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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."
Got line-of-sight?
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Cliff usually handles all the Ask Slashdots, so I can understand this.
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
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.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
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.
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!
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..
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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
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.
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!
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.
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
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?
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
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
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?