trail balloon... or rick's folly...

[Network Administrator]

Everybody,
My name is Rick Palmer-I'm a net admin at Sunflower Community Network 
in KC. http://www.sunflower.org We're a non-profit ISP and have been 
going since 1994.   We started out at KCPT and outgrew the facility. 
We have no profit motive,  salaries are substandard and all that 
kinda stuff. This isn't some commercial angle or scam.

THE SETUP
Sunflower's only real problems stem from the fact that we can't get 
good reliable service from the phone companies.  Its blatant 
anti-competitive crap.  All the major providers of local dial tone 
use the same procedural ways of not providing -customers that compete 
with them- the same service they give themselves.  There are endless 
examples but this last year MCI/Worldcom raised our costs for phone 
lines by $3000 on a $6000 a month bill (now nearly $10,000 including 
taxes) by applying Subscriber Line Charges out of the blue.  They 
aren't required to do this it is totally optional.  On top of that we 
don't even use the services that this charge is supposed to be used 
for.  This is the modem tax that we all pooo poo'd.  It caused us to 
raise our yearly membership from $79 a year to $99 a year.  We're not 
happy cause we were working hard to lower the price.  Its been this 
sorta thing from the beginning in 1994...and its put many a 
commercial ISP outa business.  This is about the corporate giants 
consolidating and monopolizing.  I'm prolly preaching the choir...I 
hope I am.

THE FOLLY
With that in mind, I'd like to run this by you'all.    I read about 
this sorta thing a couple years ago but the expense was prohibitive. 
I have a gut feeling that this could be the future of community based 
networking.    Real gorilla networking.    We'd like to use patchwork 
of home built high speed connections to "wire" the city.  Over the 
last couple years several things have happened that make it 
affordable...? Mostly the ideas have been refined which brought 
equipment costs down-and the wireless standard has evolved and become 
available at low cost.  We know how to do point to point DSL using 
the phone companies but building it ourselves...etc.

The one thing piece that is missing is a way to deploy it.  It would 
take a bunch of volunteer hobbyist types who would get high speed 
access to their house  via point to point wireless, home built DSL 
connections or other creative connections.   They would set up local 
wireless nodes to give access to the neighborhood.  (802.11 standard)

My notion is that Sunflower would find funding for it.  Maybe we 
could charge a small $20 a year of something for an account?  I don't 
know...  I would expect that we'd set up a committee of some kind to 
sort out these issues.   I expect there might be government money in 
it too.   But it is irrelevant without that small band of gorilla 
networkers in the field really making it happen.

Any thoughts?  Anyone care?  Sunflower will continue to slug it out 
against the corporate giants but it would be nice to find a way to 
take the fight to them..........

rick palmer
network administrator
sunflower community network
kansas city's non-profit
network access project
since 1994