trail balloon... or rick's folly...
Network Administrator
netadmin at sunflower.org
Fri Oct 19 04:29:09 CDT 2001
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
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