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Aussie Network Engineers Form Members-Only ISP
schliz writes "A group of Australian network engineers is planning to launch a not-for-profit internet service provider that will provide access to the nation's high-speed NBN fibre network for like-minded people. The cooperative, dubbed 'No ISP,' has no staff or add-on services to keep costs down. Members will be able to 'trade' excess download quota for a market-based price, depending on supply and demand."
All I want is reliable bandwidth and latency (what good is 50ms latency if it spikes to 1-2 seconds every so often? say good bye to skype and any online gaming) and ideally a static IP.
$110 per month for a terabyte plan on 100 Mbps down and 40 Mbps speeds over the fibre network
Is actually better than what I currently pay, I get 100 meg down, 5 up, 250 gig cap for $90 a month (Canadian duopoly, wheee). I hope they write up how they accomplish all this, might be time to start more of these co-ops. I also love the fact that with the trading scheme they encourage people to use the bandwidth, but intelligently. Right now since there's no real advantage of disadvantage to me when I run major downloads during prime time (and I notice that my speeds/latency are quite a bit worse during prime time), this co-op would result in me scripting most downloads it to run when bandwidth is "cheaper" (aka 3am). I suspect this is true for many other heavy users.
APANA part two?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Except you're actually getting what you pay for. They plan to buy a terabyte of bandwidth wholesale for each user, unlike traditional ISPs, which typically use traffic modeling to oversell their infrastructure. With the new model, if you're under your cap and I'm over my cap, I can buy the extra from you at cost, and keep getting full speed service instead of getting capped at 1MBps.
The cooperative, dubbed 'No ISP,' has no staff
I know not all countries have an established history of co-ops, but that's a completely disingenuous way of representing them.
Everyone may own an equal share. Some people may only contribute money (e.g. UK's Co-op model). Or it may be that only those who contribute work may be members, as in a partnership (e.g. John Lewis model). But as long as work needs to be done, there are staff.
Since these have been some of the most stable businesses in the UK through this recession, it's worth it for anyone who is intending to start up a new one to represent it properly.
You must be kidding. Providing internet service is insanely high margin once the lines are in place. I seriously doubt they are planning to drop new fibre or any other high capital infrastructure investments. I'm sure they will be riding on mostly existing infrastructure, especially the last mile.
These are a bunch of network techs, so they do have some clue what the costs will be.
Not only that, but I'm sure for some of them, they will actually make money on the side from the service. Have a trunk link down, oh well, me and my buddy Jim will fix that right up at our normal contractor rate (without our boss taking a cut!). Not only that, but I am sure they will be buying a lot of second hand hardware that a corporation would never buy just because it is used and donating spares from their various work projects. Their infrastructure will be incredibly cheap. Not to mention, that they will be able to crowdsource a lot of the design and implementation. Usually, I consider crowdsourcing a way of making a crap situation crappier, but it works great when you are working with a group of experts in their field.
What's that? The boss wants to upgrade the ASA 5500's at the South East branch, awesome. Hey guys, I just got a new gateway cluster for the secondary trunk line.
Networking hardware is incredibly cheap if you take the time to shop around. Unfortunately, 9 out of 10 businesses just grab it at over inflated prices from CDW or whatever other rip-off artist they usually deal with.
There are two long term challenges which they will have to face that could come back to destroy everything in about 8-15 years. First is any kind of crowdsourcing turning into politics or committees. Second is letting too many people do their own thing with the network with no documentation or oversight and creating a horrific mess waiting to collapse. Strong, well considered leadership solves both of these issues very easily.
Taco, I respect you, but I think your idea of practical is not the same as the direction these guys are heading.
I suspect what essentially amounts to price fixing is going on with the ISP's in Oz.
The cost to carry data is no where near the profit earned by instituting the caps and the charges for going over. Surely in a natural market the price would be lower, reflecting the cost and allowing for a profit, but not an obscene profit.
For a 1st world country having the caps they do is pretty pathetic. There is little excuse for it, and "people in the know" should do something about it.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
In France, the oldest provider still in activity (FDN = French Data Network) is an non-profit association (and now an association of association). FDN was created in 1992. Maybe they can learn a lot from this long experience in assiociative service providing and they can probably collaborate to have something like a cross-borders ISP.
http://www.fdn.fr/
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/FDN
You must be kidding. Providing internet service is insanely high margin once the lines are in place. I seriously doubt they are planning to drop new fibre or any other high capital infrastructure investments. I'm sure they will be riding on mostly existing infrastructure, especially the last mile.
I think this is where a lot of European localities get it right: Layer 1 is owned by the government (municipal, province/state, etc.) or a neutral/non-profit third-party. The competition occurs at Layer 3 of the stack.