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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
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.
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.
--
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.
Yes, it doesn't do to ignore loop costs.
However, in a compact area, loop costs aren't going to be too bad because they're distance based (although I wonder where their T3 is located; I bet its a bitch getting across the bay).
I've been thinking that the way to do this on a _LARGE_ scale would be to use frame relay. Frame relay uses the telco's switching network to transfer data. You pay depending on your maximum data rate and your minimum guaranteed data rate, plus lease costs to the local CO, which is probably no more than a few kilometers away. It creates virtual point to point connections that are actually switched. It's also possible to set up multiple connections from any single point in the frame network to any other point so you could have redundancy and load balancing.
As with every telephony based technology, its a bitch to get it up running, but it works well, even with 0 CIRs (committed information rates). Unlike DSL of ISDN, frame is available everywhere, and service, while not great, is better than you can get with DSL or ISDN. I know one consultant who claims he can get a frame connection up anyplace in the US and most places in the world in less than three weeks.
The neat thing about frame is that the absolute geographic size of the network is relatively unimportant, so its really easy to scale. Wouldn't it be cool to create a coop of slashdot readers to buy a huge frame relay network with T1s and fractional T1s with several T3 internet feeds? How much clout would a thousand circuit account carry?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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. --
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