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Australia's Great Linux-Based Satellite Network
yBshy4 writes "This article may interest the Slashdot folk. LinuxWorld Australia is reporting on Australia's largest satellite network, covering some 800,000 square kilometres, or most of the state of New South Wales, has gone live. The network consists of 75 Linux-based satellite routers that provide Wi-Fi (802.11b) connectivity to country towns that are unable to get DSL. The routers are engineered by Ursys and run Debian providing gateway services such as DNS and mail. According to the article, Ursys chose Debian 'because of its packaging support, which facilitates the ability to push updates to the routers remotely.' Ursys tried to use Windows but it was 'too unstable.' Hopefully this is an important step to providing better Internet access to regional areas across Australia. Anyone know of similar Internet access projects around the world?"
Wake me up when Linux is running on the satellites
This is not my opinion. Actually, it's not even an opinion. And I'm nowhere to be seen near it
"Ursys tried to use Windows but it was 'too unstable.'"
Good thing, that would have been one big ass Clippy to deal with.
Slashdot sucks
For sure, outback australia has some real problems getting internet access. Everyone has moaned to Telstra for ages about this, so it's good to see soemthing get done about it.
Australia likes the idea of wireless.... or at least we don't want to have to look at masses of wires all over our skyline.
There was a broadband cable rollout some years back, and a lot of residents complained that the extra overhead cable would wreck their view and lower their houses values due to the nasty look of an extra cable floating above them. Several local councils petitioned to have the cables dug underground, but after a feasibility test was done, putting the cables underground was found to be too expensive.... so the phone company did nothing in those areas. Now the local governments that protested the cable roll-out are all stuck using dial-up modems.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
As an IT consultant (and formerly an ISP guy) I am doing the end-customer support and installations for one of these POP's on the VIC/NSW border.
The Ursys guys run their own internal APT repository that all the BusiBox's update from (Yes, the BusiBox's are just normal rackmount PC's), allowing then to easy automate updates.
Their "web interface" is just a custom version of webmin.
I have no idea what the $3500/month for 1GB is about. I dont deal with the billing side at all.
But the service appears to work well. I am looking forward to see how much range we can get out here with the 802.11b gear, as ADSL is unlikely to come to most of these towns for many years.
"It's the smell! If there is such a thing." Agent Smith - The Matrix
Hello, welcome to the internet.
The reason US traffic (and most internet) costs are so high for Australian users, besides Telstra of course, is that US companies expect Australia to bear the cost of both incoming and outgoing traffic to the USA. This is standard US policy.
Thanks for coming along, we hope you enjoy your stay here. Unless you aren't american.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Yeah, that policy sure seems to be affecting the 50Mbps internet connection I have at my apartment here in Seoul, South Korea.
I have no bandwidth limits and it costs me about $US30 a month. There is a transproxy in the middle for HTTP, but I can still BitTorrent at 500KB-1MB/second. And for HTTP stuff that hits the transproxy cache, I regularly get 4-5 MegaBYTES a second.
I'm an Australian who's been living in the US and now Korea. The price of wholesale bandwidth in the Australia is insane and has barely decreased in the 5 years since I left...
I think it's just badly written. My take on it is that it's bandwidth not download limits. So it's probably 1 gigabit connection. The article says "can be shared between 12 to 20 people for "normal" Web access". I suppose 1/20th of a gigabit connection is "normal" access.
Also if you look at http://www.nswnet.net/rurallink/costs/
you'll see they quote AUD$189.00 for a 1GB download limited connection.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." -Albert Einstein
As you can see, Telstra recently dropped its retail pricing rates below its wholesale pricing levels. This caused a major ruckus in the telecommunications industry, and a competition notice from the ACCC. As far as I can tell, Telstra does the bare minimum it can to keep the ACCC off its back, whilst slugging Australian users as much as it can get away with.
Case in point: one big problem with Bigpond (aka Bigpong in some circles), and the reason I would never take up an account with them, is that you are charged for both download AND upload traffic. This has resulted in more than a few stories of thousand dollar plus (including at least one in the multiples of thousand dollars) bills in a month from P2P traffic (amongst other things).
Telstra. "This is your monopoly calling." *spit*
A company proposed an 802.11a wireless broadband network sharing a 2Mb leased line for our '6 village' area on the South Coast of the UK. We're not a million miles from civilisation (nearest big town is about 6 miles), but we're 'rural' and so our phone exchanges were not likely to be broadband enabled for a short while.
Monthly charges were about the same as POTS-based broadband, plus the client kit costs, but I felt that since there were quite a few small businesses in the area POTS broadband would happen eventually and so I stuck to my single channel ISDN.
At a kick-off meeting for the network, I raised concerns about the likelihood of POTS-based broadband coming to the area and diluting the wireless user base (it needed to maintain a certain number of subscribers to pay for the kit maintenance costs, power and also keep up the rental on the leased line), but was dismissed by those excited (IMHO) by the technology aspects of the system and perhaps the thrill of having a funny-shaped antenna on their roof!
Guess what, the company providing the infrastructure went bust before the roll-out was complete. I understand some of the kit may have been taken by creditors and so the system's now not intact and no buyer for the network installation could be found because many of those approached (about 10) realised that there was a local phone exchange likely to be broadband enabled 'sometime'. The final (post-going-bust) nail in the coffin was that broadband came to the area in December 2003 (2 months after the wireless provider went bust) via the local phone exchange.
The Australian solution looks like the right thing for the right demographics, the solution proposed in our area seemed to be pandering to the impatient and the technophiles, and not well thought out business-wise.
AT&ROFLMAO
Slashdot post review:
[*] mentions australia
[*] bashes windows
[*] praises linux
[*] mentions debian
[*] misleading headline (only the router runs linux)
[*] mentions wireless internet
[*] spell checked
Nice work, Tim!