Take a look the Western Mux Tsunami line - I've got bridged ethernet links now that are 45 mbits over loooooong distances, and you can get 480 mbits full duplex across seven miles. Yes, its $98k by the time its up and running, but when you're whacking a $18k/mo DS3 and giving 10x the service...
re: bozos - I am totally with you on that point - 100mw 'mods' to Linksys (Stinksys) APs that yield 31mw in channel and 69mw of crap spattered all over 2300 - 2500MHz, ATV amps modified to build 'super cells', and the like are giving the rest of us a bad name.
I run a WISP that covers five counties and I can assure you that this stuff is real. I am on a 'technical steering committee' that drives Cisco's lobbying efforts along with a handful of other industry insiders and the most of the talk around this issue went down about three months ago.
I think the easiest method to find 255MHz in the sub 6000MHz range would be to boot the owner/non-operators out of MMDS space, but there was also some talk about 2100MHz +/-
On the other hand, there is some mil stuff in the 3500MHz range that is pretty darned close to retirement - just take a look at http://www.alvarion.com and see the 3.5 GHz OFDM product:-):-):-)
You *can* run 802.11b outdoors, with a lot of clients, in noisy environments - I have a dozen customers on an AP in a two mile wide valley with a bunch of other stuff - you just have to have a detailed understanding of the MAC layer and how to tune stuff to make it work. Today 95% of all WISPs are wildcatters, like dial up was in 1994. That will shake out to a handful of disciplined operators over the next few years.
802.11b customers aren't where the big bucks are, but its going to be like ethernet - living on well beyond its appointed time, due to inexpensive gear.
There are so many nonsensical articles about what 802.11b can and can not do that I thought I'd set the record straight.
There are eleven channels available in north america - 22MHz wide, spread from 2402 to 2483 MHz, with 5 MHz guard bands between them. Channels 1, 6, and 11 don't overlap, the others... well, sit down and draw yourself a map.
There are many other things in 802.11b besides DSSS 802.11b cells that you 31337 kids can h4x0r - I've got Western Mux Tsunami and Adtran Tracer T1 bridges. T1s are full duplex - these types of radios split the ISM band 50/50 - one end sends with the bottom half and listens at the top, the other side is opposite, and they use 100% of the spectrum.
The other thing you'll find are FHSS systems in the ISM band. The most common is the Alvarion (previously Breezecom) Breeze Access II three meg access radios, but Cirronet's lower speed ISP products is starting to appear in rural areas.
If you're working inside a building with full duplex T1 bridges or a hot FHSS somewhere outside its definitely going to make a difference, and that goes double if you're running an 802.11b system outside. Putting one of these things near an 802.11b AP is basically like sand blasting a soup cracker... I've seen DSSS signal quality go from excellent to unuseable just by flipping on a Cirronet AP in the same area.
Assuming you've got no problems to deal with other than your 802.11b, other's 802.11b, and building layout you've still go trouble.
The 802.11b MAC layer is *broken*. If I pull up and start listening on a channel you're using, even if you've got WEP enabled, I can see your mac addresses and I can *issue disconnect requests* after forging your MAC and the AP *will honor the disconnect*. WEP is the equivalent of an ESP (encapsulated security payload) in IPsec and it protects your data, but the MAC layer needs something like the IPsec AH(authentication header) so that an intruder can't manipulate the MAC layer.
Building systems always have dead spots. Always. 2.4 gig bounces like crazy when there is sheet metal (HVAC duct work) is in the area. You get reflected signals (multipath) which causes corrupt frames, you get dead spots due to the signal being blocked, etc, etc. You can add further misery by trying to use an AP with 'diversity'. Drop the word from your vocabulary - its 'perversity' mode - just take the time to monitor FCS errors on an AP with this enabled and you'll know what I mean - turn that stuff on in a situation where both antennas can see the same signal and you'll toast 50% of incoming frames *every time*.
The 802.11b MAC layer is *broken*. If you want detailed knowledge I'd strongly suggest a read of the OReilly's 802.11 Wireless Networks book, but the game goes something like this. The channel you're in is a *shared* resource - that means you share with the rest of the world. 802.11b stations gain exclusive access to the channel they're on by settings a NAV (network allocation vector) in certain frames. Even if you have a WEP protected network the exposed MAC layer you're using will honor NAVs *from devices not on your network*. So when the same intruder who was disconnecting individual stations a few paragraphs back gets tired of that he can start issuing bent control frames that plug up the spectrum and bring your network to a crawl.
I've barely scratched the surface here. If you see a pretty diagram and a lot of marketing buzzwords, understand that the reality is much, much more grim.
I run a WISP that covers four counties. I've seen the spectrum analyzer output on the '100mw hack' for the WAP11 - 31mw in channel, 69mw of crap spattered all over 2300MHz - 2550MHz. I don't doubt the WET11 will be the same high quality product:-(
Use it for what its meant to do and don't try to run it outdoors any further than across a parking lot.
A few years ago I came across a fellow named Harry Christian on the street in Haight Asbury, right across from the used book store.
Harry had about twenty glasses of various sizes, partially filled with water, sitting on a card table, along with copies of his new CD. I spent quite a bit of time talking to him - there are apparently about a dozen players worldwide that are active at the moment and he is the only one recording.
Sorry no web site that I can mention, but I did purchase his disk - shall I contact him and see if he wouldn't mind my putting up an MP3 of his stuff?
I've been sitting here for a couple of hours dinking around with snmpwalk and MRTG trying to track down a problem in one of our cells (Wireless ISP) that is in a really ugly area in terms of interference.
A book that explains the underlying operations in excrutiating detail would be most welcome... I am going to pick it up tonight.
I run an internet provider with dial, wired, and wireless access products. We charge $34.95 for a plain ol' dial account and I don't think its enough.
Yes, you heard right, $34.95. Of course, we only aggregate customers 4:1 on the inbound T1 and the path to the net is set up to treat them very well. People who *need* dial up, I mean really need it for a VPN or Citrix session, don't mind $34.95 at all - they're thrilled to get something that works.
When Cox opens their net to us we'll be pushing something like a $80/mo cable connection to our network for home users. It'll have a single static public IP, a/29 will be available for those that want to firewall without NAT, and we'll do proper DNS for them as well. We *will* cap their monthly throughput if it gets excessive - I'm not selling 1.2 mbit throughput for $80/mo - its meant to be used in a burstable fashion.
The real big motivation in opening the network isn't competition in the realm of low prices - cable service is plenty cheap at $50 and I'd be happy if Cox unfornicated their peering/latency issues and charged 50% more. I'm excited about it because I can provide premium service on a layer 2 link that costs $30/mo and reaches places DSL and wireless will never go.
I run a small regional WISP and I rate cap my residential customers to 256kbits/sec.
We charge $30/mo for the port, no local loop since its wireless, and equipment rental is $15/mo. Those are the numbers you need to hit to get decent market penetration.
What does 256k cost the ISP?
A T1 is about $1100/mo when you're small. If you get big enough to start buying DS3s you'll cut that to about $600/mo. 256k is one sixth of a T1 so the monthly cost for 256k dedicated bandwidth is about $200 to the little guy and $100 for a large player.
I know some of you Generation Next play well in groups but suck at math. $200 cost - $30 revenue is me subsidizing a full time music trader to the tune of $170/mo.
My rate shaping at the moment is a solid 256k symetric cap 24/7. I'm working on some method of providing nasty residential service during the day (128k - 192k cap?) to keep my high margin business customers happy, then starting around 7:00 PM opening it up.
After the business customer base is gone I don't care if the T1s run 100% and individuals are using the full 5.5m/sec their wireless links can provide - just so long as they're sharing and playing well together:-)
I only provide dynamic public IP addresses to residential users. Its done with PPPoE rather than DHCP - makes the rate shaping much easier to implement - but it almost guarantees you never get the same IP address twice. I haven't yet blocked inbound traffic to reserved TCP ports but that will be the next big step.
I am sure a number of "free as in beer" whiners are going to promptly respond that I "don't get it" and that I'm "ruining the soul of the internet" with my facist rate cap.
I'd like to personally invite every one of you whiners to put up $25k of your own money, spend five months working without a paycheck, and then get back to me about facist rate shaping policies - I'll be happy to share technique:-)
Sprint PCS dies as soon as I loose site of downtown, Alltel can't find their own butt with both hands let alone bill me correctly , and I have no experience with Nextel.
Verizon on the other hand, works fine all over the metro and keeps on ticking in weird places like Quick, Iowa (population 4).
The policy says... roughly... you browse web pages and most of it comes from their cache, thereby saving them big bucks. Anything else is forbidden.
In reality I have and continue to use ssh for unix connectivity without hearing a thing from them. I've used pptp in the past when I was forced to work on Evil Empire(tm) OSes and that worked fine. I've got some GRE stuff running now between Cisco boxes on cable modem and that is fine as well.
The only thing they really watch for here is overall transfer volume. Use a gig a day every day for a week and you'll get The Phone Call. Other than this monitoring they don't have the time, energy, or hardware to observe/filter anything else.
I'd say go ahead and use it as you see fit... you're under the radar now and that radar isn't going to be seeing any capital investments over the next year or two.
Any monkey with a side cutter, a crimpmaster rj45 crimp tool, and maybe a type 110 punchdown tool can do a wonderful job of wiring a house - two cat 5 in every room, a nice ortronics patch panel in the basement, and whatever layer 2 switch you decide to run.
If you decide to use fiber you need expensive termination tooks, expensive cable, an expensive fiber access panel, expensive fiber to UTP ethernet converters, and a crazy expensive switch with fiber or a UTP switch with a media converter shelf. The only reason anyone installs fiber these days is a need for gigabit ethernet or ethernet runs that are vastly over distance for copper.
"But fiber is faster!"
So fsckin' what. Do you really have a *need* to move data faster than 12 mega*bytes* per second?
10/100 ethernet is going to be around a long, long time. I mean a really long time. Its like that plain ol' pots like - once things got to where they were useable (circa 1940) not much changed.
I'm pretty sure I am in the upper 1% of wage earners and I have a side business selling used communications gear. I have all the skills necessary to do what the article's author described. I work at home and there is a heavy design & prototype component to my job so I have lots of stuff that needs to be connected.
My elite home network contains... a Cisco 2621 router with a Catalyst 1924 switch. The 2621 handles ISDN and NAT to my cable modem, one of the two 100 mbit portson the Catalyst is used for vlan trunking, the other is reserved as a sniffer port.
You heard right folks - all the knowledge, a lot of the stuff around, and nothing here *needs* to go faster than 10 mbits.
Sorry to burst your bubble but, dear article author, you're caught in analysis paralysis - stop agonizing and get the lines in before the drywall guys come along and seal them.
If you're doing wireless and the local @Home g00ns fall on their ass immediately do the following.
Get to every apartment building with LOS to your pop. Give the building manager a free account in exchange for access to the roof & wiring closet and offer $5/mo for in building line rental.
Install Cisco Long Reach Ethernet Catalysts and Cisco 575 customer premise gear. Or insert a DSLAM vendor you're familiar with - I happen to know/love IOS so I stick with it - Paradyne might be a good choice as well.
Distribute using 5.8 gig UNI band stuff. Skip 2.4 gig - that is going to be a cat fight and you don't want the rich veins of users subject to the vagaries of the brewing broadband civil war in the ISM band.
You heard it hear first, folks. I've got four buildings in the high rent district already onboard and there are six - eight more I can see. If this really goes down I want to pick up $15k/mo in recurring revenue over the next month:-):-):-)
The last number indicates 103k of CIDR blocks are advertised from a major player - in this case its a peering connection to Sprint AS 1239.
There are quite a few more actually in use - many of them are aggregated at the borders of large ISPs.
This table overflowed the 64 meg mark a couple of years ago and its in danger of overflowing 128 meg before long.
I'd like to slap down the assertion that 'dram is cheap'. If you're an ISP running a Cisco 7206+NPE 150 with two DS3s, an ATM DS3 for DSL, and 24 T1 customers it is going to cost you a small fortune to upgrade that box to a 7206VXR to get away from the 128 meg limit on the NPE150.
Its been a long, long time since 'portable' IPs were issued and even if you get your hands on some and you manage to convince your top level providers to advertise the routes they're likely to get shot down all over the net by various aggressive filter policies.
IPv6 is even scarier - go read
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2772.txt
and understand what it means - if you get an IPv6 allocation you *can not* multihome even though there is BGP support for IPv6. This makes you, poor customer, the personal property of the carrier you first connect to and you'll *never* get rid of them, unless you're willing to renumber your whole network.
I think in Civ4 we'll see a 'foolish corporate lawyer' military unit. Just imagine opening a hut and finding that "You've released a horde of irritated slashdot readers":-)
I have a 22 mile hop using Wi-Lan 5.8 radios and Andrew 35dB dishes. The radios cost $2300 each, the dishes are $800 each, one is at 275', the other is on a little tower at 35'.
You'll need probably $20k by the time its done to get it working but you'll have no local loop cost and 600kb+/sec throughput.
I'd strongly suggest you find your local amateur radio club and ask them for help - they already know where the good towers are and they'll likely give you lots of assistance in exchange for a little bandwidth.
I've worked for one publically held company in a similar situation. Debtor in possesion financing like this is a pretty good sign that someone sees some value in Polaroid's business but it isn't sufficient to make the company a going concern.
If you read the docs filed with the court very carefully and pay particular attention to any 'turn around team' that is brought in you should be able to figure out what is going on - check the 'turn around' management carefully - they're likely the undertakers.
Uhh, as far as I've seen, the ethernet to token ring performance on the Cisco 2513 is just fine. No, you won't get wire speed 10 meg to 16 meg but it'll be plenty fast for a single workstation.
The bus speed is not the key on the 7x00 series, either, its the silicon switch thingy - if you've set things up properly it can handle most traffic via hardware (fast switching) rather than CPU (process switching)
Get a Cisco 2513 - one token ring DB9, one ethernet AUI - have them give you your own subnet. Should cost you about $650 on ebay. You'll have to twist arms with a hydraulic press though...
Are you sure the LAN trolls aren't making you get off linux by pointing a finger every time the network is dorked up? I put up with that sort of crap endlessly at a large (4k employees) company. One day I ceremoniously unplugged the linux box with my boss watching and left it down. Sure enough, that afternoon, the corporate creeps were on the phone demanding we turn off the 'linux problem'.
Diane's head would spin around and she'd spit nails when upset... I wish I would have caught the response on video:-)
In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb
I don't believe in any of this crap but Nostradamus has been remarkably accurate.
In the city of god, obviously Mecca, there will be a great thunder. Two brothers are the towers... or perhaps Osama and his many siblings. The fortress is the pentagon and we'll see which great leader succumbs.
Look at the map. What do you see? Afghanistan is bordered by...
Pakistan - muslim, nuclear, and already functionally at war with India. I'd love to hear their view on fallout hitting Islambad.
Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan - all muslim, potentially some loose nukes from USSR days, and a variety of conflicts simmer here.
Iran - our old friends from the 1980s. Do you think they've stopped working on nuclear capabilities with Saddam right next door? Not!
And a little tip of Afghanistan is close to India and China. Both nuclear powers, both likely to take an extremely dim view of fallout in their territory, and China... well... that is a rant for another day.
Look at the leader of this business. Ossama bin Laden, age 44, Saudi exile, veteran of the Soviet/Afghan war. You think you'll scare this guy rattling the nuclear sabres?
The Russians spent ten years trying to prop up a corrupt regime that was just close enough to Marxist doctrine for them to want to get involved. They poured everything they had but nukes into Afghanistan for a decade and all they got back was body bags.
The real income in Saudi Arabia has dropped from about $28k a decade ago to $7k now. You have a corrupt, top heavy government and a whole lot of disaffected people. How many of them *like* what Ossama has to say about the source of their pain? Want to find out? Just budget $6/gallon for gasoline before you engage in that experiment.
What about Israel and the Palestinians? Why does the whole arab world view anything the west gets involved in as being tied to that long running dispute?
In the eyes of muslim fundamentalists the Israeli state is an extension of the Frankish kingdom the crusaders founded. From 1095 to 1270, under the 'peace of god', Chistendom periodically shipped its young & restless off to the middle east to recover the holy land from 'infidels'.
Go and read some of Ossama's writings. He speaks constantly of the removal of 'infidels' from the land of the two cities (Saudi Arabia, Mecca & Medina respectively). Its a 900 year old battle and if one of his followers die the go straight to heaven. If they're injured and make it home they get to use the express lane on their way to the promised land. They really believe it. Sit down, quiet your mind, and imagine being ready to die to get the job done.
See the blame being shifted towards Iraq? Saddam would love something to distract his suffering people from the troubles at home - another crack at the US would be just the thing and OBL's hosts obviously don't want any special lovin' in the form of ALCM-Bs dropping onto their power grid.
The anger of clueless Amerika, a class nearly all./ readers seem to fit into based on their lack of knowledge of geopolitics and history, is a tool. Who is going to wield this double edged blade?
I pray I am not the only one that has read Misha Glenny's marvelous book on the Balkans. Learn about what happens when regional powers disintegrate before you counsel rash action.
I hope George Bush is looking for a quick, painless(for us), symbolic vent and budget dollars for that nasty ol' spying business.
Our existing infrastructure is meant to track soviet tanks and trucks moving in from the east. Military intelligence is a questionable phrase at best, ours has towering strengths in areas but its blindness in others is an obvious embarrasment to critical thinkers - look at the thousands of US citizens that had to die to make that apparent.
Dunno 'bout ya'll, but I am buying Raytheon as soon as the markets open.
Cirronet builds a cheap access point - $1000 for a developer's kit with one customer radio - and you can attach it via USB or RS232. I've got the RS232 working with FreeBSD and I hear there are linux drivers that work with the USB units.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look the Western Mux Tsunami line - I've got bridged ethernet links now that are 45 mbits over loooooong distances, and you can get 480 mbits full duplex across seven miles. Yes, its $98k by the time its up and running, but when you're whacking a $18k/mo DS3 and giving 10x the service ...
re: bozos - I am totally with you on that point - 100mw 'mods' to Linksys (Stinksys) APs that yield 31mw in channel and 69mw of crap spattered all over 2300 - 2500MHz, ATV amps modified to build 'super cells', and the like are giving the rest of us a bad name.
I run a WISP that covers five counties and I can assure you that this stuff is real. I am on a 'technical steering committee' that drives Cisco's lobbying efforts along with a handful of other industry insiders and the most of the talk around this issue went down about three months ago.
:-) :-) :-)
I think the easiest method to find 255MHz in the sub 6000MHz range would be to boot the owner/non-operators out of MMDS space, but there was also some talk about 2100MHz +/-
On the other hand, there is some mil stuff in the 3500MHz range that is pretty darned close to retirement - just take a look at http://www.alvarion.com and see the 3.5 GHz OFDM product
You *can* run 802.11b outdoors, with a lot of clients, in noisy environments - I have a dozen customers on an AP in a two mile wide valley with a bunch of other stuff - you just have to have a detailed understanding of the MAC layer and how to tune stuff to make it work. Today 95% of all WISPs are wildcatters, like dial up was in 1994. That will shake out to a handful of disciplined operators over the next few years.
802.11b customers aren't where the big bucks are, but its going to be like ethernet - living on well beyond its appointed time, due to inexpensive gear.
Any radio that bridges T1s uses 50% of the spectrum on one side, the other 50% on the other side, and transmits 100% of the time.
Its perfectly legal - look at Adtran Tracers in the ISM band, Western Mux Tsunami products with side band T1, etc.
There are so many nonsensical articles about what 802.11b can and can not do that I thought I'd set the record straight.
... well, sit down and draw yourself a map.
... I've seen DSSS signal quality go from excellent to unuseable just by flipping on a Cirronet AP in the same area.
There are eleven channels available in north america - 22MHz wide, spread from 2402 to 2483 MHz, with 5 MHz guard bands between them. Channels 1, 6, and 11 don't overlap, the others
There are many other things in 802.11b besides DSSS 802.11b cells that you 31337 kids can h4x0r - I've got Western Mux Tsunami and Adtran Tracer T1 bridges. T1s are full duplex - these types of radios split the ISM band 50/50 - one end sends with the bottom half and listens at the top, the other side is opposite, and they use 100% of the spectrum.
The other thing you'll find are FHSS systems in the ISM band. The most common is the Alvarion (previously Breezecom) Breeze Access II three meg access radios, but Cirronet's lower speed ISP products is starting to appear in rural areas.
If you're working inside a building with full duplex T1 bridges or a hot FHSS somewhere outside its definitely going to make a difference, and that goes double if you're running an 802.11b system outside. Putting one of these things near an 802.11b AP is basically like sand blasting a soup cracker
Assuming you've got no problems to deal with other than your 802.11b, other's 802.11b, and building layout you've still go trouble.
The 802.11b MAC layer is *broken*. If I pull up and start listening on a channel you're using, even if you've got WEP enabled, I can see your mac addresses and I can *issue disconnect requests* after forging your MAC and the AP *will honor the disconnect*. WEP is the equivalent of an ESP (encapsulated security payload) in IPsec and it protects your data, but the MAC layer needs something like the IPsec AH(authentication header) so that an intruder can't manipulate the MAC layer.
Building systems always have dead spots. Always. 2.4 gig bounces like crazy when there is sheet metal (HVAC duct work) is in the area. You get reflected signals (multipath) which causes corrupt frames, you get dead spots due to the signal being blocked, etc, etc. You can add further misery by trying to use an AP with 'diversity'. Drop the word from your vocabulary - its 'perversity' mode - just take the time to monitor FCS errors on an AP with this enabled and you'll know what I mean - turn that stuff on in a situation where both antennas can see the same signal and you'll toast 50% of incoming frames *every time*.
The 802.11b MAC layer is *broken*. If you want detailed knowledge I'd strongly suggest a read of the OReilly's 802.11 Wireless Networks book, but the game goes something like this. The channel you're in is a *shared* resource - that means you share with the rest of the world. 802.11b stations gain exclusive access to the channel they're on by settings a NAV (network allocation vector) in certain frames. Even if you have a WEP protected network the exposed MAC layer you're using will honor NAVs *from devices not on your network*. So when the same intruder who was disconnecting individual stations a few paragraphs back gets tired of that he can start issuing bent control frames that plug up the spectrum and bring your network to a crawl.
I've barely scratched the surface here. If you see a pretty diagram and a lot of marketing buzzwords, understand that the reality is much, much more grim.
I run a WISP that covers four counties. I've seen the spectrum analyzer output on the '100mw hack' for the WAP11 - 31mw in channel, 69mw of crap spattered all over 2300MHz - 2550MHz. I don't doubt the WET11 will be the same high quality product
Use it for what its meant to do and don't try to run it outdoors any further than across a parking lot.
A few years ago I came across a fellow named Harry Christian on the street in Haight Asbury, right across from the used book store.
Harry had about twenty glasses of various sizes, partially filled with water, sitting on a card table, along with copies of his new CD. I spent quite a bit of time talking to him - there are apparently about a dozen players worldwide that are active at the moment and he is the only one recording.
Sorry no web site that I can mention, but I did purchase his disk - shall I contact him and see if he wouldn't mind my putting up an MP3 of his stuff?
I've been sitting here for a couple of hours dinking around with snmpwalk and MRTG trying to track down a problem in one of our cells (Wireless ISP) that is in a really ugly area in terms of interference.
A book that explains the underlying operations in excrutiating detail would be most welcome
I run an internet provider with dial, wired, and wireless access products. We charge $34.95 for a plain ol' dial account and I don't think its enough.
/29 will be available for those that want to firewall without NAT, and we'll do proper DNS for them as well. We *will* cap their monthly throughput if it gets excessive - I'm not selling 1.2 mbit throughput for $80/mo - its meant to be used in a burstable fashion.
Yes, you heard right, $34.95. Of course, we only aggregate customers 4:1 on the inbound T1 and the path to the net is set up to treat them very well. People who *need* dial up, I mean really need it for a VPN or Citrix session, don't mind $34.95 at all - they're thrilled to get something that works.
When Cox opens their net to us we'll be pushing something like a $80/mo cable connection to our network for home users. It'll have a single static public IP, a
The real big motivation in opening the network isn't competition in the realm of low prices - cable service is plenty cheap at $50 and I'd be happy if Cox unfornicated their peering/latency issues and charged 50% more. I'm excited about it because I can provide premium service on a layer 2 link that costs $30/mo and reaches places DSL and wireless will never go.
I run a small regional WISP and I rate cap my residential customers to 256kbits/sec.
:-)
:-)
We charge $30/mo for the port, no local loop since its wireless, and equipment rental is $15/mo. Those are the numbers you need to hit to get decent market penetration.
What does 256k cost the ISP?
A T1 is about $1100/mo when you're small. If you get big enough to start buying DS3s you'll cut that to about $600/mo. 256k is one sixth of a T1 so the monthly cost for 256k dedicated bandwidth is about $200 to the little guy and $100 for a large player.
I know some of you Generation Next play well in groups but suck at math. $200 cost - $30 revenue is me subsidizing a full time music trader to the tune of $170/mo.
My rate shaping at the moment is a solid 256k symetric cap 24/7. I'm working on some method of providing nasty residential service during the day (128k - 192k cap?) to keep my high margin business customers happy, then starting around 7:00 PM opening it up.
After the business customer base is gone I don't care if the T1s run 100% and individuals are using the full 5.5m/sec their wireless links can provide - just so long as they're sharing and playing well together
I only provide dynamic public IP addresses to residential users. Its done with PPPoE rather than DHCP - makes the rate shaping much easier to implement - but it almost guarantees you never get the same IP address twice. I haven't yet blocked inbound traffic to reserved TCP ports but that will be the next big step.
I am sure a number of "free as in beer" whiners are going to promptly respond that I "don't get it" and that I'm "ruining the soul of the internet" with my facist rate cap.
I'd like to personally invite every one of you whiners to put up $25k of your own money, spend five months working without a paycheck, and then get back to me about facist rate shaping policies - I'll be happy to share technique
Sprint PCS dies as soon as I loose site of downtown, Alltel can't find their own butt with both hands let alone bill me correctly , and I have no experience with Nextel.
Verizon on the other hand, works fine all over the metro and keeps on ticking in weird places like Quick, Iowa (population 4).
You sad, twisted little man. M$ and bspears-nude are obviously a perfect match, but for the less deprived
rm -rf
is like to be overwritten by:
penelope-cruz.jpg
The policy says
In reality I have and continue to use ssh for unix connectivity without hearing a thing from them. I've used pptp in the past when I was forced to work on Evil Empire(tm) OSes and that worked fine. I've got some GRE stuff running now between Cisco boxes on cable modem and that is fine as well.
The only thing they really watch for here is overall transfer volume. Use a gig a day every day for a week and you'll get The Phone Call. Other than this monitoring they don't have the time, energy, or hardware to observe/filter anything else.
I'd say go ahead and use it as you see fit
Any monkey with a side cutter, a crimpmaster rj45 crimp tool, and maybe a type 110 punchdown tool can do a wonderful job of wiring a house - two cat 5 in every room, a nice ortronics patch panel in the basement, and whatever layer 2 switch you decide to run.
... a Cisco 2621 router with a Catalyst 1924 switch. The 2621 handles ISDN and NAT to my cable modem, one of the two 100 mbit portson the Catalyst is used for vlan trunking, the other is reserved as a sniffer port.
If you decide to use fiber you need expensive termination tooks, expensive cable, an expensive fiber access panel, expensive fiber to UTP ethernet converters, and a crazy expensive switch with fiber or a UTP switch with a media converter shelf. The only reason anyone installs fiber these days is a need for gigabit ethernet or ethernet runs that are vastly over distance for copper.
"But fiber is faster!"
So fsckin' what. Do you really have a *need* to move data faster than 12 mega*bytes* per second?
10/100 ethernet is going to be around a long, long time. I mean a really long time. Its like that plain ol' pots like - once things got to where they were useable (circa 1940) not much changed.
I'm pretty sure I am in the upper 1% of wage earners and I have a side business selling used communications gear. I have all the skills necessary to do what the article's author described. I work at home and there is a heavy design & prototype component to my job so I have lots of stuff that needs to be connected.
My elite home network contains
You heard right folks - all the knowledge, a lot of the stuff around, and nothing here *needs* to go faster than 10 mbits.
Sorry to burst your bubble but, dear article author, you're caught in analysis paralysis - stop agonizing and get the lines in before the drywall guys come along and seal them.
If you're doing wireless and the local @Home g00ns fall on their ass immediately do the following.
Get to every apartment building with LOS to your pop. Give the building manager a free account in exchange for access to the roof & wiring closet and offer $5/mo for in building line rental.
Install Cisco Long Reach Ethernet Catalysts and Cisco 575 customer premise gear. Or insert a DSLAM vendor you're familiar with - I happen to know/love IOS so I stick with it - Paradyne might be a good choice as well.
Distribute using 5.8 gig UNI band stuff. Skip 2.4 gig - that is going to be a cat fight and you don't want the rich veins of users subject to the vagaries of the brewing broadband civil war in the ISM band.
You heard it hear first, folks. I've got four buildings in the high rent district already onboard and there are six - eight more I can see. If this really goes down I want to pick up $15k/mo in recurring revenue over the next month
A quick look today shows that:
c2650_1#show ip bgp summ
144.228.242.180 4 1239 290068 5592 841986 0 0 3d21h 103572
The last number indicates 103k of CIDR blocks are advertised from a major player - in this case its a peering connection to Sprint AS 1239.
There are quite a few more actually in use - many of them are aggregated at the borders of large ISPs.
This table overflowed the 64 meg mark a couple of years ago and its in danger of overflowing 128 meg before long.
I'd like to slap down the assertion that 'dram is cheap'. If you're an ISP running a Cisco 7206+NPE 150 with two DS3s, an ATM DS3 for DSL, and 24 T1 customers it is going to cost you a small fortune to upgrade that box to a 7206VXR to get away from the 128 meg limit on the NPE150.
Its been a long, long time since 'portable' IPs were issued and even if you get your hands on some and you manage to convince your top level providers to advertise the routes they're likely to get shot down all over the net by various aggressive filter policies.
IPv6 is even scarier - go read
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2772.txt
and understand what it means - if you get an IPv6 allocation you *can not* multihome even though there is BGP support for IPv6. This makes you, poor customer, the personal property of the carrier you first connect to and you'll *never* get rid of them, unless you're willing to renumber your whole network.
I think in Civ4 we'll see a 'foolish corporate lawyer' military unit. Just imagine opening a hut and finding that "You've released a horde of irritated slashdot readers"
I have a 22 mile hop using Wi-Lan 5.8 radios and Andrew 35dB dishes. The radios cost $2300 each, the dishes are $800 each, one is at 275', the other is on a little tower at 35'.
You'll need probably $20k by the time its done to get it working but you'll have no local loop cost and 600kb+/sec throughput.
I'd strongly suggest you find your local amateur radio club and ask them for help - they already know where the good towers are and they'll likely give you lots of assistance in exchange for a little bandwidth.
I've worked for one publically held company in a similar situation. Debtor in possesion financing like this is a pretty good sign that someone sees some value in Polaroid's business but it isn't sufficient to make the company a going concern.
If you read the docs filed with the court very carefully and pay particular attention to any 'turn around team' that is brought in you should be able to figure out what is going on - check the 'turn around' management carefully - they're likely the undertakers.
Uhh, as far as I've seen, the ethernet to token ring performance on the Cisco 2513 is just fine. No, you won't get wire speed 10 meg to 16 meg but it'll be plenty fast for a single workstation.
The bus speed is not the key on the 7x00 series, either, its the silicon switch thingy - if you've set things up properly it can handle most traffic via hardware (fast switching) rather than CPU (process switching)
Get a Cisco 2513 - one token ring DB9, one ethernet AUI - have them give you your own subnet. Should cost you about $650 on ebay. You'll have to twist arms with a hydraulic press though
Are you sure the LAN trolls aren't making you get off linux by pointing a finger every time the network is dorked up? I put up with that sort of crap endlessly at a large (4k employees) company. One day I ceremoniously unplugged the linux box with my boss watching and left it down. Sure enough, that afternoon, the corporate creeps were on the phone demanding we turn off the 'linux problem'.
Diane's head would spin around and she'd spit nails when upset
In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb
... or perhaps Osama and his many siblings. The fortress is the pentagon and we'll see which great leader succumbs.
I don't believe in any of this crap but Nostradamus has been remarkably accurate.
In the city of god, obviously Mecca, there will be a great thunder. Two brothers are the towers
Nuke them into the stone age indeed! I can tell 99% of /. readers flunked geography ... too much Nintendo is my guess.
s t/ afghanistan/afghanistan.htm
...
... well ... that is a rant for another day.
./ readers seem to fit into based on their lack of knowledge of geopolitics and history, is a tool. Who is going to wield this double edged blade?
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/mapshells/middle_ea
Look at the map. What do you see? Afghanistan is bordered by
Pakistan - muslim, nuclear, and already functionally at war with India. I'd love to hear their view on fallout hitting Islambad.
Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan - all muslim, potentially some loose nukes from USSR days, and a variety of conflicts simmer here.
Iran - our old friends from the 1980s. Do you think they've stopped working on nuclear capabilities with Saddam right next door? Not!
And a little tip of Afghanistan is close to India and China. Both nuclear powers, both likely to take an extremely dim view of fallout in their territory, and China
Look at the leader of this business. Ossama bin Laden, age 44, Saudi exile, veteran of the Soviet/Afghan war. You think you'll scare this guy rattling the nuclear sabres?
The Russians spent ten years trying to prop up a corrupt regime that was just close enough to Marxist doctrine for them to want to get involved. They poured everything they had but nukes into Afghanistan for a decade and all they got back was body bags.
The real income in Saudi Arabia has dropped from about $28k a decade ago to $7k now. You have a corrupt, top heavy government and a whole lot of disaffected people. How many of them *like* what Ossama has to say about the source of their pain? Want to find out? Just budget $6/gallon for gasoline before you engage in that experiment.
What about Israel and the Palestinians? Why does the whole arab world view anything the west gets involved in as being tied to that long running dispute?
In the eyes of muslim fundamentalists the Israeli state is an extension of the Frankish kingdom the crusaders founded. From 1095 to 1270, under the 'peace of god', Chistendom periodically shipped its young & restless off to the middle east to recover the holy land from 'infidels'.
Go and read some of Ossama's writings. He speaks constantly of the removal of 'infidels' from the land of the two cities (Saudi Arabia, Mecca & Medina respectively). Its a 900 year old battle and if one of his followers die the go straight to heaven. If they're injured and make it home they get to use the express lane on their way to the promised land. They really believe it. Sit down, quiet your mind, and imagine being ready to die to get the job done.
See the blame being shifted towards Iraq? Saddam would love something to distract his suffering people from the troubles at home - another crack at the US would be just the thing and OBL's hosts obviously don't want any special lovin' in the form of ALCM-Bs dropping onto their power grid.
The anger of clueless Amerika, a class nearly all
I pray I am not the only one that has read Misha Glenny's marvelous book on the Balkans. Learn about what happens when regional powers disintegrate before you counsel rash action.
I hope George Bush is looking for a quick, painless(for us), symbolic vent and budget dollars for that nasty ol' spying business.
Our existing infrastructure is meant to track soviet tanks and trucks moving in from the east. Military intelligence is a questionable phrase at best, ours has towering strengths in areas but its blindness in others is an obvious embarrasment to critical thinkers - look at the thousands of US citizens that had to die to make that apparent.
Dunno 'bout ya'll, but I am buying Raytheon as soon as the markets open.
http://www.cirronet.com
Cirronet builds a cheap access point - $1000 for a developer's kit with one customer radio - and you can attach it via USB or RS232. I've got the RS232 working with FreeBSD and I hear there are linux drivers that work with the USB units.
Perhaps this will change things for Skylarov