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Bay Area Bandwidth Coop Formed
Matt Hempel writes "Is there anything cooler than a T1 to your house? $200 a month through the Bandwidth Coop.
" You can also get information on writing off connections on your taxes, and "how we did it". Very cool - I'd love to see more places doing this - anyone else doing stuff like this?
First off, thanks for the interest. Except for those who find it amusing to look for open ports in the 30000s.
DSL is a great deal, if it works well for you. That is, PacBell DSL. Covad/NorthPoint prices aren't that far away from ours, particularly at T1 speed. The website explains why we don't offer DSL: a) it's hella expensive to provide and b) the problems involved with many installations make it prohibitive to support. This is not to say we won't do it in the future, just not now. We're looking into Microwave as well.
Our facility is in Sunnyvale. The cheapest loop is about $220, it's about $350 from Fremont/San Jose and about $500 to SF. Sorry if that's unclear.
T1s are ancient, but I'd wait to call DSL king until PacBell's ATM network proves itself capable in the face of pretty serious expansion. A Coop T1 is a clean meg and a half, no questions asked (unless they've figured out how to oversubscribe DS circuits).
As for terms of service, relax, we're not out to censor you. And we're hardly moral.
Tanks
--matt
I've talked to a number of people about T1 versus DSL, and many DSL customers have had significant outages (for literally 5-8 hours or more at a time).
:-). Right now, I pay $1,500 a month for a T1's worth of bandwidth and an office in which the power goes off every other weekend :-(, and a T1 to my home would cost about the same.
If you can possibly get T1, you should.
In many areas, frame relay T1 will save you money - if you're far away from the company offering a T1, Pacific Bell will sell you frame relay at a fixed price. I think it's about $ 450/month for the frame relay T1, so your cost for the co-op would be $650/month. This is in contrast with the equivalent (industrial strength business-style service) DSL for about $ 420 a month.
If I could get the deal, I'd take the money and run. Trust me on this one
If anyone offers a service like this in the Los Angeles area, please let me know. My email address is valid and on the post.
D
ISP FAQ: http://www.amazing.com/internet/
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PacBell is a mess, InternetConnect is terrible, and where you do find a reputable provider with impressive peering agreements and such they only offer 1.1MBit (Covad) SDSL, not 1.4MBit. The providers that offer 1.4MBit (NorthPoint) SDSL that we have tried have had daily network downtime, with a 22 hour outage just yesterday. This is unacceptable for a business such as a (small) ecommerce site, or mail servers for small businesses where sales people require email every minute of the day or else they go completely insane.
Affordable T1's are still a good bet for those startups that require stable internet access, at least until they are able to afford collocation or a T3/DS3 connection.
Personally I'm far more impressed with the Citylink stuff in wellington. Local fibre loop all through the center city (Where I live), 10 or 100mbs right onto the loop, your choice of bandwidth providers (Theres at least 10 on the loop now), brilliant speed and great pricing, especially as they'll do deals for residential.
I believe this is, along with wireless, is the future of real connectivity. Phone lines just don't cut it, and cable, at least in New Zealand, is still too slow (and costly). Being on a localised fibre loop provides huge advantages in terms of cache sharing, ftp services (I can get a copy of the latest debian within moments off a mirror on the loop) and stability (When you have this many people on the same connection, they work damn hard to make sure it never ever goes down).
My recommendation for those businesses and big users in wellington and soon, auckland, is to drop these stupid, unstable, overpriced ADSL/Cable things and get on Citylink, my experience has been nothing but positive.
You can't win a fight.
Is there anything cooler than a T1 to your house?
yes there is !
I live in a dorm at the univerity campus and I connect to the internet via a lan.
we share the 300mbps uplink with +/- 2000 students and I can reach d/l speeds of aprox. 600-1000 Kbyte/s plus we have a 100Mbit between the student's homes.
and the cost of that, less than $7/month!
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DSL is a better deal than a T1 because of the way the tariffs are written here in California, I hope they switch to DSL soon. However, I am currently paying $215/month for 768K symmetric DSL, I doubt that with the wire plus the aggregation they can beat that price by much. Still, I'd be glad to use a co-op if it became economicaly viable.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
DSL has many flavors.
ADSL is for the net.consumer who doesn't need much outbound speed because he's just sending out small HTTP requests, but does want lots of inbound speed to get the requested pr0n faster.
SDSL is symmetric -- at my house, we have 768K/768K, which is just plenty for fairly quick access in either direction.
There's also IDSL and a couple other obscure flavors, but "DSL" isn't necessarily slow on the outbound.
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I had a look at this - still runs to around 400/month with pacbell costs.
I've been looking at www.sflan.com. It's a shared 10Mb/s radio network in SF. And best of all Free!
I have had a wireless network in town for around 8 months now. I have now have a 4xT1 microwave link to my place of work which has a T3. I provide 2.048Mbps connections to friends for free over the 915MHz (center freq.)WaveLAN cards and 47 element yagi antennas. I basically have full control of each end. My employer thinks it's actually pretty damned cool, especially since we normally have a big surplus in bandwidth. It was really fun to setup, and is about one of the only *practical* projects I've done ;-).
Back to the point, the only problem with Citylink is you can (AFAIK) only get it if you're in central Wellington. Ah well, it'll be a while yet before I attempt downloading any ISOs:).
Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
At ompages.com we are building a public co-op style secure network. We will share bandwidth for such services as squid proxies, and IPSec connections. We are a public project so go ahead and join in.
Ompages' volunteer developers are working on such user specific applications like a secure instant messaging client/server and an easy to use web based anonymous remailer.
Other more complex projects involve the creation of web based collaboration tools that will serve as the basis for working on code for ompages' goals of a secure public network.
We need the helpe of people like you all to make our vision a reality. One thing we *really* need is global collocation. If you are interested in ompages and are located outside of the US; we need you to collocate ompages services and/or translate the website into your native language. Thank you.
All that sounds really great. Until you get audited and the IRS decides to disallow all of those deductions. May not ever happen, but they do that to people sometimes. My tax accountant advised me against trying to do that sort of thing unless I was basically self employed full-time.
Cable modems only provide the given bandwidth up to a certain point. You've basically got XXX megabits per second up to the first router. After that its shared bandwidth. I'm not sure about DSL.
That is TOO true! I was checking the routers along my path to an FTP site the other day and it turns out that the first router on my @home loops is so overloaded it can barely move between 4pm and midnight!!! They need to do something to alleviate some of that congestion! It's like having a 28.8 modem during those hours! Good thing I do most of my surfing after those hours...>:)
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I am sorry, but the age of T1s taking over the world is long gone (and hence /.ers pining for them). Cable modems and DSL provide far faster connection speed for much cheaper.
T3 coop? Hey, I'm there. Or, how about some of that Internet2 bandwidth (>100MB/sec)?? With enough people, I am certain that the price could be around $200 per person...(you'd need about 100 or more people though, but 100 people for a T3 - still damn fast).
Justin
Mu. P.S. The address you see is real. =)
This is great, I support the use of CO-OPs for this kind of community sharing (I've been involved with my current food CO-OP for almost a decade), but because the phone companies have mopopolies on providing local loop and digital services it's really only viable where you can string your own wire.
So, I can't imagine a CO-OP like this being viable if the have to go through the local CO in order to get to each member's demark, but for community condominiums and large apartment buildings this kind of technique is a wonderful idea for lowering cost across the board to all members. The point I'm making is that once you start reselling something (even if you're doing it non-profit) that the phone company can do with it's own equipment you are at a serious disadvantage.
One other possibility: the CO-OP could get a high speed connection in a neighborhood and then resell it via wireless... but that could turn into a regulatory nightmare.
Finally: If cablemodem companies are serious about providing "local loop" service (even if it's a completely different technology from traditional switched phone networks) then shouldn't they be regulated under the same tarrifs as the standard phone companies? Such an argument could bring demark standardization between the two carriers and foster better competition... and even lower prices -- for individuals and CO-OPs.
Few years ago a couple of friends of mine got T1's installed to their houses up here in the Hollywood hills a few years back, and when we all got together one time over drinks and realized that its just a short step away from sharing the load with our friends, we invested in some radio-WAN gear and set up our own bandwidth coop.
Things have changed now - a couple of guys in the losfeliz net moved to Argentina, and I moved out of range of the radio WAN net we'd set up, but there is still friendly bandwidth sharing going on in this area if you look for it.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Most people who have worked with networks can probably explain why a T1 is better than DSL. One, it's not running over j random telco's oversubscribed, badly managed ATM network which they've hacked together to roll this to market (as the guys at the coop mention on their web page, PacBell's is disintegrating by the day - I should know, I am in fact at the end of a DSL line attached to it).
For reliability and QOS, you can't beat a 'real' connection. Ever notice your DSL is strangely slow during peak hours? Well, mine is at least. For folks who were getting by with a 56k modem or other dialup-type device, yeah, DSL is an amazing step. I think it's neat for home use in that same way. But if I was doing anything mission critical (ie, trying to run a small business, or contracting from home) I'd want a T1.
For people used to dealing with real networks, DSL is kind of a nasty kludge that no one has implemented adequately, and can't really replace good reliable network connectivity. It'd be neat if it did, 'cos it is *CHEAP* -- but hey. There is NO such thing as a free lunch.
Note this from their terms conditions of service:
Here's a list of what you can't do:
Spam
Hack
PortScan other networks
Host porno
Host pyramid schemes
Defame
Start Fights
Distribute propoganda
Kick sand in other's faces
Host Nazi web sites
Additions/subtractions to this list are welcome. If you're concerned about hosting something which may cause controversy, let us know. We're cool about it as long as you're not an idiot.
The paragraph at the bottom greatly mitigates the offensiveness of that list. But I don't see why the legal activities on it should be there at all. They don't cause any problem for the network ("host porno" a possible exception, but consider a private low-volume porn site, or text-only). It seems that their only purpose is to impose some moral code of how the network is used. They of course have the right to choose who they want to do business with, for whatever reason. But do you want to do business with them?
We did something similar a long time ago, over seven years if I remember correctly. The ISP hadn't been invented yet, and the only Internet connectivity was through the local University or a commercial outfit that wouldn't do residential or anything less than ISDN.
/28 hunk of a class C. We had 20 members, with over 100 computers hung off the thing, all for about $50/month each. Slow, but we were all masters of our own domains.
/. effect ...
We ran 25 POTS lines and a 64k ISDN line into a residence. We did our own DNS, routing, etc. and owned all our own equipment, including the co-located stuff. 24/7 connectivity, with each member getting a
We're still around, but now we're on a T1 providing 128k ISDN for about half of what it would cost from any of our local ISPs.
So welcome to the world of co-op connectivity, guys! May a thousand co-ops bloom!
And no, I ain't gonna tell you who we are. We're all too familiar with the