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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.
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.
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
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"
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.
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"
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.
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.
You have obviously not been to the area. When there is a lightening bolt, it makes the evening news - extremely rare...
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
a municipality _is_ a bunch of local citizens acting in concert for the good of the community. Texas has MUD (Municiple Utility Districts) that handle things like water and sewer in un-incorporated housing developments (Some developer buys a few hundred acres, and drops 2000 2500-5000 sq ft houses on it) the developer helps orginize the MUD, and the community runs it, and funds the infrastructure investments required to build and maintain the infrastructure.
you would have to float a bond of some kind to build enough towers that pass legal muster... Nothing says you couldn't buy some cheap windmill towers and put them in high spots... ;) and trying to get the existing utilitys to share space (can I put it ontop of a power pole?) is a huge potential legal SNAFU...
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