them. They are the lowest of the low.

Re:If you dig things up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes .... why do you think there is a comment about "cheap labour" in what was said...

Re:If you dig things up.

[macguys]

lol...I thnk you might have my bunch confused with some other wackos. We're a long way from Orlando in the other Florida. ... but thanks for the after dinner chuckle.

Re:If you dig things up.

[Anonymous Coward]

um, most states have regulations about how far underground untilities have to placed. Florida as I remember is 30" telecom, with fiber being 36" minimum. Also with new technology such as blowing fiber, access points do not need to be nearly as close as every 300 yards. Still, costs for these individuals would be very high, unless some fed/state grant could be found to subsidize the construction costs.

Re:If you dig things up.

[falsified]

That completely sounds like something one of you would say!
Only a joke.

Re:If you dig things up.

[Beauty_is_the_Enemy]

HaHa, your connection blows.

Solar power

[skinfitz]

I think what is needed are solar powered tree mounted wireless bridges.

Oops I'm off to patent that.

Re:Solar power

[Anonymous Coward]

Too slow, Bezos' got there first...

Re:Solar power

[pdbogen]

Electricity from the sun, you say?
An indirect process over time, you say?

Genius! Off to the patent office with me, and then to my lawyer to file suit against Mother Nature. Fossil fuels my foot...

Fiber

[geogeek6_7]

In my community, we chose to use ethernet over fiber. You avoid any electrical concerns, and the fiber can be buried. We purchased 6 strand fiber from Anixter, and have been very happy.

I would highly suggest fiber as opposed to just about anything else--- it takes work to install (dig ditch, we put in conduit, then pulled fiber through it), and it requires a special terminiation kit, but the results are extremely rewarding.

~geogeek

Re:Fiber

[po8]

If you run a hard line, it is best to use glass instead of copper. Otherwise, the effects of a lightning strike can be pretty dramatic: the lightning tends to seek out shallow runs of copper (although it could care less about glass). If you must run copper, use fancy isolators on both ends to minimize the danger to folks and equipment.

Re:Fiber

[KD7JZ]

One thing to remember is that burying fiber with
no metalic member or shield makes it impossible to
locate. When other construction takes place, if the contractor cant locate your fiber, they _will_ cut
it...

Re:Fiber

[Anonymous Coward]

But you don't need to connect the copper wire in case of a fiber connection, so there is no problem when lightning induces voltage spikes.

Re:Fiber

[Becquerel]

Especially in North Florida

With an average of around 30 strikes km^-2 year^-1, it isn't going to be long before you get a hit on one of them.

Not as bad as central africa though

Re:Fiber

[KD7JZ]

Correct.. if you use all dielectic fiber, you can
1. Throw a run of insulated #6 copper in the
same trench
2. Place radiolocation markers in the trench
or
3. Just do what all telcos do with no
problem, use copper sheathed fiber, properly
grounded in the pedestals..

Who gets control over the T1?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you say your used to "working together" well then who be in charge of maintaining the T1 connection and equipment? Seems to me any incompetent management of that equipment might invite shotgun wielding neighbors.

Re:Who gets control over the T1?

[Tmack]

Generally the LEC you purchase the T1 from will keep the line up. The termination points, thats what would be of any concern. All you would need though is a Cisco (or any other router) with a T1 card (even the 2k's can have T1 cards, dont necessarily need a datacenter and a 10k or anything special like that). Between that and the smartjack (end of T1) is just a piece of cat5. The other end would require connection to an ISP, probably something the LEC could also handle. If it goes down, and your cisco is still running, you call the LEC and they fix it. Other equipment would be a little more of a concern simply because there would be more of it depending on how you actually wire the network (simplified if you go wireless).

TM

Re:Who gets control over the T1?

[macguys]

We're pretty good at maintaing our infrastructure. We maintain our own dirt roads and mananage to do so without much blood being spilled.

Multiple Options

[MonMotha]

If you're willing to run lines and fiber is possible, you can just run fiber from the most central place to everywhere else and run 100Mbit or GigE over it. Ethernet can go a very long distance over fiber.

If fiber is out of the option, you could run coax, get a CMTS (can be had on ebay for $5k-$10k) and run a cable modem system over your coax. You could also then get a big sat dish (not the DSS things, the C-Band things) and provide basic cable as well for a reasonable cost.

Failing coax, DSLAMs can also be had cheap and run over just about any kind of wire as long as it's twisted together :)

Basically, you're spread out enough that using the same technologies the telcos and cable services use is feasable. You could also start running T carrier, but that may get a bit expensive in terms of hardware.

As for wireless solutions, look into directional stuff (obviously). A mesh system may be most useful as it would allow the network to keep working even if one residence isn't reachable for repeating. Various 2.4GHz solutions exist, not just 802.11, or you could also look in to free-space optical. The RONJA project (google for it) is kidna neat, but probably not feasable in this situation.

Re:Multiple Options

[kpdvx]

Running your own basic cable service wouldn't be that easy actually. First of all, if you were to distribute the channels across your community (which, you are) the dish would need to be fixed on one single satellite. Galaxy5 would be the one, because it has the most "cable" channels on it. Keep in mind that channels are spread across different satellites. Ok, so, now you'll have to go with a dual polarity LNB (one polarity for odd channels, and one for even) and then you would need to have 24 different receievers, because (at least with non-commercial equipment...) you can only descramble one channel at a time per receiver. Each receiver has one VideoCipher unit (descrambler), and you would have to have 24 different accounts with your satellite provider, because every single VC unit needs to be authorized, but mind you, you only need to subscribe to one channel per VC unit. So now that you have all of that, your 24 recievers hooked up, and subscriptions for 24 channels on 24 different VC units, you need to distribute this, which means running each receiver output to a modulator, so that you have CATV compatable channels, 1-24. Whew, ok, now you can distribute your Basic Cable service throughout your comminuty.

Re:Multiple Options

[Profane Motherfucker]

you can just run fiber from the most central place to everywhere else

And while we're on the subject of Cheap and Easy options, why not Just Put a satellite into Geosynchronous orbit and just build a land relay station that just uses microwave frequencies? You just call the FCC and they set you up with a license. Then you just need subscribers and you're set.

Re:Multiple Options

[macguys]

The problem with wireless is that our homes are almost all tucked in to the trees. My house is surrounded by trees at least twice as tall as the house (please, please, no hurricaines). It is possible to do a point2point system by cutting tunnels in the tree cover, but it would require a repeater in almost every home in the community.

Re:Multiple Options

[eggstasy]

Dude, your post didn't contain any profanity. I am displeased. Don't let that happen again.

Re:Multiple Options

[MonMotha]

Oh yes, I know the problems with it. It's certainly not as easy as putting up a dish and making it work.

Notice also I was only referring to the in-the-lear channels (there are a few of them left, are there not? :)

It probably wouldn't even make up basic cable, though you could get some of the more interesting ones with enough dishes to cover the sats (I know my local cable co only has like 4 or 5 dishes tho (G5, G3, F3 and something else IIRC, it's enough to get all the basic channels).

Needless to say, you'd need a lot of equipment, I was just mentioning the possibility that if coax were run for a cable modem system, you could also run normal analog (and what the hell, digitial if you wanted to) cable over it.

Re:Multiple Options

[MonMotha]

The submitter mentioned that running twisted pair or coax was an option, so I was exploring the possiblity of running fiber instead. If you're going to be running cable, might as well go all out :)

<OFFTOPIC> Blah blah blah, can't post more than once every two minutes...makes it real easy to reply to comments in a thread you started, eh? </OFFTOPIC>

Re:Multiple Options

[cheezus_es_lard]

Or you could take advantage of a growing trend and do an apartment-style multi-user DSS setup, where one location has a DSS dish and the signal is rebroadcast over coax. I lived in two apartments where this was offered (DSS reciever in my living room, coax to the wall, to the apartment mgmt complex, there was a signal amp + splitter and a reciever). Pretty simple setup. I would think you could do the same thing with some basic cable co. equipment.

Re:Multiple Options

[Profane Motherfucker]

I have faltered a bit lately. Ever since I reduced my alcohol intake by about 80%, no joke, I am much less profane. It takes so much energy to get pissed of an violently profane whilst sober.

Re:Multiple Options

[joshuac]

Ummm, hello, can we say latency? A swarm of LEO sattelites is really the only way to go.

Re:Multiple Options

[leonbrooks]

it would require a repeater in almost every home in the community.

Is that actually a problem? You can get a decent half-omni out of carefully cut a piece of downpipe.

If most of your residents can see a nearby road LOS, perhaps the solution is to run fibre or DSL(-ish) down some of the roads, with omni and half-omni waveguides in strategic spots to cover from one to a handful of houses each.

If you don't mind mixing in even more technology, perhaps a RONJA-like system with laser pointer lasers instead of LEDs could cover longish LOS situations (e.g. hillside-to-road) where the ever-present trees would eat a wireless signal, and you could stand the loss of one or a very few trees to make LOS a reality.

Another possibility is to run Ethernet from the house up a nearby tall tree (not right to the top because it waves around too much and attracts lightning) and a directional-ish service like wireless from up-the-tree to the next node or uplink. A pair of those talking to each other would be very `country'. I'd stick a well-grounded well-fused-and-spark-gapped baby switch between the down-wire any any buildings, as added lightning insurance. Power the suckers down the same Ethernet cable.

<OFFTOPIC>(this rambling prompted by the appearance of a certain poster above) I have a radical-surgeried version of the monmotha firewalling script that multi-homes (tested on up to four simultaneous links through different ISPs) it pleases me to call this multimotha, if you want a copy to play with, email me.</OFFTOPIC>

With respect to the T1...

[dbarclay10]

With respect to the T1 ... god, PLEASE shop around for options.

T1s aren't significantly faster than good DSL service, and can be significantly slower than cable 'net access. For about 20 times the price.

Now, you may have no other option, but do shop around. You won't regret it.

Re:With respect to the T1...

[BuckaBooBob]

Well Thats the thing... DSL/Cable isn't there to replace T1's.. They are lower cost because they are Shared out to offset cost... What do you think they hook DSL/Cable up to?!?! The same stuff T1's do!! Bandwidth has to be paid for... You think just because it gets run through DSL/Cable service the Magic Bandwidth Farie comes by and makes it cheap?! Bandwidth is pretty much a fixed cost(Depending on who is selling it to you and how much they have aswell).. the more you get the cheaper it is... The shorter the local loop the cheaper it gets... Once the data pops out of the DSL/Cable ect equipment do you think it magically appears on the internet?!?! If you can sluff what you are using for Bandwidth off on a shared access medium then do it... But don't put on a big surprize face when they come to shut you down or toss a huge bandwidth bill at you for mis-use of the service.

Re:With respect to the T1...

[Anonymous Coward]

T1's have TOS agreements with the customer that DSL does not have, nor will it obnoxious end-user agreement BS like DSL.

Energy

[asadodetira]

Why don't you run coaxils along the power lines. (To simplify maintenance and for aesthetics, not putting wires elsewhere)

Re:Energy

[neurostar]

Why don't you run coaxils along the power lines

That's probably illegal. Besides, I doubt the power company wouldn't be too happy with someone stringing up wires on their poles. Also, you run the risk of electrocuting yourself while putting the wires up.

neurostar

Re:Energy

[DragonPup]

That's probably illegal.

It is illegal. Only utilities can use poles. And beyond that, there's rules for utilities. Like no matter what pole you look at, the actual electrical lines are the highest tier of wires.

Re:Energy

[xphread]

I dont know if the parent poster is tring to be funny or what, but consider the effect of induction.

Depending on how far you are going to cable these in parallel you could induce quite a voltage down your line.

Network harware probably wont take too kindly to >50v spikes pumped down it.

Re:Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you nuts? If you run a wire, with a load on it, parallel to another wire with current running through it, you will induce voltage from the live wire onto the other wire. In this case, several thousand volts. Every time someone flicked a light switch, turned on their toaster or ran the microwave, you would have a happy little multi-kilovolt waveform induced upon your coax.

Have you considered...

[MacDork]

one of these?

Re:Hey everyone, I'm new here...

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL... "flamebait". HAR!

Towers

[nuggz]

Can you make a transmission tower on a hill or something?

Re:Towers

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, you have never been to North Florida. I am from the St. Augustine area (nation's oldest city w00t) and we don't have many "hills" around here. The ones we do have we normally call by their more common name: septic tanks.

Re:Towers

[Anonymous Coward]

Florida has no hills, except mount Trashmore the town landfill

Re:A first for the /. editors

[yintercept]

Yes, farms and condos are almost the same. Farms have cows, some of the people in condos look like cows.

Now, if we lived in a physical universe where there were limit to how long you can run coax cable without loss of signal, or if we lived in a world where there were complex laws regarding crossing roads and boundaries with wires, then questions would be different. I am so glad I live in Slashdot where things are simple.

That type of world has different people designing different solutions for different problems.

Use powerlines

[andrewlong]

Check out http://www.commsdesign.com/story/OEG20030423S0042.

Something similar's been discussed before

[Second_Derivative]

I can't find the story but check these guys out:

http://www.rric.net/

Basically, when their local telco refused to provide DSL provision, they invoked a statue which forced them to colocate some DSLAM equipment of their own, and they set up their own DSL ISP. Should be just the sort of thing you're looking for. I'd get a fatter uplink than a T1.

Anyway, yeah, plenty of informative info there, take a look. </karma_whore>

Re:Something similar's been discussed before

[irabinovitch]

Didnt that statute get removed by the FCC recently? I dont think the phone co's are required to let competition in anymore.

Re:Something similar's been discussed before

[djweis]

That was line sharing that is getting axed. The rric purchased non-shared copper subloops. This is still allowed.

Do your own DSL.

[mindstrm]

Discuss with the telephone company. Start an ISP co-op and offer DSL service.

If you can actually run your own cable... run fiber to every house.

ObSimpsons

[Anonymous Coward]

Na na na na na na na na LEA-DER!

Na na na na na na na na LEA-DER!

LEA-DER! LEA-DER! BATMAN!

I mean LEA-DER! I love the leader!

Bandwidth

[Lokni]

I would much sooner go with a DS3 which to my understanding is about $5000 a month. For each home that works out to about $35 a month. I would find out first which homes in the community are interested and then find the cost to each home using the chosen technology. Ethernet might be good, or you can setup your own DSL ISP for the community. It would probably be wise to setup a co-op or non-profit corporation to organize costs and the collection of money for monthly bandwidth costs.

Re:Bandwidth

[CrackersnSoup]

That is $5000/me for bandwidth, Now add $2500/mo for the local loop. Unless it is in a co-lo, then it can be cheaper for the bandwidth. That can also allow you to do a wireless backhaul for $7500-25,000 (one time fee, 12 month ROI) and possibly tower rent depending on how far you have to go and what deals you can get (that 5 story apartment building thats in just the right place gets 2-3mb/mo free for placemt of the antenna's)

Crackers`n`Soup
wISP Network Administrator

How I would wire a community.

[JWSmythe]

Funny that you just posted this to Slashdot.. We've been trying to figure out how to connect several locations (houses, apartments, and offices) in an urban part of Los Angeles, without having to pay outragous fees for bandwidth and even simply the wiring. We have an office in a centralized location that already has a T1, going back to one of our colo's with real bandwidth...

You could do copper, but you're limited to 300m for Cat5. Anything longer, and you'll have to do some sort of modem. I don't know if you can put ?DSL modems back to back..

You could do fiber, but that'll probably end up costing you some bucks, and you'll have to be sure that the lines are safe (like, no one will accidently dig through them).

You don't say exactly where in N. Florida you are, but knowing Florida you're probably in a relatively flat area with lots of pine trees. You said several hundred acres, so I put that in an area calculator and found 1000 acres = 1.56sq miles, so none of your points are really very far from each other.. I think you're definately a candidate for wireless, if the trees stay out of the way.

Check out fab-corp.com for antennas.. No, not an advertisment. I just bought some stuff from them last week, and they were easy to deal with. They're also located in Florida, so your order will be there quick. My order got to California in about 3 days. If you were to put a sector antenna (like, the first one in the sector antennas section) in the center of the property, you should have good coverage to the whole property. I'd recommend for the best connection, get a good antenna for the receiving ends also, such as a 24db parabolic antenna.. Make sure when you mount them, you bolt them down tight, and be *VERY* sure you do good lightning supression.. I lived in Florida for years, and survived the hurricanes, and daily thunderstorms. :)

To give an idea of what kind of range you can expect, I bought a "24 dBi Mag Grid Antenna" (bottom of the parabolic antenna list), and attached it to a "Senao SL-2511CD PLUS EXT2" card. From an upper story of an office building, I started sweeping around with this antenna just listening (to estimate range. honest.) With a 4.5db blade antenna, I could hear 6 AP's, but only had a workable signal to one. With the 24db antenna I could hear over 2 dozen AP's. None of them were named for what they were, except one that said "YMCA"..

I asked some of the people who know the area well, "Is there a YMCA in that direction"? I know there's one closer, but it was about 60 degrees from where I was pointing. Turns out the YMCA I heard was a few miles away. So, with my 24db antenna talking to something resembling a normal AP (I doubt they had a directional antenna pointed at my office), I had a workable signal.

Before you start buying cards, I strongly recommend you check out Seattle Wireless. They have a *GREAT* page comparing wireless cards.. I highly recommend the Senao SL-2511CD PLUS EXT2.. It has two external antenna jacks (external antennas are required on this one). They also show an AP with the same card built in.. The Seano cards are suppose to put out 200mw, as opposed to most cards and AP's that are only around 30mw (check their chart), so you'll get much better range with them.

I hope this helps.

Re:How I would wire a community.

[JWSmythe]

Oops.. I forgot one part. :)

If your customers already have TV towers (like those ugly 50' masts), that would really help.. Put your wireless antenna up on those, and (hopefully) you'll see over the trees.. In Central Florida (where I used to live), we had our TV antenna on a 50' tower to get TV reception.. We could see television from Tampa, Orlando, and Gainesville, depending on which way the antenna was pointing. Sometimes, if atmospheric conditions were right, we'd get the odd signal from Texas or Louisana.

Oh, the good old days of spinning the antenna around to get the best reception. I almost forgot about having the rotor control in the house.

If your main antenna is really high, it should help you clear the trees.

Re:How I would wire a community.

[grumling]

Cell phone towers usually have space (bays) to rent out. Water towers have been used forever for police repeaters and the like. Even though there are no hills nearby, there are plenty of high places in FL. Some of them may not even cost much, and offer proper accomidations.

Re:How I would wire a community.

[Nogami_Saeko]

I always sort of wondered about the idea of using a permanently aloft balloon of some type to handle this kind of chore. A really high-strength fabric balloon tethered to the ground by some equally high-strength cable that also grounds it from lightning, etc.

Now add a conduit for injecting helium into it periodically to maintain the altitude, and cabling for an omnidirectional wifi antenna...

Wonder if it'd work. Could possibly get it a few thousand feet up for some pretty decent line-of-sight coverage.

N.

Re:How I would wire a community.

[JWSmythe]

I was just looking into this too, for my area. :) A while back, I bought a Nextel cellular modem.. It's a PCMCIA card with a little antenna on it, that doesn't use my phone to work.. After I found my IP, I started going through whois's.. It turns out that they're using American Tower. Even the little town of Crystal River (probably no one here has even heard of it), has 4 American Tower towers. Here's the search results

If our building management doesn't get back to us with a good answer (like, we can put antennas on the roof), I'm going to call American Tower.. They have 5 towers on one hill, and one on a rooftop, not far from my office. I hadn't even noticed the 5 towers til I looked it up on their map. Then I was like "Hey, there they are!" :)

I'm sure there are other providers too, I just don't know any.. I just got lucky when I ran across this one..

Re:How I would wire a community.

[BuckaBooBob]

Well only connecting a few buildings to a central one is easy as hell... You can easily do a 3Km hop with Microwave with 5 9's realibility.. only overhead is a Licence to use that freq on those paths and your set... 45Mbit Microwave gear is damn cheap.

Re:How I would wire a community.

[objekt404]

Why rent space when you could just run it up the nearest tall pine. (I used to live in an area similar to this, Green Swamp, N. Polk County, FL: Still doesn't have cable in most locales...)

Anyway, I read Rob Cringley using a similar setup to do wireless over some *mountains* (they sure would be in FL) to conect wireless to his downtown. No need for water towers (tough they handle hurricanes better) or C-Sats (which die during the mildest of FL thunderstorms & first down in a real storm).

I am not a network tech ("Don't blame me, it's a hardware problem), but a central point, w/a repeater/transmitter on a tree (Cringley built one for $100 IIRC) then that should give *atleast* you 100mpbs (over # users on local net) for access.

FL is the *frontier* if you will for the last mile idea. The large cities cover so much of the state, but there are still those w/i the margins that are not served (this isn't outback Wyoming, but between Tampa & Orlando is a huge market of *last-mile* waiting to be served).

No offense to anyone in Wyoming, of course...

Re:How I would wire a community.

[TheHawke]

Use the FCC antenna Registration system that they have in place.... ANY antenna over a certain height MUST be registered with the FCC.

http://wireless.fcc.gov/antenna/

Re:How I would wire a community.

[cpt kangarooski]

He's in the Tallahassee area, I think. At least, his homepage lists a business address on Capital Circle. I grew up in Tallahassee. It's actually pretty hilly as far as Florida goes. With pine trees. If he's in the woods, then the woods are actually fairly dense.

Tallahassee also has a hilarious looking capitol building. Florida truly is America's wang, and it shows.

Re:How I would wire a community.

[JWSmythe]

I just took a look at the site.. It appears he can go up to 200 feet without permits, unless he's near an airport.. But, they have the handy-dandy "do I need a permit" calculator to figure it out for him. :)

A quick search found that Microsoft has a way to find your coordinates.

"
1. Go to Microsoft's terra server
2. Click on 'Advanced Find'
3. Click on 'Address Search'
4. Enter the address and click 'go'
5. Click on the 'USGS arieal photograph' link
6. Verify where on the photo the house or address is
7. Click on the 'Image Info' link
8. The page will have the latitude and longitude of the borders of each photo labeled. Use these to estimate the latitude and longitude of that address.
"

Pretty much, bounce over to Terraserver, put in your address, find your coordinates, then punch them it the FCC's converter, and then put those results into their check page, and it'll tell you what you can do.

Searching my old address in suburban Tampa (approx 10 miles North of TIA), with a 200 foot freestanding tower (tower and guywires), I could be ok.

Of course, I doubt the homeowners group or planning and zoning would approve of a 200' tower in the back yard. :) If that 200' tower fell over, probably land on 3 houses there. :) One guy did have a flimsy 50' antenna on his roof with guywires to the extreme corners of his roof, next door, which probably gave him an overall height of 65'. It was more than enough to clear the trees.. Some cable company was broadcasting cable over it.. I never did find out who though. $25/mo for all the stations with the antenna. They must save an absolute fortune on physical cables.

We tried to do wireless service for a temporary location once. It was a one-night event. Time Warner wouldn't provide a cablemodem, even though they were nice enough to tell me, "if you were across the street, we'd service you." {sigh} We couldn't do it though, because the tall downtown Tampa buildings were in the way, and we didn't have any additional hardware to bounce around (or over) them.

We ended up with 2 56k dialup connections directo to our office to do live webcams over. That really sucked. Even the phone lines sucked there.

Re:How I would wire a community.

[JWSmythe]

I haven't been *TO* the capital since I was a kid. But, if he's anywhere near Tallahassee he probably has hills to contend with (or work with) too..

Last time I was there, I was driving a moving van through there at a whopping 50mph.. Warning, never over-load the really big U-Haul's and try to get them to go fast. They won't. {sigh} Tampa to Los Angeles took us almost a week. It took 3 days in a normal car. I saw more speed traps there than anywhere else along I-10.. One trooper was sitting in a Cadillac under an overpass. I didn't realize he was a speed trap, til we came by (full throttle, 50mph) and saw him hanging out the window with radar gun in hand.. Go ahead, clock me. I can't speed. :)

Re:How I would wire a community.

[cpt kangarooski]

Not in the panhandle. There are big thunderstorms pretty much every afternoon that come in off of the Gulf. Only last a little while, but they can get pretty bad.

In a lot of Florida they're regular enough to set your watch by, though each area gets them at different times. IIRC Tampa had their storms much earlier in the day than Tallahassee did.

Re:How I would wire a community.

[Anonymous Coward]

That Cringely article is bogus, check out the bawug mailing list archives for more info.

Re:How I would wire a community.

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] You could do copper, but you're limited to 300m for Cat5 [...]

Ethernet goes up to 300 feet: that is 100 meters, not 300.

Consider Waverider 900MHz

[puzzled]

Given the terrain you describe the most likely wireless solution is something in the 900MHz band - it'll work well through trees & such which is something that can not be said for 2400MHz solutions.

Waverider is the first name that comes to mind, I hear Alvarion has some sort of 900MHz product in the works also.

I'd suggest you go to http://www.isp-lists.com and sign up for the isp-wireless list - plenty of people there will have hands on experience with what you're trying to do - much better source than all of the arm chair quarterbacks that inhabit slashdot.

Re:Consider Waverider 900MHz

[legend]

I would second that Waverider push. Also www.alvarion.com is supposed to have a 900mhz product out soon.

Forget what this guy said about isp-wireless though, the list is moderated by money grubbing nazis. The wisp@part-15.org list is much more active, and has actual information.

Re:Consider Waverider 900MHz

[puzzled]

re: isp-lists - I hear they did raise the rates on isp-equipment, but I hadn't noticed that this had occured on ISP wireless - I'm in the middle of a move and not paying attetion.

The responder is dead right on the part-15.org mailing list - I'd heard about this from Marlon Schafer or Michael Anderson, just haven't had time to get involved.

Re:Consider Waverider 900MHz

[dotwaffle]

[raging fury] You yanks are sooooo annoying! With your GSM 1900... Why can't you be on 900 and 1800 Mhz like the rest of the world???? 900MHz is what most GSM providers use... It's not a good idea I tell you, not a good idea! When we invade, we're gonna thrust all this technology upon you and force you to all play REAL football!

Re:Consider Waverider 900MHz

[thogard]

The US military uses 900 Mhz so if they were needed in Europe again, the US mil frequencies wouldn't conflict with the ones used in Europe.

Re:Consider Waverider 900MHz

[legend]

Michael Anderson.... you should never trust a man with no shoes.

Shoeless Bullit

Microwave

[Anonymous Coward]

Try to setup a microwave link with the nearest city. That would be much cheaper than laying a T1 on I-don't-know-how-many-miles. Then, you can also use microwave for distribution as there aren't too many houses. Here, in Canada, we have a company called Look distributing TV and internet via microwave and it's quite fast.

Or you could distribute the bandwidth via DSL... since you probably already have the wires installed everywhere, you just need some more equipment.

this man is an impostor!

[Anonymous Coward]

this man is an impostor!

Re:this man is an impostor!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dunorix? Isn't that a really great web design company or something?

distribution

[SHEENmaster]

It would kick some royal ass if I could grab all the unused bandwidth at 3:00 am when I'm the only one awake. Dynamic allocation based upon usage is an important part of sharing.

Another idea is a singular server for file sharing with the outside work so that you dont waste bandwidth with 100+ gnutella nodes through your T1.

Here's your business plan

[worst_name_ever]

Can't help you with the technical details, but here's a suggested business plan:

1. Wire rural community for net access
2. ???
3. Non-profit!

[Magnolia Road post] Re:With respect to the T1...

[c0y]

If cable or DSL were available, there wouldn't be a need for magnoliaroad.net et al....

Also, with T1 circuits, you are more important to the telco than a DSL, which is just a dry pair and billed much less. In rural areas this may be more important than you think... If you are not too far from a large city, the break-even point for doing a T1 is probably ~12 people willing to pay $50/month and who have Line of Sight to a central point. This doesn't include startup costs, just monthly recurring.

The Magnolia Road coop (from which I am posting this incidentally- I laugh at your puny /. effect) had outages last summer caused by lightning strikes[0] which took out the telco's repeaters.

A T1 outage will get a much faster repair time than average for DSL. With T1, you call up your provider and go through the food chain to get the telco dispatched. With frame relay (at least through Qwest) Enterprise Repair calls you to see if you are available for a dispatch (this is true even when Qwest is not the ISP per se, but just the FR circuit carrier). Frame relay pricing is also not distance-sensitive as T1 is (at least here in Qwest-land, YMMV). It turns out we get better customer service on a FR than T1, while loop costs on the latter are higher!

I mentioned this cam in another post just a few days ago. It looks at Thorodin Mountain, which is a central hub site for our network. This is what latency looks like going across that mountain right now (worst time of five separate monitoring points). This is via two hops on 5Ghz Trango radios, ~ 14 miles round trip:

10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 3.425/4.236/6.832/0.951 ms

One moral: stay away from 2.4Ghz as much as possible. Everyone and their brother has a 2.4ghz phone/mouse/x-10 cam that will cause interference. Those times above were in 100's of ms when the links were at 2.4Ghz. We still do end-user AP at 2.4, but channel crowding forced us to upgrade all of the point-to-point backhauls to 5.8Ghz

Mike
coyote at magnoliaroad dot net

[0] In one instance, lightning apparently entered a NOC via the T1, and fried a couple grand worth of equipment in one moment. We surmise it was the T1 because all of the radio gear was kicking. The catalyst switch was still semi-functional from the console, but was showing link on ports even after cables were removed :( In another instance, the same storm blew two different repeaters. Qwest managed to replace one of them and restored service for about ten minutes before the next one blew out (at which point I asked them to wait for the storm to pass). Enterprise repair is one of the few parts of Qwest which doesn't suck!

You live in the country? This is the thing!

[Daath]

IPAC with QoS!! RFC2549!
Cheap, but maybe not that fast...
There also seems to be a reference on slashdot!

Yes, but...

[WindBourne]

Charlie ergin is redoing it up right (rather than retro-fitting) with a new set-up.

hmmm

[zymano]

i agree with others , satellite, radio, laser transmissions but how about

MONKEYS! monkeys can deliver messages house to house swinging from trees after receiving data from main radio reception dish .

Just feed monkeys bananas!

Tonight on the History Channel

[Anonymous Coward]

As anonymous posting is allowed on Slashdot (see Anonymous Coward), trolling and spamming on Slashdot is a highly evolved phenomenon. It is a bizarre and complex subculture involving attempts at the "first post", Naked and Petrified Natalie Portman, hot grits, the trolltalk forum and other user-created discussions, goatse.cx, Beowulf clusters, mock-homosexual erotica featuring an admixture of Slashdot celebrities and topics (e.g. Star Trek, Linux, BSD), announcements of Stephen King's death, and other unusual juvenilia. Probably the most famous personalities to have come from Slashdot's 'old school' trolling community are OSM, Trollaxor, Jon Eriksson, Streetlawyer, Gnarphlager, Dumb Marketing Guy, 70%, 80md, I Am Troll and The Lunchtime Troll. They are well-known for their creative writing. A newer breed of 'blue collar' trolls set up Geekizoid - a site devoted to exploring and fostering 'crapflooding', whilst at the more upmarket end of the scale Adequacy.org experimented with other trolling techniques.

Since trolling is prevalent, a moderation system is implemented, whereby every comment posted (including those posted anonymously) can be "moderated" up or down by randomly chosen moderators, changing its score likewise. A given comment can have any integer score between -1 and 5 inclusive, and a Slashdot user can set a personal threshold where no comments with a lesser score are displayed. (For example, a person with a score threshold of 1 will not see comments with a score of -1 or 0 but will see all others.) Moderators have been known to abuse the ability to increase or decrease the score of comments, and in some cases entire threads of comments have been marked down to -1. Subsequently, a meta-moderation system was implemented to moderate the moderators and help contain abuses.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot

Switch?

[sTavvy]

What about just putting a Switch in the middle of the town and running Cat5 out to everyone? thats a joke by the way

Re:Switch?

[amorsen]

Why is it a joke? It is a fairly common thing to do. The only thing stopping it from working in this case is the distances involved. With a fiber switch it is probably the best option available to them.

Re:Switch?

[sTavvy]

maybe i'm not as dumb as i thought then!

Hummingbird just might work. Kickass range.

[kennyj449]

http://www.hbwireless.com/

I've been working here for some time as their resident linux freak / tech support slave / biased security know-it-all / networking software guru / site surveyer. I don't have an easily definable job title (I just HAD to be a religious /. reader, didn't I?) but I was originally hired for tech support so that's what I get referred to as. We're based out of Lake Mary but we work just about anywhere that has adequate demand, particularly in central and northern Florida.

We're actually working on getting an entire town in Louisiana, St. Joseph, up and running. Last I heard, we were doing it with a whopping TWO ACCESS POINTS and no range extenders. In a rural area. Two towers, two T1s, no other cabling outside of the towers themselves.

We've also got some interesting stuff in the works for Orange and Volusia counties, under the Wireless Law vendor. Basically, insanely-secure wifi for courtrooms. Biometrics, encryption that'd make the NSA hate us, our families, and our pets if we sold it on the open market, the works. ;)

Despite St. Louis being swamp/forest area, we've been able to get a connection using 802.11b via an integrated laptop card from as much as 2 miles *outside of town.*

Depending on the local topography and what man-made structures might be available, we might or might not want to build a tower or two to provide coverage in your area. If you have a few tall buildings that get enough clearance above the trees, rooftops alone might suffice.

Our antennas, which utilize some dead-sexy proprietary technology that *still* makes me drool, can keep up a connection to the average laptop for up to three miles in open-air under ideal circumstances; the worst range I've seen was 1/2-mile and that was with an *entire office building* between me and the nearest antenna, using a low-power Linksys 802.11b CompactFlash card in my PDA (Sharp Zaurus 5500 ^_^), with the antenna being only a few stories off the ground.

We've yet to see anybody do that without using a system that looks like a cold-war-era radar dish, let alone push that kind of signal through an entire building and into the rear parking lot successfully. Even the radar-looking setups don't do that as well as we do, despite being several times the size.

We don't even need to over-amp the antennas.

We also implement some decent QoS that, instead of simply capping your bandwidth like a cable modem, just gives you a "fair share" of what's available.

We can run from anything as simple as a 56k modem up to a set of full data T1s *per antenna*, the main limitation being the 802.11b protocol's limited bandwidth. This will go farther once 802.11g is finalized. In addition, we can (of course) set up range extenders with our antennas to make the most of a single pipe.

If you're ever going to be in the Maitland area just north of Orlando, contact us and we'll see about doing a demonstration of our technology at the local testing site. We have other locations in the works in Florida, but this is the only one we currently use for demos.

For more information, visit http://www.hbwireless.com/ and read up. Contact info sits up there as well. I'm known in the company simply as "Ken" if anyone asks. :)

Re:[Magnolia Road post] Re:With respect to the T1.

[dbarclay10]

If cable or DSL were available, there wouldn't be a need for magnoliaroad.net et al....

Obviously cable and DSL aren't available to them ;) They were, however, examples of alternative technologies which are *much* cheaper, even over long distances.

Frame relay pricing is also not distance-sensitive as T1 is (at least here in Qwest-land, YMMV). It turns out we get better customer service on a FR than T1, while loop costs on the latter are higher!

This, indeed, is another example ;)

Alternate Topology with 802.11

[EvilTwinSkippy]

I've been using a prototype of a topology where you use highly focused directional antennas to aim at a central station with an omnidirectional antenna. The key is focusing the attentions of your remote stations onto a single source.

I've been running the system between my office and my apartment (1/4 mile away) through trees for almost a year. I'm using off-the-shelf Linksys access points (1st gen, at that) and antennas I bought from a place in Canada. The access point in my apartment is programmed to be a client, and the "master node" just acts like a regular access point.

The system work well through trees, though I do tend to get a lot of noise during rain storms. I don't have rooftop access in my apartment, so I'm actually shooting the signal out of my apartment window.

If I had the remote on the roof with line of sight, I'm told the system will reach 2 miles.

The office access point has an 8db omnidirectinal antenna the focuses the energy into a flat disk. The remote has a panel-style antenna the focuses the energy into a 20degree cone. You don't have to be too picky with the aim, I can turn the panelmount 45 degrees either way.

Had it not worked, I was going mount the access point in a pelican case, bolt the panel antenna onto the outside, and drill a hole for the pigtail and the ethernet cable.

I also had plans to run power over the spare 2 pair of wires in the cat-5 jack. Rather than one of those hundred dollar POE kits, I was planning on boosting the voltage at house end, and have a 5V voltage regulator ($5 at radio shack) on the other.

Hell when I finally get laid off, that's my scheming Dotcom idea.

No, Communes and Communities are very different

[arete]

Communes and Communities are very different, although I suppose it might be hard to tell just visiting. I suspect most communes are examples of Intentional Communities, but not the reverse.

In short, a community is a village; an Intentional Community is a village founded and tended on the principle that everyone really, really likes the color blue; and a commune is where everyone who's part of it dedicates all of their possessions and income to the community's goals of promoting the color blue, kindof like they're all married to each other.

Basically, any group of people who live together and interact are a community. A group of people who live together on purpose are an Intentional Community (or generally capitalized Community) who will generally share many ideals.

The governance and ownership of the IC could be open to everyone living there or more restricted, sometimes to the founders or long-timers. Or pick any governance system you like. Typically there is some kind of arrangement where you have to work and/or pay to live there.

In a true commune all of your possesions and income are shared within the community. Being in an IC _often_ does not involve giving up the ownership of personal possesions or whatever income you might have. And some people do live in Communities and have "normal" jobs.

Of course, a bunch of people who don't believe in possessions living in a Community would be pretty hard to tell from a commune, even if the part about the possessions wasn't a prerequisite for living there.

(My sister lived for a while at the Dancing Rabbit EcoVillage in Missouri, which has some people who hold communist ideals but also some who are downright capitalist)

Slow?

[CausticWindow]

Every time an article like this is posted to Slashdot, the poster mentions that they want to use a single T1 divided by 150-500 people.

Now, what on earth is the point of that? Why don't they all chip in on a modem for the local library or something like that? It'll cost less, and the speeds will be about the same, if you calculate in the time spent waiting in line.

Re:Slow?

[amorsen]

You may be used to to ultrafast connections, but for many people a slow permanent connection is very useful. I should know, I used to have a 33kbps permanent circuit a few years ago. Just enforce caching and avoid p2p. Schedule heavy transfers between 1am and 5am. In any case, such a connection is much more useful than a metered connection like ISDN. With a metered connection you cannot check your email all the time, you cannot be on messaging services or chat much, and when browsing you have to keep an eye on the clock. Waiting is not that much of a problem when you are not metered for the time you wait...

Best of all, when the money starts flowing they only have to upgrade one connection. If they do bandwidth allocation right, they will have a very low latency (unlike POTS or ISDN).

Re:Slow?

[macguys]

Actually, because of the georgraphy here, it really makes more sense to buy several T1s or fractional's and use a cluster approach. I'm very interested in the suggestions relating to ethernet over fiber.

Re:Slow?

[CrackersnSoup]

You are also assuming that every user is giving a dedicated amount of BW from that pipe. Also it asumes that each user use's that entire amount 100% of the time. Every ISP in the world over sell's its bandwidth 4x to 10x times. Even your oh so holy cable and dsl providers. They over sell it by even MORE, its jsut that they have DS3s' and not just a T1. Remember, this ISNT a all you can eat dedicated line.

Crackers`n`Soup
wISP Network Administrator

What about ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your community building towers higher than the trees, so you can use wireless.

look to fibre

[cdn-programmer]

Your biggest issue will probably be right-of-ways. If you can get everyone on the community to agree to a right of way then you have a number of options.

If not - look into incorporating your own telco and see if you can get the local authorities on side.

Physical installation will be expensive - but if _can_ look at a fiber link. Last I checked 6 conductor single mode fiber for overhead was only a wee bit more expensive than copper. Underground will probably be similarly expensize.

Last I checked there were ethernet to fiber drivers that ran 100 base-t (2/3 of a T1) for 50 miles and cost under $1000 USD. (allied telesyn for example). This issue here is that the capital cost is not out of line and the capacity is awesome.

With so much capacity you should be able to run local telephone dial up service and TV signals on the same fibre (but I haven't researched how). I just know there is a ton of bandwidth available.

Furthermore the infrastructure if it is put in properly will be viable for the forseeable future. I'd say over 100 years - but with technology who knows - maybe within 5 years something comes along. You have to take that chance. It is better to spend a little extra now and have something that is solid.

T1 will probably not be adequate for your users. But you can look at backbone links and if you do it right - other communities might join you and you can put the big ugly telcos out of their beauracratic misery.

Good luck.

Re:look to fibre

[lucifuge31337]

ethernet to fiber drivers that ran 100 base-t (2/3 of a T1)

Since when is a T1 154 MB? Try 1.54.

similar situation

[elphmorgan]

We've got a similar situation with our cohousing community here in Ann Arbor MI where we would like to distribute internet access to the 37 households in our neighborhood as well as the 40 households across the pond in another cohousing community. Like you the issue isn't getting the connection to the net - it's connecting all the households. Even billing isn't an issue since we have association fees we can tack onto.

We're probably going to use a combination of cat5e in the ground (fiber was too expensive for us) and wireless (802.11g) with good antennas and maybe some mesh technology (if it's reliable and easy to maintain.) The bandhwidth shaping tools that I've read about would be nice but the expense is high and it may be one of those situations where it's best to wait for the problem before applying the solution. Good luck!

Re:similar situation

[macguys]

Same elph who visited our community a few years back for a national communities conference???

directional 802.11 would work also

[Fastolfe]

Stick a highly directional antenna on an 802.11 setup and you can get some fairly good mostly point-to-point wireless links. The local university does that here between campus and its various off-campus houses purchased in the neighborhoods nearby. The trick is getting the antenna high enough that it has a direct line of sight.

Re:directional 802.11 would work also

[G27 Radio]

Two questions regarding directional 802.11 antennas. First, I don't have a line of sight to the location I want to have access (the beach). Can I bounce it off the side of a building or does the signal not bounce off of cement?

Second, where do I get an N-connector? Does Radio Shack sell them? The only place I checked was Radio Shack and of course no one there knew what I was talking about. They pointed me to their website, but just try searching for N connector on Radio Shack's site. You'll get every other connector in the book. Not an N-connector.

Re:directional 802.11 would work also

[JWSmythe]

Bounce? Maybe. :) I've read a lot about people bouncing signals and using hills (the signal will bend a little going over a hill), but it won't be anywhere near as good as a direct signal.

Search the web for your N-Connectors.. Try fab-corp.com too. They have pigtails.. One of my friends got all his connectors and stuff from E-Bay. If there's a shop that deals with microwave communications stuff, they may have 'em.. One guy I work with regularly doesn't do computer work, but he did a lot of Microwave communications with the US Gov't.. When I started rattling off frequencies, and showing him my equipment, he was amazed. Pretty much we're using microwave frequencies, and similiar hardware to theirs..

If you really want to find out what you can do at these frequencies, check out
The ARRL UHF/Microwave Experementer's Manual - Antennas, Components, and Design.. It's really neat to see what the ham radio geeks have been doing for years.. Like, pg 1-10 fg 14 is "The San Bernardino Microwave Society's beer can polaplexer". It's a tall beer can (like a Fosters, I think), pointing into a parabolic dish. Looks just like what we've reinvented with the pringles cans. I made mine out of a section of dryer vent pipe (Home Depot sells it in 6' lengths at even in inch sizes (2", 3", 4", etc)). Just the pipe by itself at the right measurements helps signficantly.

They go into bouncing similiar frequencies to ours off the moon, with rather large dishes.. But, if you happened to have an old satellite dish (like one of those 15' ones) with holes less than 1/4", you'd be exceeding the power required to bounce off the moon, even with a little network card. A 1W amp would definately make it stronger. :)

**WARNING**

Don't use a 15' dish. Don't use a 1W amp. Don't point it at your little sisters hamster. The FCC may get a little pissy about that. If you do, I didn't suggest. If you say I did, my name is Guadalupe, and I live in Istanbul. I raise goats on a hill, and don't even own a computer.

But if you do it, let me know how it works. :)

Re:directional 802.11 would work also

[Anonymous Coward]

The original poster mentioned that having lots of trees makes getting line of sight for 802.11 hard.

Re:directional 802.11 would work also

[ruthven78]

you can increase signal to penetrate some obstacles but a lot of obstacles would make it difficult. Im looking at the same problem in my city, lots of pine trees and some small hills. Deer Park, WA, minutes north of a major metro area (Spokane, WA) and no broadband...but go 1 hour north and you get DSL service to a community 1/5 the size of Deer Park...go figure.

Re:directional 802.11 would work also

[Fastolfe]

We have lots of trees in my area as well. The university here got around the problem by placing the antennas on relatively unobtrusive masts rising from the roof of their various properties. Get the antenna high enough to clear the trees and you're generally OK.

It depends on how tall your trees are, though, obviously.

Re:directional 802.11 would work also

[AB3A]

Don't use a 15' dish. Don't use a 1W amp. Don't point it at your little sisters hamster.

Actually, even in the near field pattern, a fifteen foot dish would not do a damned thing to your little sister's hamster. It would be well within ANSI exposure limits even at one watt.

I know this because I had to evaluate a similar situation were some roofers were working in front of an industrial communications microwave dish many years ago. Naturally they were paranoid after seeing so many sci-fi movies with great big dishes beaming death rays.

Still, I was able to show that we were getting close to the galactic noise level for near field exposure (our dish was an eight foot diameter with 10 mW on 6 GHz). Nevertheless the poobahs put their heads together and some ignorant dufus allowed these roofers to insert a clause in thir contract that we would power off the transmitter for this dish while they worked in front of it.

So we shut off the link. Down went the facility PBX trunks. Down went our two way radio communications, down went local police and fire receiver systems, down went some transmitter links for the county police. And the roofers went to work. While they were working, we went upstairs and pulled the supervisor aside.

"See that dish on that water tower over there?" I asked. "That's the other end of this microwave link. You could stand in front of this dish for your entire life and die of boredom before it did anything to you. Well, we turned off the transmitter at this end because you idiots somehow got our company to agree that not having police, fire, telephone and telemetry data is safer than exposure to this dish. But the other end of this link is still beaming microwaves at you. You didn't ask us to turn it off, so we didn't. I hope you're happy. "

Re:directional 802.11 would work also

[JWSmythe]

Hehe..

I was contemplating microwaves and dishes the other night.. What would happen if you mounted the emitter from a home microwave oven (roughly 2.5Ghz) on a big old satellite dish, and aligned it with a satellite? Like, the old satellite TV control boxes aligned the dishes fairly easily. Would 1000w on a 15' dish be enough to shut off HBO? {{Evil Grin}}

That wouldn't be the safest place to be standing, would it?

But as far as people's paranoia goes, I got a 2' (24db) parabolic antenna for my laptop (200mw card). It's on a tripod a common area of our office. It's not actually attached to anything, other than the tripod. Every day, I see that someone turns it away from their office or desk. Over the last week, it's turned about 90 degrees to the left. I suspect the people to the right of the dish. No one believes me when I tell them that it's just a piece of metal until it's turned on.. :)

I had only intended on keeping it in the office temporarly, but this has become entertaining.. :)

bandwidth usage (Re:With respect to the T1...)

[c0y]

At peak times we see ~ 100 devices on the radio net.

This graph shows a snapshot I just took of our aggregate bandwidth usage for the core network (there is another discrete T1 not represented there).

A Wireless solution

[Anonymous Squonk]

Implementing an RFC 1149 network is the obvious solution for your co-op. Not only can you transmit data over rough terrains, but it's the only proven, tested networking option that is 100% organic!

Scientologist Alert

[Anonymous Coward]

According to a feature story in the Orlando Sentinel, this so called "community" is a part of the Scientologist cult known as a "rebirthing center". Community members are subjected to electronic gadget quackery in order to "regress" the victim "back to the womb".

Stay away from these creeps. Whatever you do, DO NOT encourage or enable them. They are the lowest of the low.

Correction

[dbCooper0]

For Cat5 - Maximum length is 328ft. or 100 meters. Not 300m as you have stated.

Your other ideas are interesting, and I admit that the first thing I thought about was copper between homes...with enhancements to extend it.

Method

[CrackersnSoup]

Depending on exactly the time of ROI your looking will determine what methods are available for this. Coax would allow you to offer other services(CableTV, CCT, Voice, Data). Fiber will too at a higher cost (likely) while allowing for more of above. Wireless will let you do data/voice and possibly video, depending on the amount you want to spend. I would need to know alot more about this exact community to give a better then a guess answer. Wireless is easy if your willing to do it(or pay the right people to do it. Mesh is not very good unless your willing to buy costly hardware, at which point just buying the carrier grade hardware would be a wiser solution.

Is there currently coax installed?? What about other utilities?? is there already conduit in place that can be utilized?? depending on the layout a fiber based backbone with 10/100 or fiber to the home off of it would be a reasionable solution. Also who owns the light poles?? A few people have worked out a resionable method of using them as mini pop's tho most cities make it dificult to access the pole and power.

Take the information you find here and call a few people who know what there doing. Also take advantage of isp-wireless isp-cable and ect mailing list's at www.isp-planet.com
Good luck and let /. know how it goes.

Crackers`n`Soup
www.speedexpress.net
wISP Network Administrator

The expressed opinions are that of my employer.

Re:Method

[macguys]

Nope..no coax in the community. However, Comcast stops about a mile or so down the road. They want us to pay for the cost of running cable in the community so that they can lease it back to us. I guess I just don't understand economics and the world of big business.

There is copper in the ground; all owend by Sprint. In my initial inquiries, they claimed to not be interested in working with us to a roll-our-own DSL system.

Re:Method

[CrackersnSoup]

That is very common. "Big Business" stays that way with exactly those type of deals. You pay for the install and they rent it back to you =)
I would work a deal with the cable co that there is a mini headend located someplace that you can place a cable head(you can get them for as little as $2500) and that they NEVER get to sell anything but video services. If i had the cash i would just come out and start up a cable co of my own. Your best bet might be to do just that. You should beable to do a co-op deal, get goverment monies and ect. Hmmm, I am looking for a new job....
Look at a local competitor to Comcast and explain you will pay for what you want. You pay for the network and they give you a discount on the monthly cable bill. You run the ISP side yourself.

Crackers`n`Soup
wISP Network Administrator

ummm, not enoug bandwith....

[CakerX]

they want "broadband" and they are only settling for a lone T1.

among 25 concurant net connections thats 56k a piece . if someone is runing a webserver, they are all fucked

Re:ummm, not enoug bandwith....

[cdn-programmer]

Actually they are not fucked.

your 56kb actually runs in a DS0 which is 64KB/sec with inline switching so it is 24 lines.

Regardless how the lines are shared - normal browsing is highly asymetrical and so is web serving. The two co-exist quite nicely.

Games can place a very significant demand for bandwidth.

Re:ummm, not enoug bandwith....

[mindstrm]

Right.
Furthermore... the head end isn't the issue here.. it's the community wan they want to build... the head end can easily be scaled up to whatever the community feels is appropriate.

Re:ummm, not enoug bandwith....

[cdn-programmer]

Yup - I agree! The head end can easily be scaled up.

They need to figure out a way to install underground fiber. Someone else posted that Anexiter was selling 6 conductor for about $1 bux per foot. Those were the same people I was talking to about 4 years ago.

Still - this is going to cost them about $7,000+ per mile when they factor in the cost of a cat to bury it. Probably it is money well spent but they will need the revenues from the cable and voice services to help pay for it. At a reasonable ROI and low interest rates they can expect $700 per year or more in financing costs per subscriber.

This reminds me of a coal mine serving a power plant. The railroad ran a loop where trains went round and round, back and forth between the mine and the power plant on a continous basis for years - and at very high hauling rates.

Eventually the coal mine and the power plant managed to get a right of way and started construction of a slurry pipleline. Still the rail rates remained high.

When the pipeline was finally put on stream the railroad slashed their rates to about 1/10th what they had been charging. They slashed the rates so much the slurry pipeline was no longer cost effective.

Funny how competition can bring prices and services into line. I suspect the same thing will happen in this community. Billing rates will remain high and service will remain poor to non-existant until they install an alternative infrastructure. Then magically things that were not possible before with happen.

Of course the telcos don't care because it was the taxpayers that build and paid for their infrastructure years ago. So they can milk it - and if it falls into disuse - so what - it was paid for years ago.

Damn I'm a cynic!

DSL

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in a rural area (nearest city is 100kms away) and have DSL. You might be out of luck with the infrastructure you have, but if it's just a case of your telco not putting the resources in to make it avaliable you still might be able to use the system.

Copper + fiber

[Anonymous Coward]

OK here are my assumptions:

You have more time then nessicarly money and buy in costs are important.

Your community is spread out but still not very spead out as in a two km run from a central point gets you anywhere on the community.

Wireless is worthless for a few reasons people will want in in there home so channel's are scare. You want more bandwith than a T1 (A DS3 with bandwith is 7.5k here from a real tier one in CT) in the long run 10kbs per household is pretty pitifull. If not now but in the future.

OK idea's

Fiber is nice for the long runs but significantly to expensive to run to every house and terminate (it's cheap to run bury all the multimode and soem single mode you would like.

Cat5 is your friend (shielded) it will get you 200m from your fiber breakout points thats nearly 2 football fields in any direction I would assume with under acre lots that would place at least 8 home in reach. Coax gets you significatly farther but at higher equipment costs and complexity of maitnence.

OK with this said you have a run of shielded cat5 to each house running at 100 full. That gets concentrated via a small managed switch in a box the low end cisco 2950's make sence here and can be had cheap enough. Gbics for the uplink at under a hundred bucks now. There are probably some cheaper hardware on ebay as well.

The gige uplinks get thrown together at the central location where the T1, DS3 name you flavor drops off. A 36xx series router can handle the perdicted ammounts of traffic for a long time and DS3's or ATM OC3 partials (Maybe more it's been awhile since I worked with something this small) You may go off brand here and get a used summit (garbage but they work) that can handle the 20 fiber runs hopefully less if you can get more than 8 houses per break out.

They have these baby speed plows they use for sprinkler systems they are quite easy to run pull that black platic pipe for as your chaseways they can be seamless inside the ground and thus proivde good moisture protection. They are hard enough to cut through as well. This would give you a max 3 bridges between any two points inside your network thats perfectly acceptable.

As for the break out switches the 2950 series will run off of DC directly (the backup PSU input) but AC power should be avalible a small weathertight box would be all thats needed mounted on something unabtrusive / landscaped. Remember to leave room in the boxes for gear later on like fiber cross patching wireless AP's. I would look for a smaller switch though that uses gbic's if at all possible (fiber tranceivers fail) or is cheap enough to have a few spares hanging around.

Mesh

[ArkiMage]

There is a lot of mesh networking technology available now. Do some searching on "mesh" and "community". Example: http://www.kingsbridgelink.co.uk/

Economy of Size and Distance and other problems

[zin]

If the phone or cable company won't come out to your neighborhood there is probaly a very good reason. First of all a T-1 aint gonna cut it. Plus the wiring or wireless equipment (and it aint going to be linksys, you need some enterprise stuff.) And if it breaks who is gonna fix it, and who is going to deal with collecting money from residents, and who is gonna deal with the telco. Basically it's going to be a full time job for a couple people.

I used to work for a pretty decent side (national) ISP, and some complex in boston decided to get a T-1 for it's residents. Off the bat they wanted every resident to be able to open trouble ticket, uh no you can't have 30 authorized callers (most companys have maybe 4-8.) Before you know it people are calling up to find out their pop user and server address and you gotta tell em you don't have one, your complex bought a line and bandwitdh and thats it and no we don't support your newbie internet problems. You line is up and isn't taking errors, sorry :) or your line is full cause someones kid is probaly running some p2p apps. It's not worth it...

DIY DSL?

[Wakkow]

I used Net-to-Net Tech's Point-to-point products to connect two places a few thousand feet apart. I emailed them a few questions and they were quick to respond.. Maybe contact them for a solution since it seems they have a wide array of products. They could probably use existing leftover copper pairs rather than trying to bury new cable/fiber.

Working href

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.commsdesign.com/story/OEG20030423S0042

Alvarion 900 Mhz Wireless

[matth]

What the title says. Alvarion (www.alvarion.com) is coming out with a 900mhz wireless system. The 900 mhz will blast through some trees and buildings.

Re:Alvarion 900 Mhz Wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, bear in mind that the Alvarion stuff, like all other data stuff, is a low power Part 15 device that is subject to some very stringent FCC regulations.

So, lose the idea of "blasting" through the trees. Even the hams who share the 902-928 MHz band have to contend with some other primary users.

The other problem that seems to have been lost in the discussion is that, depending on exactly WHERE in north Florida this is all to be located, they may run afoul of the primary user on the 2.4 and 5.8 GHz bands, and I can assure you that that's not amateur radio, either - it's Uncle Sam. You may expect significant amounts of government attention (and not necessarily the desireable or pleasant kind) should any attempts be made to cheat on the Part 15 rules for bandwidth, power spectrum density, antenna gain, etc. Uncle Sam has some significant military assets in north Florida that they will not allow to be compromised because of some rogue devices on those bands. (Hint: primary user on most of the amateur radio bands, including/especially the 2.4, 3.4 and 5.8 GHz bands is the Government Radiolocation Service). And, no, you can't operate this rural telecommunications service under the Amateur Radio Service regulations, either. If you insist on going the RF route on those bands, you'd be under Part 15 and must follow the appropriate FCC regs to the letter, or you'll all hang collectively.

Best bet in the long run is to form your own local telecommunications cooperative, run in fibre-optic lines, and then take bids from the "big boys" for a connection to the Internet from your head-end. You can very probably do much of the infrastructure installation yourselves (or contract with a cable installation company - I know of a couple up here in Northern New England that have wired up several towns twice over - once with 1/2" aluminum coax back in the early 80's and again in the last 3-5 years with fibre-optic). As other posters have indicated, you should pay a LOT of attention to lightening protection and local loop isolation, etc., since as you well know, Florida has about the highest lightening-strike rate in the country. (Take a trip down the Turnpike sometime below Orlando towards the Gold Coast, and stop in the rest areas, or go down I-95 below Daytona Beach and stop in their rest areas. Observe the light towers and other towers in the vicinity - they'll look like huge aluminum/steel flowers, and are used to attract and dissipate lightening! )

Same concept could/should apply to your electricity supply and your telephones. If it's YOUR town, then by now you should have hired/consulted an attorney who can research the applicable state laws around this stuff. The poles are privately owned - not by the state or the county government, but by some private/corporate entity. You should be permitted under state law to rent space on the existing poles to provide telecommunications, subject to some fair and reasonable mechanical/electrical constraints to ensure things stay safe for all involved. All of this is really no different from conditions during the Depression where cooperatives were formed to provide electricity and telephones to rural parts of the USA. The legal infrastructure is still there, AFAIK (and IANAL) - go use it!! And, don't be afraid to consult the Public Utilities Commission in Tallahassee - you're paying taxes to support those idiots, so you might as well make them get off their duffs and do something useful for the money the taxpayers give them, for once. I know that sounds unusual, particularly for a government agency in Florida, but it's another precedent you can set :-).

Wire Up The Cows

[richone]

Build a mesh network by stapling 802.11g access points to the backs of the cattle...

Re:Wire Up The Cows

[SmurfButcher Bob]

Ooo! Ooo! You can power them with fuel cells that run off methane!

Re:Wire Up The Cows

[pair-a-noyd]

Hey,
Some of the very first phone lines were run through barb wire fences.

The wires were already in place, seperated and isolated from one another on insulated (wooden) posts.

They really, really did use to do this..

http://collections.ic.gc.ca/exploring/homestead/ er lytech.htm
"Another type of phone used in this area was the barbwire phone. This phone was introduced in 1945. A barbwire phone was installed by using one pasture fence line for each user. The return feed was made with a grounding post drove into the ground. In the early days people would use the same government phone box with switches and an extra bell. They then moved on to use old telephones, which were available and installed separately. When the barbwire telephone first came out, the wires were stapled directly to the fence posts. This didn't work well. When it rained it would weaken the transmission. Later on insulators were put on and reception would be clear. The barbwire was a good way of communicating; it tended to be very reliable and didn't break down like the government telephone would. This telephone was especially handy when a bull got out of pasture and did not completely break the wire, everybody would listen on their end of the phone and they would tell each other where the lost bull was heading. This type of phone lasted until a modern government telephone system was put in with underground wires. "

I got a solution for you

[netwalkr]

I have been designing networks for a couple of years now. I believe the foundation for this particular situation is going to be wireless. Proxim has been one of the major wireless equipment providers for some time now. They have a new product call the Tsunami MP.11 access point. It is a point-to-multipoint geared towards "last mile" solutions. The AP cost about $700. You will place this as close to the center of the community as possible. Then you will receive the signal through residential receivers. You can purchase them in 5-packs for about $1,200. I agree with the other Slashdotters as far as the T1. If possible go with NxT1 (IMA) or a T3 if possible. A single T is not going to be that much bandwidth for the community. This solution is ideal because you will not have to dig trenches, place conduits, and run fiber or copper. For more information on the Tsunami MP.11 visit http://www.proxim.com/products/all/tsunami_mp11/mp 11.html#ordering Any questions please e-mail me at jackblack5769@hotmail.com. Cheers, Netwalkr

Mod parent up - He's serious !

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this moderated as troll ? Its a good idea !

BushLAN

[femto]

Keep in touch with the BushLAN project. It is in the process of commercialisation and products should be available soon. BushLAN sounds exactly like what you are looking for.

BushLAN is a low cost 'last mile' solution specifically targeted at Internet distribution for rural areas. It uses lower frequencies (VHF) than 802.11. As a consequence the signal propagates further (3-100km). If you have television reception it should work.

I'm not directly affifialted with BushLAN, but I do work in a simliar field within the same country, so I am not completely disinterested.

If you decide to get one or more T1s...

[Dishwasha]

make sure you look in to the Universal Service Fund to reduce line costs.

Re:404?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, hell... guess I got it anyway. Makes me wish I remembered my slashdot passwd, so I could log in, and get the full glory.

Re:look to fibre - corrected

[cdn-programmer]

typo. Sorry. I meant OC3 which should be 155mb/sec last I checked. T3 = 45mb/sec

Typically a telco likes to get $500 - $1000 per month for a T1 (24 "circuits" = 24 DS0's). In europe it is an E1 (30 DS0's).

T3 is 30xT1 so it would cost about $15,000 per month minimum and 100base-T would be billed at about $30,000 per month minimum.

One can quickly see that the cost of physical infrastructure is pretty small when faced with billing rates like this.

Negative much?

[mindstrm]

Small rural communities in the US are often quite good at doing things together.. from selling farm products to power to phone to cable TV to Internet.... I've seen many a CO-OP that hadnles these things. IF you think collecting the fee for high speed net access to everyon'es home is some kind of barrier to entry, you are very mistaken.
That's what the guy means by "we are used to doing things together"

Generally setting up access like this for a small community involves setting up a small ISP, as a real business, co-owned by the community, with real employees... not a big for-profit business.

Likening it to a building owner who wants to provide cheap internet to his building, and be an isp without doing any work is kind of silly.. the mentaility of those involved is totally different.

And while yuo are high and mighty on the poor guy who bought a T1 from your company, realize your company salesmen probably heard his whole plan, then told him how he shoudl buy it form them because they offer the best support. Sure, he didn't check with the actual admin/support department... but you can bet he told the guy he would be taken care of if he went with you.

The product the techs often think teh company is selling and what the company is representing to it's clients is often very different. YOu may see it in purely technical terms... your clients, and your sales people, and everyone else in the company doesn't.

Dude just feel lucky you can get the T1

[pulse2600]

In my town of 500 people in rural NJ, I can't get T1 or cable access...it suxors cause I want to start a business that would require I get a high speed line for people to connect to my servers but I can't do it from an office close to home...

Reality Check: Put it someplace "neutral"

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

What you're describing is a rural condo.
You mentioned the group is used to working together, but it is probably pressing your luck to assume everyone will get along well forever. You probably want individual "star" topology media going to a central point which should be a locked up place with only the equipment (telco termination + connections to the house) in it. The shack or bunker should be powered independently from any of the units (Joe sells, and the new guy is a luddite who wants no bandwidth, and finds all that equipment gobbles up power. The last thing you want is to have A cutting of B because A doesn't want to pay for bandwidth, but B is behind him, or "A."

There's a simple way to get wireless past trees...

[The Lord of Chaos]

It's called a chainsaw. I'm not to sure your neighbours would approve though.

Pricing, Details

[Anonymous Coward]

This would appear to be a good approach. From Cisco's website:
LRE also overcomes the distance limitations of traditional Ethernet (100 meters) by providing Ethernet-performance at up to 15 Mbps and distances up to 5,000 feet (1,524 meters).
It works over Cat 1/2/3 wiring, alongside voice systems.

Pricing:
Catalyst 2950 12-port LRE Switch: $3500

575 LRE "Customer Premise Equipment", i.e. your "LRE modem" costs: $180

Prices

Details

Thoughts?

Re:Scientologist Alert

[macguys]

Yipes...this guy just won't stop. I don't know a single neighbor who is a member of the organization this guy is referring to. However, there are a couple of Lutherians down the road and recently a Quaker family moved in.

Use 802.16

[Mooncaller]

The correct standard for this type of application is not 802.11. IEEE 802.16 has been designed specificly for this type of application. A quick read of the earlier responces indicates most /.er are a little behind the times. This is understandable. Prior to the new standard, 802.11.whatever was the only way to go ( by default). Manufacturers and Service providers have been applying it to problems outsides its targeted domain. These entities have been marketing their products/services and thereby obscuring the definition of the domain for which 802.11 is applicable. Now that 802.16 exists, and products are coming to market, implimentors should stop missapplying the older standard and current 802.11 systems should be migrated where appropriate.

Re:Use 802.16

[Anonymous Coward]

Will someone please explain to me why this is funny?

I think he is absolutely spot-on... Just look
at the 802.16 PHY(s), it is way more appropriate
for the terrain and distances involved than 802.11(a/b/g/whatever). And the MAC is more appropriate for a multiple-residential Point-to-multipoint deployment than 802.11's

So, why is this funny???

who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're clearly some sort of commune kook anyway. Try distributing bandwidth through your tin foil hats or someting. Loser.

trees?

[LBArrettAnderson]

screw the trees - you'll get a lifetime supply of firewood and wireless broadband internet.

Microwave and LAN-style wireless

[tbaggy]

I've worked with a Canadian company called IpPlus located in southern Alberta which used a combination of Microwave gear from Harris along with a mish-mash of LAN style wireless gear from Waverider.

I think they had about 8 sites, connected in a ring topology using some Marconi ATM switches connected via a local ds3 or ethernet connection to the towers.

The toplogy was basically like this:

Customer House---802.11b---Ethernet/Tower--Microwave--Tower /Ethernet--Router/switch--Internet

Depending on the size, either a point to point style network could be configured or a ring style topology. With a ring, you have some level of redundancy.

This works very well for them and allows them to grow the network easily. A starter node shouldn't be that expensive either..so if you can put up a tower or two, you should be in great shape.

The network spans many hundred miles over microwave..so distance really isn't a problem for them.

Good luck, and you should come back in a year or so and let us know what you decided on doing!

rfc 1149

[Anonymous Coward]

Monkeys are expensive and fairly slow. Fear not however, this problem has already been addressd.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt?number=1149.

Re:rfc 1149

[zymano]

good one . Cheers!

Re:rfc 1149

[JWSmythe]

You don't have to send the monkeys.. An infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of packet generators will eventually create any traffic that may have beeen sent across the network.

Who needs Shakespeare? I need network traffic! :)

Palmtops?

[billstewart]

Ok, I stole the line, but you toss the ball in such a slow high arc....

I first heard the term from people who were talking about unwiring places in the Caribbean.

have a look at mediacell

[CaptainFrito]

these guys may be able to help you

Don't forget robustness

[stomv]

If you do run fibre to each location, don't forget about network design -- you don't want a neighbor to cut wire in his yard by mistake five years from now and knock half the community offline until the physical layer is repaired.

If you're not sure the optimal way to design the network topography, call your local university's systems engineering department. I'm a Ph D candidate at Boston University's Center for Information and Systems Engineering, and one of the things we research is how to design topographies for networks so that robustness is maximized while minimizing cost... something your community ought to consider.

Go for it all ...

[bizitch]

After reading this thread - one thing came to mind: If you do decide to lay fiber - go for it all!

I mean - you could co-op everything - High Speed Internet, Cable TV and Phone for that matter.

While wireless can offer a low-cost solution, it has many potential problems across a geographic area.

The most effective means of distributing high speed access would definitely be to lay fiber. I mean if you decide to dig up the ground, don't screw around with copper this would severely limit you.

Fiber would allow you to really leverage the investment of hacking up that ground - Internet would be easy, a couple of T1's multilinked together and some smart allocations of a class C of public numbers and your off and running (a T3 would be total overkill IMHO).

But you can leverage this investment to allow delivery of Telco service as well.

You could simply order up an ISDN PRI or two and a block of about 300 DID numbers. The best part is that at this level of service - you can get an incredible amount of competition. All calls anywhere for under 2 cents/minute any time - and I mean ANYWHERE and WHENEVER - Free of course within the Co-Op

I recommend using this product from Sphere (www.spherecom.com) I just got certified on this product and am completely AMPed about it. It is a pure IP VOIP product that delivers the station end as regular analog phones. So customers need nothing special at their end.

If you model your distribution method after the Bells model of hubs to CO's etc. - you could really do something very cool here.

Here's a suggestion:

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop being a bunch of commie hippie faggots and go get real jobs.

Middleburg??

[Anonymous Coward]

sing "They got some crazy little women there and a I'ma gonna {pause} get me one!! (or two, or three...)

guess you have to be from Jacksonville FL to get that one.

Re:look to fibre - corrected

[zeno_2]

T3 is 30xT1 so it would cost about $15,000 per month minimum and 100base-T would be billed at about $30,000 per month minimum.

Try 28 instead of 30..

Intentional Communities are a broad movement

[billstewart]

Intentional Communities are a broad movement, ranging from student-oriented housing coops to hippie communes to old Quaker villages to apartment buildings that don't want to be boring. (OK, some of them probably _are_ cult-like - the ic.org web page lists about 500 of the things.) I know people who've lived in a number of these things - some have stuck together for 50 years, while others have fallen apart in a year. Some people like being closely involved with their neighbors, while others don't; suit yourself.

What community is yours?

[billstewart]

I found the assertion that Scientologists and Rebirthers were part of the same cult to be rather confusing; either he's just a troll making stuff up or he's referring to things that *I* certainly didn't see on any of your web sites, nor did Google...

ic.org lists about 500 intentional communities, ranging from hippie communes to apartment buildings trying not to be boring to Quaker villages I know old people from to some things that probably are run by wackos (or would be if they could get organized).

I live in a condo, which is more of an unintentional community :-) We've got 32 units of medium and large apartments in Silicon Valley, mostly occupied by owners and some by tenants, with a shared central yard and pool, and monthly dues that keep going to things like paint and termite repair and fixing the hot water and such. Works OK.

rural last mile

[shoestring]

I am in a similar situation. That is I am in a rural area, and broadband solutions of DSL or cable modems are not possible here. As there is no cable system here, and the phone system CO is about 4 miles as the crow flies (longer by wire) and the wire is circa 1970.. phone modems work at somewhere between 21 and 33 Kb.
We are using wireless. Actually I am using a linksys (with a decent antenna) and it works well going out to half a mile or better with decent antennas (15 db mini-dish). One of the new linksys would do better, or you could go with a 24 db dish and get something like a factor of 3-5 on range (+3db = double the power). A lower frequency will work through trees better (900 Mhz). In our case (2.4 Ghz) a tree kills about 5 db (more if it is wet) or drops you to 30% range. In your case it depends on how many trees are between the customer and base stations. Note there are limits to the linksys for number of people connected, so if you are going to have a lot per node (greater than 30) you should invest in enterprise level (cisco or tranzeo, I did like aeronet (cisco), but their new software has some issues. I haven't got the new tranzeo yet, but they look very good). You will probably want to use decent antennas on the systems, you might try hyperlink (www.hyperlink.com) but there are probably cheaper places on the net or ebay.
For our location trenching and running wire or fiber was cost prohibitive.. so I expect it will be for you also. Though fiber does wonders for bandwidth. If you can get the cooperation of your local phone company DSL might work for you (see ruby ranch), but have found at least locally that doesn't work. (old phone lines and uncooperative phone company).
For bandwidth I would highly recommend say something like packeteer, however if you are a true geek, I have found that a cheap linux system with ipchains (or iptables) is much more cost effective. There is more setup involved, but you also get more flexability. I use ipchains, NAT and TOS mangles to manange the bandwidth here and it is very effective.. though what is "fair" can be hard to say some days.. in this case e-mail, goes first, then http, then ftp and finally others.
Currently the neighbors are averaging around 100 B/s, peak at 128 Kb for a couple of minutes (since that is the limit they can get) and in total move about 98 Meg a month.. they are rural (and not slashdotters..) so they are pretty much e-mail and http. Generally they aren't running servers. A T-1 will work well to start (IMHO, contrary to others), but of course it will grow as you get more people on, and they start using more bandwidth. Remember (for some of you city folk).. they were on 21 Kb modems on a good day so this is much an improvement! Don't need to make a superhighway today when just a decent dirt road will work fine (and gets the job done faster and cheaper.)

Get the Telco to Do It For You -- or DIY

[shylock0]

Have the telco run broadband to the local phone switch (I assume everybody has phones). From there, you folks can buy and install your own DSL equipment using the regular copper to each house.

Actually, better still, you could get the telco to do it for you. If they'll centrally install T1, they'll also probably install DSL if there are enough customers interested. They'll put it anywhere if they have a sufficient subscriber base (30-50+ users). This has been done before in rural areas, or in new development communities.

Balloon, It may sound crazy.

[joeshabazz]

i'm not sure how this will help but there is a company out there that's developing a type of hot air balloons to act as cell towers. Perhaps this could help in some way?

not necessarily true

[1nt3lx]

The higest tier is 600VAC three phase. Then below that is 120VAC service which goes into homes and things. That's why there are huge transformers sitting between two appropriately distanced wires.

Re:not necessarily true

[bofkentucky]

mmmmmm....luser roasted over 3-phase, I'm sure there are still a couple asleep in the labs (last week was finals for the local universities).

Rural Last Mile Solution (ReachDSL)

[mikegroovy]

Our Local Teleco (McLoudTeleco.com) recently implemented a nice "last mile" solution for our rural area... They installed a bunch of Paradyne "ReachDSL" DSlams... which require proprietary Paradyne DSL Modems.
Of course this would require the assistance of your Telco provider. Submit a Buisness Plan to them if they are a down to earth Teleco.. if they are a Megacorp, I doubt they'll work with you. :(
DSL is so much better for gaming than High Latency Satellite! (And Way better than Dial-up!)
Snippet from an Informative PDF:
"offering a minimum rate guarantee of 256K at a
distance of 18,000 feet (5.5 km), with typical performance
far exceeding this rate. In fact, astounding distances of up
to 60,000 feet (18 km) have been attained with ReachDSL
products - without the use of repeaters or amplifiers."

bandwidth throttling

[smartfart]

"and if one person eats up the majority of the bandwidth, you have a small arms family fued going on in North Florida."

IIRC, iproute2 is able to selectively throttle connections based on username and other identifiying qualities (such as per IP address, etc.). I haven't looked at the package (no need as of yet), but I would imagine that this would be a good tool to use against kazaa servers, etc..

The best thing is, the luser eating all your bandwidth doesn't have to be told that you're cutting back on his speed --- you're the admin, you run your network the way you want, etc. --- and if you knock it down incrementally over the course of a few weeks, he probably won't realize what's happening ;-)

Re:bandwidth throttling

[ruthven78]

exactly and if the luser is using software to throttle other people's bandwidth down and increase his/hers it could be considered a DoS.

Re:bandwidth throttling

[saider]

The best thing is, the luser eating all your bandwidth doesn't have to be told that you're cutting back on his speed --- you're the admin, you run your network the way you want, etc.

The administrator is not the owner of the network. The "luser" is part owner (This is a co-op) of the system and has the same rights as everyone else. A fair policy should be crafted that allows everyone to use the system to capacity.

How we are gonig to do it

[WildThing]

first for each smal area, order a point to point T-1. That costs only $2 (2 dollars) per month. (Check the FCC tariffs). Just be sure to tell youir telco that you want a FCC tariffed T-1. (The costs are actually 1 dollar per endpoint and xx dollars per CO mile. but so long as it's in the same CO the milage is 0 ZERO.) then you can either go wireless for the small areas or run calse to the homes.

telco fibre gov't woes

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a couple of issues with some of the ideas here. first and formost:
T1s ARE the way to go unless you can get cable to the main POP. T3s are waaay more expensive, take for instance a zero mile (they are billed by mile) T1 in NJ, 500 a month with a 5yr commitment. And a zero mile T3 with the same commitment? 12k a month.
These are *real* vz prices. I am a just recently former telco whore.
second, right of way.
Simply put, no. Only the local utility companies have right of way and there is NO WAY IN HELL they will let you put in dark (as in pure point to point no telco office stops) fibre. Simple reason, you can pump ANYTHING the media supports through it. Such as, maybe an OC 192? and they can't bill you for the speed increase (since they don't own it). Similarly they'll refuse copper. Any land between the nieghbors is automatically out of the question, since the local Telco(bell south) ownsright of way to it. The poles, conduit, pipes, and all, same deal. Wireless is the only way to go, and strictly speaking you only own so much of your airspace as well.

If the neighbors are NEXT to eachother you can do it, and with fibre, which is the most economical considering its massive bandwidth. if this is the case, go for it, dig away, but keep in mind troublshooting fibre breaks is the a pain in the ass. And You'll want to bury it reasonably deep, say 4-6 feet, and it sounds like through roots no less. In any event thats my $.02 good luck!

Re:telco fibre gov't woes

[Quill_28]

>And You'll want to bury it reasonably deep, say 4-6 feet,

Why? Seriously, Florida barely has a frost, so why bury it so deep? Just curious.

Re:Rural Connectivity

[valluvar9000]

It will be better in the long run to go for a wireless solution as the system will be more robust. Wires are great but for teleco's who have the staff to maintain it. There are some custom solutions that handle low population density telecon. Mostly designed for inaccessible rulral areas. One very viable option is to use corDECT -http://www.tenet.res.in/Products/tele_prod.html which is a project of some of the professors at the Indian Institute of technology. Its based on the the DECT standard of the ETSI and may provide real low cost low maintaince network for remote areas. Check out the TDM/TDMA solution. It may be suitable.

More specifically

[m0rphm0nkey]

More specifically Amperion has some pretty cool powerline telephony solutions involving both wireless and cabled networks.

In the event that you want to try 2.4 with your own towers and/or access points these guys have circular polarized 2.4 antennas between 9 and 12 db. This means they have a degree of ability to pierce tree foliage (largely vertically and horizontally placed) that regular vertically and horizontally polarized antennas don't posess.

What are our citizens RIGHTS over phone telco's?

[jago25_98]

This is what I know:

Ethernet over phone cables + "dry copper pair" = technically enough to make the link....

but ->

phone companies don't like to give out the connections?

How do we actually approach a company and go about this? What are our rights? - In the various counties, UK, US + Canada in particular?

I live in the UK, with BT owning the central backbone. They did have a total monopoly(?) but hopefully has been delt with by the government agency that is supposed to keep a week lid on consolidated buisnesses / monopolies (name? is this Oftel)?

If I could buy a dry-copper-pair connection from work -> home I'd be laughing but I'm not sure how I can and IF I can.

So, lets swap tips and see if we can find what is possible and together we may be strong enough even to stand up for ourselves, who knows.

wireless may work anyway

[sbwoodside]

If you have any kind of hills at all wireless should be an option. Get a nice tall tower up on top of your local hill and put an omni antenna up there. Then, at each house, point a nice high gain antenna at the tower. That's the usual star design. If that doesn't cover it, you can bridge the network into multiple stars, create for example a backbone that jumps from the T1 to a tower then to other towers or well-located houses. It will be a LOT cheaper than running any kind of new cable given the distances you quoted. Wifi you can get the kit for each house as low as $200-$300 and put up a repeater with a couple of radios and antennas for $1000 or so.

The only mailing list that I know of dedicated to long-distance WiFi (802.11) links is wireless-longhaul. You can subscribe here. There's also a Wiki with plenty of links to projects that have successfully deployed long-distance wireless networks in all kinds of different places.

Don't go into proprietary wireless unless you absolutely have no other option. There's some interesting new technology that's already available e.g. from Alvarion, using OFDM you can make non-line of sight connections at microwave frequencies. Eventually there will be 802.16 standards for them but right now it's not ready yet. The proprietary solutions are many thousands of dollars for each box.

simon

Re:wireless may work anyway

[Quill_28]

>If you have any kind of hills

It's Flordia! I think half the state is below sea level. :-)

Re:wireless may work anyway

[ArsonPerBuilding]

Half the state is the sea level.

Buy a server too

[hughk]

and put it next to your ISP connection. Run Squid, DNS and a POP Email server from there. Run a secure SMTP relay as well. Firewalling the community is also possible at this point, which can reduce problems dur to misconfigured downstream computers.

A T1 isn't really that fast, especially if everyone starts hitting it at the same time. However, you can significantly reduce your bandwidth requirements to the rest of the world by using a buffer. A linux box isn't that expensive to buy or to run compared with the other hardware.

Whilst it seems strange to talk about this in response to a question about the last-mile, it is very important to optimise upstream bandwidth use.

As for downstream connectivity, it really does depend upon the distances and terrain. If you lay it yourself, remember you said this was an agricultural community. Don't bury it under worked land. Try to keep clear of overhead copper, otherwise ensure that both ends are well protected against lightning surges.

If you can find a good line of sight then wireless LAN is still interesting (an antenna on top of a pole is still typically cheaper than a buried cable).

can't reach the site but VHF is sloooow

[sbwoodside]

I can't reach the site you link to right now, but I know that anything that uses VHF is going to be slow. You can't get higher than modem speeds on VHF. Yeah, the range can't be beat (well, HF can beat it ... ;-) but you need microwaves like wifi 2.4 to get the nice megabit speeds. Sorry.

simon

Re:can't reach the site but VHF is sloooow

[funky womble]

The site is up now, they are aiming at a minimum of 100kbps (and it seems they think they can get that from 5MHz of bandwidth with 100W of power over 100 miles). 100Kbps is a big improvement over modem speeds over poor quality phone lines (as long as there's not so much processing involved that it would raise the latency to unacceptable levels).

Re:can't reach the site but VHF is sloooow

[femto]

100kbit/s is a minimum. There is no reason why a 5MHz channel cannot give 5/22 of the aggregate datarate of WiFi (=2.5Mbit/s). In the future, newer modulation schemes also offer the possibility of spectral efficiencies of the order of 20bit/s/Hz, which would give a datarate of 100Mbit/s.

Re:can't reach the site but VHF is sloooow

[sbwoodside]

link??? I'm interested.

Re:can't reach the site but VHF is sloooow

[sbwoodside]

How do they get that speed?

simon

Re:can't reach the site but VHF is sloooow

[femto]

No time to find links, but I can provide words for you to plug into google. For the "WiFi related" speed of 2.5Mbit/s, search on "CKK" or "Complementary Code Keying". For 802.11a related speeds, look at "COFDM" or "Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing". For the 20bit/s/Hz stuff I mentioned, look at "space-time coding", "MIMO", Multiple Input Multiple Output", "BLAST" or "Bell Labs Layered Space Time".

Re:can't reach the site but VHF is sloooow

[sbwoodside]

OK, this doesn't seem like a long-distance solution like traditional VHF data links. I was thinking that you were talking about something with the potential for 100s of kms of range like HF/VHF data links. I can't find ANY information about range, except that its being considered mainly for 3G so I'm thinking the range isn't that impressive (compared to the OFDM type stuff that's coming from IEEE 802.16...)

email me if I'm off sbwoodside@yahoo.com

simon

PS it's interesting tech

Re:can't reach the site but VHF is sloooow

[funky womble]

I think they're using a VHF TV channel, if it's got enough capacity to transmit analogue TV, it should have enough to handle a fairly respectable amount of data.

The fact that something is VHF just specifies what frequency band it's using, not how much of that band (i.e. bandwidth - measured in Hz, KHz, MHz) it's using.

RF bandwidth is not, btw, directly related to 'data bandwidth' which is more properly known as throughput. The amount of throughput from a given bandwidth depends on other factors including the type of modulation. Think of the modem modulations V34 and V32 - they both use the same bandwidth but different modulations, resulting in different throughput. Then compare with ADSL, which achieves faster speeds by using a larger frequency range.

(btw, some types of modulation have useful characteristics such as immunity to certain types of interference, it's often a trade-off though).

It's probably not the world's best description but it'll point you vaguely in the right direction I hope! Or at least prompt someone else to do better if I got it really wrong..

Re: opx or alarm circuits

[Wakkow]

In a normal residential neighborhood, realistically how hard and expensive would it be to get a line from House A to House B? Seems like they'd charge a lot just to find the two wires and hook em' together at the switching place and at each end.

If you have all those trees

[maroberts]

Make them do something useful. Trees just stand around all day doing nothing, so select the tallest of them and put network repeater stations on the top of them. Why buy a tower when a tree is there to do the job for you? Put those lazy trees to work I say!

I wish I could...

[EmagGeek]

... mod this story down as "Trolling for free consulting on Slashdot"...

There are what, 4 or 5 of the "Hey everybody, I'm thinking about creating a plasma-phase inverted-field warp drive, has anyone ever tried this or done this, or can anyone just do it for me? That'd be great. Thanks!" stories every week now...

Re:I wish I could...

[Anonymous Coward]

sub space invertion drive is much better. used with di-subtrobic interlinks it will warp into nether space!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

New Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw these guys at a Las Vagas show www.orthogonsystems.com last week. They claim 6 miles non line of sight. Does any one have any information to back up their claims?

Stop being selfish. Move back to the City

[evodas]

Everytime I hear one of you nature-destroyers living out your selfish impulses by trashing more and more nature and complaining about not having the "comforts" of civilization, it makes me want to slap you.

What's wrong with you?

Easy - Don't take it to the last mile.

[carlhirsch]

Assuming this is some sort of intentional community, do you really want something that will keep people holed up in their individual homes for more extended periods? Sounds like something that could break down the close-knittedness of the community.

Pick four or five community centers, or even just one, and put a few computers in there. Instant gathering place.

High-speed internet access in every home, you might as well be living in the suburbs. With goats.

-carl

Re:[Magnolia Road post] Re:With respect to the T1.

[autophile]

With frame relay (at least through Qwest) Enterprise Repair calls you to see if you are available for a dispatch

In Soviet Russia...

--Rob

last mile

[aimew]

Has anyone looked into using the power lines? Y'all do get 220VAC at your homes, don'tcha. Let the internet ride the power, baby. Surf the 60 cycle waves.

Hi speed to all! Power to the people - broadband to the power.

I love simple solutions to tough problems; or is this not 'hi-tech' enough for y'all? ;->

Fiber but don't get sucked into VOIP and video...

[SwedishChef]

At least not until you have a reliable data system. The local PUD here decided to do video and they have gotten themselves into a quagmire with allegations of mismanagement and worse. Video over fiber seems easy technically (just multicast it) but it turned out to be a nightmare. And expensive! It will suck the life out of your project if you try to do it in the beginning.

If you have only a couple hundred acres you should be able to design a fiber network using relatively inexpensive switches. I recommend using Squid as a cheap way to ensure that bandwidth isn't hogged (a T1 is not that fast when serving 100 "high bandwidth" customers) by a few very active downloaders. Use NAT to keep costs down and stop enterprising home office users from installing their own servers. This will slow P2P down too.

But whatever you do, don't get involved in running VOIP or video over this system until you thoroughly understand all the political and technical details.

WiFi in the Sky Viability

[frenchgates]

As a rural broadband have-not in a sparsely populated and terrible line-of-sight area, I see little hope from the kinds of solutions discussed here.

On the other hand, what about all the wild-eyed plans we see here every few months for things like high altitude balloons over major cities covering 500K sq miles? Or what about all the LEOS companies that seem to have died? Are any of these types of projects still going forward?

SprintPCS

[nolife]

If you live within a SprintPCS service area you can get unlimited 56-144kbps service (that is the advertised rate, YMMV) for $80 month. Some people in alt.cellular.sprintpcs have had good luck with the service while on the road with laptops (no cell phone is required).

They do have very limited service areas and are normally only near highways and larger cities.

The real issue....splitting up the connection

[WyrdOne]

I think the bigger question your asking is not the logistics of getting the network into place (which there are many different technologies that will work for you....fiber probably being the best since it has the longest run distance and the greatest upgrade potential).

It's more your question of how to portion up the network so that one person/connection doesn't eat up the entire bandwidth of the community. I think the answer to your question is OpenBSD 3.3 and PF + ALTQ. You can establish queues for each house that allow a person to only use a set fraction or set Kbps of the connection. You can even set it up to limit only certain services (like Kazaa or FTP) so that they don't eat up needed bandwidth for E-mail and IM programs. As long as noone on your network needs a lot of bandwidth or low latency connection you might be able to get away with sharing a single Sattelite connection. (ALA Pegasus (DirecTV) or StarBand (DishNetwork)) If they will need a lower latency connection or higher bandwidth you will have the eat the $$$ on getting a T1 or DS3 installed (You will want to get in writing/contract the costs of the install charges since 99% of the telco's will charge you time and materials for burying line from the hub to your location.....and if they have to dig more than 100yards then it's going to cost big bucks.)

Nokia Rooftop Networks

[NaturePhreak]

About a year ago Nokia offered a peer-to-peer wireless networking product, called Rooftop, that was specifically developed for this kind of application. It was cheap and could cover a large area without having line of sight access to a central location. IIRC, it used the 5.12Ghz band. I can't find anything on the Nokia site about it, but it may be worth looking into.

Re:Nokia Rooftop Networks

[CrackersnSoup]

It was not cheap, It did not work, and it has been left on the side of the road by Nokia.

t1 and this...

[bobsalt]

get a t1 from broadbandsolutions for 899 a month, then go here

http://www.championradio.com/towers.html

and get a 96' tower for under $3000

15dbi ommni antenna from here...

http://www.fab-corp.com/index.htm

and 24dbi parabolic fro the clients...(overkill for less then 1 mile range)

hook up whatever cheap ap you want..wap11 or a wapp54g? and then use the same in client modem

surely the trees arent too high for a 96' tower?

Re: opx or alarm circuits

[tzanger]

Depends on the length. They literally say it's $x + $y/kilometer. It's often not worth it unless the bandwidth is free. I am paying CDN$34/mo for the circuit between the ISP I work at and my home.

Nice, unfettered, full-duplex 2048kBps SDSL link for $34/mo, you can't beat it. :-)

Packet Radio

[Anonymous Coward]

Supply packet radio to your town, get a local Radio amateur to build antennas and buy modems in bulk

Re: opx or alarm circuits

[hdflsts2002]

Not sure what your local telco will charge but here (south western PA, Alltel service area) the price is quite reasonable. The longest pair that I have run 12,451 feet (running two Cisco 828 routers, g.shdsl, in a back to back setup on this connection) is running $5.16 per month and am pushing 2.3Mb symetrical.

There will of course be the intitial setup charge, one time, which again here is $50.

Why not fibre?

[sydbarrett74]

Look at this page: http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link0110/ att-0140/01-100Mbps_internet_access_at_home__M_ttg r_nd__Ume_.htm It details how a Swedish neighbourhood installed fibre to every home. If you're going to break ground, you might as well go hole-hog and do it right the first time.

Re:MICROWAVE MICROWAVE MICROWAVE

[Anonymous Coward]

MICROWAVE MICROWAVE MICROWAVE.
it goes thru trees, windows and everything else.
plus its cheap.
http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/uwave.html

With frame relay..

[blenderfish]

Enterprise Repair calls you!

Thanks, I'll be here all week...
- Blenderfish

Another thing you may want to at least look at...

[pillar]

There is a company that is doing some pretty cool last mile wireless stuff which may or may not work for you. It's non line of sight (900mhz I believe) the company is waverider http://www.waverider.com/
I've met with them a few years ago, they were pretty knowledgable and had a cool product. I've seen their networks deployed in a nearby town and it works great.

Re:[Magnolia Road post] Re:With respect to the T1.

[Anonymous Coward]

With frame relay (at least through Qwest) Enterprise Repair calls you to see if you are available for a dispatch

[...]

It turns out we get better customer service on a FR than T1, while loop costs on the latter are higher!

That's what the enhanced management features in FR gets you. And comparing FR to a T1 is an apples to fruit juice comparision. FR isn't a physical circuit and can use anything from a sub-DS0 to a DS1 or higher for transport. You can get FR on a T1, but these days you are more likely either FR or a straight DS1 delivered over HDSL which greatly reduces the cost of either service. The days of getting DS1 on a traditional T1 span are waning rapidly.

Enterprise repair is one of the few parts of Qwest which doesn't suck!

The !nterprise customer is one of the few Qwest customer segments who don't suck!

Re:look to fibre - corrected

[cdn-programmer]

From the SONET Reference

Transmission standards in the U.S., Canada, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (ANS) ads the rest of the world (ITU-T) evolved from different basic-rate signals in the non-synchronous heirarchy. ANSI Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) combines twenty four 64 kbit/s channes (DS0) into one 1.544 DS1 signal. ITU multiplexes thirty 64bit/s chennels (E0) into one 2.038 Mbit/s E1 signal (an extra two channels provide frame alignment and signalling, making 32 total).

This is from the Tektronix SONET Telecommunications Standard Primer. Copies can be requested from the Tektronix offices, ir visit the website at http://www.tektronix.com

Re:look to fibre - corrected

[zeno_2]

Hmm..

My statement you replied to said that a T3 line consisted of 28 T1 lines. I still believe this to be true. Your reply really has nothing to do with what im saying. Let me pick it apart =)

From the SONET Reference

Thats nice

Transmission standards in the U.S., Canada, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (ANS) ads the rest of the world (ITU-T) evolved from different basic-rate signals in the non-synchronous heirarchy.

Thanks for the history

ANSI Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) combines twenty four 64 kbit/s channes (DS0) into one 1.544 DS1 signal.

Alright some good information here. What this is saying is that a T1 line (or a DS0) is 24 channels that are 64kbps each. Good info.

ITU multiplexes thirty 64bit/s chennels (E0) into one 2.038 Mbit/s E1 signal (an extra two channels provide frame alignment and signalling, making 32 total).

Ahh some more good info, got to love that =). This is saying that an E0 line (which is pretty much europes equivalant of a T1 line from what I can see) is 30 channels that each run at 64kbps each. Good stuff to know, but this really has nothing to do with a T3 line.

Now for my good info =). A T3 line is actually 672 channels that run at 64kps each. Ya, thats right, 672, not 30. So, if we were to look at that good info above, we would see that a T1 line is 24 channels of 64kbps each. If we now take that magic number 24, and multiply it by 28, what do we get.. 672 =). Here are some of my links.

Link 1

Link 2

I hope it helps..