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

[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

[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

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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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.

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.

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

[mickwd]

This site might be of interest.

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

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

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.

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: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.

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>

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.

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:Laser

[geeber]

Gotta love those transparent hardwood and pine tree's.

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: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.

[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!

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. :)

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!

Wire Up The Cows

[richone]

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

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

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.

Re:Laser

[GMontag]

Or just use a really hot LASER to start with.

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.