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

[David Rush]

Rick:

Sounds like a fun idea to me.  I'm not convinced that it's economically 
viable, but you won't know until you at least do some planning.

So you're proposing 802.11b (aka wireless Ethernet) "neighborhood access 
nodes", with some high-speed connection.  One good thing about this is that 
it should be easy to try out - no large infrastructure to build out, just 
some 802.11b gear.

Any projections of how many "neighbors" in a typical neighborhood you could 
serve?  Of course that really depends on a lot of things, but any 
guesses?  It would take a LOT of nodes to blanket the city, but you've got 
to start somewhere.

You'd need to carefully read the terms of service with the DSL, cable 
modem, or whatever is used to "feed" the 802.11b access node.  The provider 
of that might not take a shine to your attacking his customer base.

Also, I assume you're assuming (how's that for going out on a limb?) 11 
Mbps 802.11b, rather than any of the other 802.11 flavors.

I wonder how many people are doing this kind of thing right now (even with 
some Cat 5 running between homes), just to share a DSL connection with 
their neighbors?

David

At 8/27/01 10:15 AM -0500, you wrote:
>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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