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How a Group of Rural Washington Neighbors Created Their Own Internet Service (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes with a story that might warm the hearts of anyone just outside the service area of a decent internet provider: Faced with a local ISP that couldn't provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their own network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by [friends Chris Brems and Chris Sutton], and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island. It's a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington.
There are so many places forgotten by the mainstream service providers. Competition is a good thing.
probably ground the equipment just like a house is grounded.
lose != loose
If a lightening bolt strikes an ethernet connected device in the trees, the ethernet cable just melts/burns away.
There is no way in hell that any current reaches a ten yards away house or what ever.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I've seen lightning do so awfully strange things. I would not say no way in hell. I've seen that shit hit the ground and roll along it. I've seen it hit one tree and spring from it to another tree. Lightning is wild and unpredictable.
Hopefully they put a lightning loop next to it. It's usually part of an antenna array, the lightning strikes that instead of the antenna and is harmlessly conducted to ground.
Orcas Island is one of Washington State's San Juan islands. The "residents" tend to be rich people visiting their vacation homes. The actual original residents eventually will all be priced out of the place.
In any case, this isn't a poor farming community - they can afford this sort of large expenditure.
#DeleteChrome
If a lightening bolt strikes an ethernet connected device in the trees, the ethernet cable just melts/burns away.
Or maybe it becomes a conductive plasma. OK, I'm at least half joking. But we are talking about lightning, here. Also, how much current do you really need to fry your delicate electronic equipment? ISTR being told that a couple volts over spec will fry things. With the push for low voltage, the spec is pretty narrow.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not necessarily. I lived in the sticks for a long time. We had no high speed internet option. Satellite had a data cap, mobile broadband wasn't fast enough, and the only access provided by an ISP was dial up. I could see a community in the distance where cable internet was available. I was able to get 12 MBPS over 2 miles with 2 old school wrt-54g routers, 2 18 dbi gain yagi antennas, and two sprinkler boxes to keep it all dry. The total price was under $300. The new sprinkler boxes cost me more than the used wrt-54g routers purchased on ebay. That setup worked for 6 years till I moved.
The placement of the microwave link on the water tank, the network of '10 relay points, which have multiple radios", using "5.8GHz and 900MHz frequencies, and a little bit of 3.65GHz". Long term planning "take their time to add capacity before connecting everyone who wants service"
Tracking what relay point is down and having backup battery power for a time. The suggestion to place a "Raspberry Pi at the different relay points to do speed tests" was a good read too.
This is really motivating and shows what a community can do with existing methods rather than waiting for more traditional networks to even be planned or upgraded or offered.
Thanks.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
One thing that really strikes me about this story is how many walls the founders of this movement ran into trying to get it set up - they wanted towers, but said putting those up would be prohibitively expensive for such a small organization. Now, imagine that a municipality was able to get behind this, maybe get some state funding to offset the costs (perhaps by providing free broadband to homes with children in public schools that otherwise could not afford it) and was able to put up a better system that didn't rely so much on the homeowners to maintain (the article states that any homeowner who has it installed has to provide power for it for life even if they do not use it). Commercial providers would be forced to cut prices and improve service or go under.
Now if a for profit company wanted to do this they would have had to do the following;
1. Environmental impact studies,
2. Local consultation
3. Easement/right of way purchase/contracts
I am also wondering who does the maintenance/customer service for this system?
A local group just doing something is very different than a corporation doing it.
The same thing that happens if lightning strikes their TV antenna or Sat dish on the roof of their house?
If you think that it takes longer to melt copper than it does for a catastrophic potential to develop over 100ft with the energy travelling via the conductor at a significant portion of the speed of light then...
Your lesson is that a layman trying to be an Electrical Engineer on the internet is doomed to fail.
P.S. "lightning"
I'm guessing since TFA wasn't specific, but it sounds like the equipment in the tree goes to a POE injector and a consumer WiFi AP in the home. So if lightning hits the tree, they lose the power brick, cheap consumer WiFi, and the radio in the tree but the rest is protected by the 2.4 GHz air gap.
In copper electricity travels at about 2/3ds of C, so it travels 10 yards in 50 nanoseconds. That's 0.00000005 seconds, if you think it'll melt away first you're sadly mistaken. Particularly since copper doesn't melt until 1100C, the plastic outside will burn quick but the cable won't break instantly.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If a lightening bolt strikes an ethernet connected device in the trees, the ethernet cable just melts/burns away.
Is there a rule which says that the geek has to forget everything the ham radio operator has learned about lightning, antennas and feed lines since 1906?
I have seen lightning travel through 200ft+ of rg6 coag, much of it buried. Al the way up to the house where it had a ground tap, saving the house. The cable had blown itslef out of the ground, 6 inches deep, making the dirt into glass. Without proper supression/grounding the current will find its way down ethernet and FUCK SHIT UP.
Silence is a state of mime.
We had a not-so-well-grounded cable service where I was growing up.
When lightning would strike miles away (as counted by thunder delay), we'd see sparks arc between our cable box and our TV set.
Hopefully they hired someone who knows what they are doing / has some experience installing outdoor radio and network gear. There's more than a few of those people running around most populated areas these days.
Air-Stream http://air-stream.org/ have been doing this for almost 15 years now.
While not an ISP people can share their internet over the network using VPN.
It's still as relevant today since the national broadband network isnt getting to everyone especially people in valleys who cant get a service and are looking to make their own links to someone who does have it.
WACAN are also similar http://www.wacan.asn.au/
Community networks are the way to go, take out the middle man ISPs and government snooping.
You have obviously not been to the area. When there is a lightening bolt, it makes the evening news - extremely rare...
+1 to this, there are quite a few community wireless networks around the world and is worth checking out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region
(look at the history as some idiot keeps deleting the page contents)
A couple of years ago in Orlando, lighthing hit a tree in a parking lot, ran down the tree, blew a 6-inch hole in the ground at the base of the tree, ran another 8 feet or so into a shed and set the shed on fire from the inside.
Never expect lightning to just give up. If if can do that through the practically-nonconductive wood of a tree and dirt, barreling down electrical wires is no problem at all. Even if it has to use vaporized metal as a path after the initial surge.
In any case, this isn't a poor farming community - they can afford this sort of large expenditure.
Honestly it doesn't seem the expenses were that great, it seems the primary investment is one man who did a whole lot of legwork to rent a microwave link, find relay points, install equipment, do network supervision and maintenance and so on for free. The numbers are pretty much all there, initial investment was $25k that they need to pay back in 36 months. Break-even was 25 users, subtract 25 @ $150 = $3750 in sign-up fee = $21250 / 36 = ~$600 month in down payment. Running income = 25 @ $75/mo = $1875 - $900 in microwave rental - $600 in down payments = $375/mo for running the wireless grid and misc. other expenses = ~$0 in wages. And now they're paying it down faster so they can lower prices, with 50 users / $900/mo + a slightly bigger grid it might drop to $40/mo after the investment cost is paid off in less than two years. That's not expensive, it's super cheap for rural broadband.
For comparison, we're paying ~$500 extra per household on top of of the ordinary ~$300 sign-up fee and ~$100 monthly fee for the privilege of getting a fiber rollout with Internet/TV at our cabin here in Norway. On the bright side, after the first twelve months we don't have to use it more than 4 months a year, but it's still ~$2000 for year one and ~$400/year just for the summer. And they're not planning to lower prices, they're planning to recoup the rest of the roll-out costs, pay wages and turn a nice profit over the next 20-30 years. But it's not like in the city where you can connect 100 people in an apartment building at the time, distances are huge and customers few so cost per subscriber will be far, far more expensive so I doubt that we're a cash cow. Anyway to get back on topic, what this community has that others lack is one very skilled volunteer working for free, on a commercial basis it would be way different.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That is RF bandwidth that some poor, deserving cellular corporation could be using to sell more iDroid phones to suckers. You act as though the radio spectrum was some sort of publicly owned resource or something. The CEOs of AT&T and Verizon are crying themselves to sleep every night, you bastards!
Have gnu, will travel.
We have three providers, one of which is the very same CenturyLink telephone company DSL cited in this article. Like all DSL, it plugs away reliably over the installed telephone copper, but the speed each user gets depends on his distance from the telco switch. Speed falls off rapidly from the 10 MHz maximum at the switch to unusably slow three wire miles away, and given the funky routing of telephone wire, that might be two blocks from the switch as the raven flies.
The best service comes from the TV cable company. Those who are on its limited number of service thoroughfares enjoy 80 MHz, albeit with a chintzy monthly cap that prevents most users from making much use of the bandwidth. For every other house in our large, spread-out area, scattered through a maze of hills and canyons, is a commercial wireless ISP that operates just like the one described in the article. A central signal received on fiber is radiated to homes that get free service in exchange for hosting large relay antennas, which in turn fan out to surrounding individual users.
And of the three alternatives, the WISP is the one that everybody hates. It's dog slow for all users, and all those relay links are subject to an incredible variety of interruptions. Raccoons and termites chew through feed lines. The summer monsoon and the winter snow breaks dishes. Trees grow into the relay beams at unexpected points, constantly having to be trimmed back. And wealthy owners of large houses in the boonies (there's an 8,200 square footer on my street) don't expect dialup-grade Internet service in a home they have paid so much for. Everyone who gets stuck with the WISP lusts for cable service
There's something fundamentally different about antenna lines VS ethernet cables.
Antenna lines are used to carry RF; ultimately the RF component energy is a ground-referenced signal, so ultimately, there is earth-referenced electricity being carried.
Ethernet lines are magnetically coupled, not electrically coupled with the device, and also do not carry a ground-referenced signal, and the standard requires a Kilovolt of isolation between the Ethernet PHY and device power. Even Power over Ethernet is not an earth-referenced voltage.
This does not mean Ethernet devices are immune to lightning, after all, you could still have an induced Alternating Current in response to even a distant lightning strike, if the wire is horizontal and of sufficient length, but if you add a surge arrestor with a shunt to ground, then you have a reasonable level of safety, and you just have to accept that with lightning there is no 100% protection: after all, lightning can still strike and kill people, even while they're sitting down inside or resting on their bed. Why should anyone ever think it would be reasonable to expect their electronics that are 1000x as sensitive to stray voltages with no current as a person, would be perfectly safe?
Your Ethernet cable through the device is no better a path to ground, than the aluminum siding on the building, so it's not the biggest thing to worry about: frankly, the radio on the wireless CPE is more likely to get burned up first.
The new sprinkler boxes cost me more than the used wrt-54g routers purchased on ebay.
There's always pretzel jars, plastic buckets, or second-hand tupperware... Did you auto-powercycle the routers, or...?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So true. At least in many areas which are far behind.
Yeah, I thought about it.
Two things came to mind: the melting/gasous cable might be an even better conductor, thinking of ions etc. And secondly, I forgott that, a typical ethernet cable has a woven metallic shielding. Not sure how common that still is. Anyway, if it is shielded it would be a better conductor as like the current would mainly go along that 'shield'.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That shielded cable is called STP, it is used in noisy environments, and the shield is run straight to ground. I am not sure if it would help any in a lightning storm, but it would offer some level of protection. Personally, if I was designing this, I would add a lightning rod above the antenna on the pole/tree and leave it at that.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
No the wire vaporizes and provide a conductive Ion trail to the grounded equipment in the house, if a 110 kV power line short circuit does this, imagine what a million volt lightening strike might do.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Why? Honestly, I'm interested - I'm not aware of anything unique to communism that requires force to succeed.
On the other hand, doesn't any modern political system require force to succeed? How else is the rule of law enforced? How does the free market prevent me just taking what I want?
Depends how you define 'electricity travels'.
Electrons in a copper conductor travel a few cm per second (lets say a few inches).
The 'power' is traveling quickly, as the whole body of electrons is moving more or less simultaniously.
Perhaps you ment electromagnetic wave! As in signal transmission?
Oops scratch that above, I just read it up again: for a 5 yards distance an electron under direct current needs about a day in a copper conductor.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I have no idea what, exactly, happened but I had a strike near my house back in the early 2000s (lived elsewhere then). I lost a ton of data - hard drives were erased, just blank. Even floppy disks were erased. Not all of them but quite a few of them. It lit the whole area up in a bright blue, took out a tree that was right next to the house, and that was okay but I was really pissed with the loss of data. I had some backed up at the office but not everything. It made me back up and verify my backups more and I ended up changing the backup process at work as well.
I can only assume it was EMF/EMP type of thing. That seems most likely to me. The power surged and that killed a few things (even melted one of the surge protectors) and almost all of the data was gone - even from devices not powered on, even idle media like the old floppy disks. I ended up sending two disks off to a data recovery house (that was costly) and got some of the data back. I lost work from the late 80s and an absurd amount of porn and music (for that day and age). I was kind of surprised that it took out disks that weren't powered on, spinning, or even in a computer.
Insurance did not cover the data nor did they cover the data recovery house's expense. I think they called it an "act of god" or some shit. I had coverage and it paid for the tree, the damage done by the tree, and would have covered fire but my data was my own damned responsibility. I guess the good thing is that I learned better backup processes and haven't had that happen since.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Electrons in a copper conductor travel a few cm per second (lets say a few inches).
Huh? You're saying that I can outrun electricity...
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The galvanic isolation that ethernet supplies is intended to prevent common mode ground loops over 100 meter distances which is far enough that separate building grounds can be at each end. Once you have to deal with high voltages like lightning, the isolation transformers might as well not exist.