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Bay Area Bandwidth Coop Formed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the high-bandwidth-for-all dept.

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?

5 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. DSL, loop costs, et al. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4
    Hey

    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

  2. T1's are still attractive for small biz by tekan · · Score: 4
    We have tried several DSL providers for Small Business connectivity in San Francisco, all have failed when it comes to honoring their Guarantee of Service agreement.

    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.

  3. Re:faster one way, incoming. right? by emerson · · Score: 4

    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.


    --

  4. We have been doing this in Los Feliz, Los Angeles. by torpor · · Score: 4

    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. --
  5. A long time ago ... by Checkered+Daemon · · Score: 4

    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.

    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 /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.

    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 /. effect ...