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NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

nycmesh.net

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Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#161

Post by bogomipz »

_m_a_t_t_ wrote: post #145
bogomipz wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. It's still not clear to me how MYCMesh users would be able to reach the internet. They state in their FAQ they are not an ISP which leaves me to believe they don't buy transit from anyone. But looking at that peering link there are only 122K prefixes being advertised at DE-CIX NY and NYCMesh only peering with 14 other ASes there. That would leave large parts of the internet unreachable. Perhaps Hurricane Elec…

packet.net is main transit provider, and think there are a couple alternatives now as well

Ah thats the bare metal cloud provider. They seem like a cool and interesting company too. I'm glad to hear they're involved. Cheers.

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#162

Post by markn951 »

jdanp wrote: post #135
markn951 wrote: post #3

Stuff like this make me long to live in NYC. Only city in the US with the density, technical expertise, and money for this kind of thing to happen.

NYC is a nice place to believe in in an idealistic way, but crummy when it comes to the nitty gritty function of the city. Source: I live here

Oh :(

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#163

Post by remar »

jdanp wrote: post #135
markn951 wrote: post #3

Stuff like this make me long to live in NYC. Only city in the US with the density, technical expertise, and money for this kind of thing to happen.

NYC is a nice place to believe in in an idealistic way, but crummy when it comes to the nitty gritty function of the city. Source: I live here

Could you maybe elaborate on some examples you have in mind?

I'm strongly considering accepting a job offer for a company in NY since I'm starting to get bored of living in Seattle. I figure moving to NY would mean being surrounded by more people and having more opportunities to collaborate on projects like these.

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#164

Post by mightybyte »

_m_a_t_t_ wrote: post #141
mightybyte wrote: post #25

I was participating in NYC Mesh for awhile, but eventually I had to unplug because I got notices from my ISP about copyright infringement and I didn't want my internet access to get shut off. So sad. I really want this effort to succeed.

This isnt much of an issue now that NYC Mesh is providing egress in place of an ISP. There aren't many individuals left broadcasting their own ISP connection out. It sounds like you were sharing your own ISP connection a while ago before this was the case, mightbyte?

It's been awhile, so you could be right. I just bought the router from the NYC Mesh people and hooked it up to my internet connection thinking it would be a nice way to give access to people in need and support what I consider to be a powerful idea and a worthy cause. It was never a big enough priority for me to put effort into figuring out precisely what was going on. If all NYC Mesh traffic in and out of my ISP goes through a VPN, maybe I should give it a try again.

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#165

Post by Rjevski »

minkiu wrote: post #156
Rjevski wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I know of, and I don't see a major business-case for it. The UK ISP market is much better than its US counterpart (we have no Comcast, for starters) so I'm not sure there would be enough demand for a wireless ISP. But if you have any ideas on how to make this profitable, I'm up for it. Email in my profile.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but ain't Relish ( https://www1.relish.net/ ) a WISP? If you guys gather around to chat let me know, I might be interested in participating as well.

They use LTE which doesn't really scale well and their reviews have been less than stellar.

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#166

Post by amazon_not »

Timmah wrote: post #137
fixthenet wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Josh from the Community Broadband Project here. Would be happy to answer any questions about our mission and progress in LA. I'm no regular, but we just got a bunch of traffic from Hacker News and I'm here to spread the gospel. NYC Mesh is doing very cool stuff--we wish them the best. We're in touch with a few other community ISPs who are growing organically in competition against big incumbent ISPs. It's inspiring.…

I don't know if laying cable is one of your biggest challenges, but I assume it would be along with right-of-way. What do you think about the idea of using the sewer system to lay either fiber or 10+gb copper? Before you think about how gross that is, consider the advancements in drone robotics. You would need to devise a cable-laying robot that could traverse the sewer via remote control. Mount fixtures to the top o…

Rule #1: Never install new copper in the outside plan.

That being said, there are companies specializing in installing fiber cables into sewers. They use tracked robots to install steel bands inside the pipes that keep the fiber cable in place. It's not cheap, but it is cheaper than ripping open the streets in a city.

There are also techniques to install fiber cable into water pipes.

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#167

Post by amazon_not »

Timmah wrote: post #153
SECProto wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Water utilities are (justifiably) very protective of their infrastructure. Justifiable because of the extreme expense in closing a street, excavating, and repairing anything that happens to their buried infrastructure. I've seen the one in my city reject a stormwater pipe because of a couple small pieces of crusher dust. I can't see them being positive towards the deliberate installation of another biofilm-forming-su…

I don't disagree. I think that a full mitigation plan could help. For example showing that fiber can be easily chopped up if a pipe clogged. Maybe biofilm could be mitigated with an electric charge on a conductive outer sheath? I can't see how a single cable or 2 would ever require digging into the street.

Even a single cable in the sewer can require digging up the street if the cable causes an obstruction in the pipe.

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#168

Post by amazon_not »

fixthenet wrote: post #158
ucaetano wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Josh! Do you buy any transit at all or rely solely on peering? Who do you peer with, and how easy has it been to find peers, due to the huge asymmetry in traffic? Do you have any CDN caches deployed (GGC, Netflix, etc.)?

Great tech questions. Right now, in our beta/test network, we're receiving DIA service to a remote server location and that's it. No peering, no CDNs. Our next steps are to increase the bandwidth of our DIA, since that's more cost effective at our current scale than we'd benefit by peering. The step after that is to swap that DIA for transport and then colocate in DTLA to find peers. CDN caches often require a minimu…

A Netflix cache appliance isn't dependent on the number of customers, it's on dependent on the amount of traffic from Netflix. You don't need 5000 Netflix customers, you need 5 Gbps of peak traffic to qualify.

However that isn't your only option. You can just peer with Netflix, they have an open peering policy.

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#169

Post by amazon_not »

_m_a_t_t_ wrote: post #146
amazon_not wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall the NYCmesh people having free bandwidth from an employer or sponsor. That obviously helps. Not exactly scalable or replicable tho.

There was a donation of bandwidth for supernode 1, but the cost of that bandwidth is insignificant relative to other costs. The current model is scalable. Supernode 3 is launching in the next week or so and Supernode 4 will be following it soon.

How are you covering costs?

Re: NYC Mesh – community-owned network to replace your current internet connection

#170

Post by amazon_not »

mojomark wrote: post #160
mileycyrusXOXO wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wanted to say thank you for explaining this. I've read about this before, but I feel like something finally clicked when reading your comment.

Don't worry, most people don't understand the physical infrastructure of the internet. However, from my understanding, a direct connection to the internet backbone is what gives tier q ISP's their God-like monopolizing power in a given region (like Comcast in most parts of Baltimore city). However, the backbone nodes require maintenance, so the fee to connect directly is expensive. You can't simply move next to a bac…

> However, from my understanding, a direct connection to the internet backbone is what gives tier q ISP's their God-like monopolizing power in a given region (like Comcast in most parts of Baltimore city).

No, the reason Comcast and other incumbents dominate is that they built out the last mile infrastructure. The backbone costs are a minor expense.

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