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Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

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Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#31

Post by 01Michael10 »

chrj wrote: post #27
vicpara wrote: post #20

Community fiber optics is the way to go. In Bucharest, in 2000, when fiber was really expensive a small community, like a block of apartments, would get much better quality service by sharing a business type of connection than buying for each apartment a "home/personal" service. The initial cost is that someone needs to step up, build the infrastructure and start the sharing service. In Western countries this might b…

How would these Internet "coop's" deal with the tech support? I would worry that regular users would constantly have all sorts of problems with spyware, viruses, cheap APs/routers and broken network configurations.

I am sure their would be an enterprising local computer tech the community Internet "coop" could contract with and recommend for their users.

Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#32

Post by skorgu »

BystanderX wrote: post #23
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #12

I may be missing something but is the suggestion that local municipalities dig their last mile and run their own fiber? That's ... Not likely to succeed surely? I assume the actual dig out is a specialised job, with no private hire market, the back haul ... To where and to whom? Do most towns know where their nearest telehouse/interconnect is? The support tasks are difficult - and scale pretty well, but not if you ha…

I recall reading about this being done, honestly. The community actually running the lines. I wish I remembered where, I'd link it.

There's a big ol thread [0] on this in NANOG with lots of juicy implementation details. I'd hesitate to use the word 'consensus' in relation to a mailing list in any way but my take home is that if the municipality sticks to providing L1 (i.e. a physical fiber as opposed to an 'internet connection') it requires a manageable level of expertise and still vastly lowers the cost of entry for ISPs to provide the rest of the stack.

[0] http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2014-July/068527.ht...

Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#33

Post by k3oni »

vicpara wrote: post #20

Community fiber optics is the way to go. In Bucharest, in 2000, when fiber was really expensive a small community, like a block of apartments, would get much better quality service by sharing a business type of connection than buying for each apartment a "home/personal" service. The initial cost is that someone needs to step up, build the infrastructure and start the sharing service. In Western countries this might b…

I remember this, happened across country actually and we had one in our smaller town but the infrastructure between apartment blocks was built using coax instead of fiber.

A few years later the guy that started it initially(96-97??) wrapped everything in the first CATV local internet and tv network which runs even today.

Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#34

Post by vicpara »

chrj wrote: post #27
vicpara wrote: post #20

Community fiber optics is the way to go. In Bucharest, in 2000, when fiber was really expensive a small community, like a block of apartments, would get much better quality service by sharing a business type of connection than buying for each apartment a "home/personal" service. The initial cost is that someone needs to step up, build the infrastructure and start the sharing service. In Western countries this might b…

How would these Internet "coop's" deal with the tech support? I would worry that regular users would constantly have all sorts of problems with spyware, viruses, cheap APs/routers and broken network configurations.

There are indeed a lot of problems with individual users. Small networks as such were generally maintained by sysadmins like teenagers/students/grads which sometime fix these config problems for a small amount of money. Plus, good tech guys were always requested by neighbours to fix problems as such, change a HDD, change a cable or a faulty plug.

It is indeed a local community type of network. Plus, in every family there is a teenager willing to step into network configurations. Teenagers, students and young professionals were those that made these networks so popular because they were demanding high quality connection and they were tech savvy. People like them are generally willing to do the hard work of learning something about setting a network IP to a router or AP. Setting a DHCP server in your network was something that released a lot of pressure in my network. Mac addresses were also used quite often to block unauthorised devices from accessing the network. You had to call your sysadmin and send / spell over the phone your mac address.

When everything was at very beginning, during storms a lot of equipments connecting two blocks were getting burned, UTP cat 5 cables broken and required fixing. People who started this kind of networks were to become country's first big generation of top notch dev ops who faced networks growing from 3 users connected by a BNC cable to thousands of users distributed all over a large neighbourhood.

Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#35

Post by xhrpost »

> "People love to complain about the speed of their Internet access and with good reason."

I'm sorry, but no, in my experience, they don't. I can't think off hand of any non-tech person in my area complain about their Internet speed. People pay $42/mo here for 9/2Meg and because it will play Netflix and get them on Facebook, it's good enough. I'm not arguing against a fiber upgrade, I'd love to see it, but in the end, non-techy people don't seem to see much advantage. You're not going to build a community network unless the community is engaged. How other non American countries have done it I don't know, how you get that level of engagement in the most individualized culture in the world is beyond me. Sadly, I feel the only way this would really happen in most of urban America would be to beat the incumbents on price. Which sounds possible, but not by much, especially with the fact that if you don't offer bundled cable-vision, people then have to break their other provider's bundle and pay more for cable elsewhere so the difference is even less. I hate to be pessimistic about it (I think gig everywhere could have huge economic advantages), but this is a major hurdle. People often hate their providers, but it's often due to price or customer service, not speed.

Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#36

Post by rasz_pl »

vicpara wrote: post #20

Community fiber optics is the way to go. In Bucharest, in 2000, when fiber was really expensive a small community, like a block of apartments, would get much better quality service by sharing a business type of connection than buying for each apartment a "home/personal" service. The initial cost is that someone needs to step up, build the infrastructure and start the sharing service. In Western countries this might b…

No seed accelerator? No big name co-founder? No funding round? No buzzword-laden bullshit talks at fashionable conferences (ted)? What about 'professional' ex-lawyer CEO paid >$100K with no clue about networking? Saas? Cloud? can this even scale? Where is the growth?

One sys admin? 500 homes? bootstrapping? low prices? What are you? some hippie commie geek man slave? You want to actually work for a living of something?

Re: Hate Your ISP? Maybe You Need Community Fiber

#40

Post by Millennium »

underdown wrote: post #37

I'd love to have fiber dropped to my home but this article glosses over the privacy implications of having a government entity have direct access to everything you do online.

Indeed. Taxpayer-funded broadband has its allure, but the risks of something going very wrong with private data are much higher, in terms of what is at stake if not in terms of odds of a breach.
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