Forget Comcast. Here’s a DIY Approach to Internet Access
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You have the freedom to use the network for any purpose as long as you don’t harm the operation of the network itself, the rights of other users, or the principles of neutrality that allow contents and services to flow without deliberate interference.
You have the right to understand the network and its components, and to share knowledge of its mechanisms and principles.
You have the right to offer services and content to the network on your own terms.
You have the right to join the network, and the obligation to extend this set of rights to anyone according to these same terms.
It is unlikely anyone in the network has the rights to the copyrighted material being exchanged. There may be some exceptions, but you'd have to dig for them, in an extremely invasive and non-neutral way.
Also, copyright infringement is nothing like property theft, mostly because copy & paste doesn't have the same effects as cut & paste. Stop using this broken analogy, it only hurts the debate.
You could argue that taking all the bandwidth is harming the network.
> or the principles of neutrality that allow contents and services to flow without deliberate interference.
As long as no service was prioritised, e.g. every user gets an equal fraction of the bandwidth, then it is still neutral.
Anyway, i find the title odd, because at the end of things it's still plugged into the Telefonica/Comcast/Whatever. So, what's the point?
This basically describes a community/small-business ISP, nothing special.
Not an unuseful reference to have.
- guifi.net (you can visit the website for more info) is a non-profit foundation to support the development of an open, user-owned network.
- Users, alone or by groups buy networking gear (nodes) that connects them to other nodes.
- The result is a mesh network between all those nodes. Guifi.net develops and mantains (free-software based) software to manage the network. They have a website that centralizes information, manages the private IP space, and provides firmwares for the supported gear.
- The network may be used for any purpose. If you want to build a VPN between two physical locations that both have guifi.net connevtivity you don't need to go to public internet. Aside from maintaining the networking gear, there are no fees either.
- Getting internet connectivity is possible. You "just" need someone giving you an "exit gateway. This can be a friend with guifi.net connectivity AND a traditional telefonica/comcast connection. You can also buy internet access directly from the carriers at the CatNIX peering center (the foundation has laid out fiber connecting to that exchange). I don't know the fees.
It is a cool project, but I can see how users can get unhappy if they pay for a node under the premise of "free connectivity" only to find themselves on a (quite large) private mesh network.
This is by the same guy who did the Aero startup. The large broadcasting companies were completely threatened by it.
Interested to see what happens with Guifi.net and Starry.
One is an ISP, run as a cooperative, the other is a company trying to parlay hardware innovation into a monopoly.
You are correct about business model, access and governance. Yet the similarities go beyond just being in the same industry.
Similarities include:
1. Both compete with & fill an ISP last mile void. a. Guifi - Access to the internet b. Starry - Access to the Gigabit internet
2. Both are the acting as ISPs for their users.
3. While not the same, there are architectural similarities. Wireless, communication nodes, etc.
My main point is figuring out where the other end of the line is, at the original ISP, or beyond that. And please forgive my lack of vocabulary, I have limited networks knowledge.
In my experience the way this works is that we buy a leased fiber connection - say 1GBPS, usually terminated either in a regular datacenter or in a business park somewhere. Sometimes you're buying that line from the same entity that is also selling residential Internet access in nearby neighborhoods (IE CenturyLink) but the business group you're dealing with is almost entirely distinct from the residential Internet service group.
1GBPS will go further than you think - you can put 700-800 heavy usage customers (cord cutters, college students, etc) on a 1GBPS link and never (or very rarely) max it out. Selling higher speed plans doesn't really increase the max throughput on the network either, except in fairly predictable 'bands'. That seems unintuitive, but most people don't really increase their Internet usage depending on the speed of the connection (other than at a few thresholds, IE going from <1mbps to something that allows cable-cutting) so selling a faster connection just gets them their data faster and frees up your capacity for the next request.
You would think that at least 50% of people would be watching Netflix at the same time each night, but as of yet that doesn't seem to be the case. (At least not on any of the networks that I've been familiar with, which are in pretty tech-savvy areas like I mentioned, with heavy users.) It also helps that you can get one of Netflix's caching servers (can't remember what they're called) once you hit a certain threshold of traffic to their network.
The key though is that the more customers you aggregate the less traffic you can plan for per customer. So for example if you have 100 customers you might need to budget your network at 4-5mbps/customer to make it through peak times without slowing every one down too bad, while if you have 1000 customer you can get by with ~1.5 mbps per customer.
How many people are you going to service per point of access?
How are you going to deliver connectivity to all your points of access?
1) I've used Cambium and Ubiquiti and several others. Ubiquiti is hard to avoid because it's so damn cheap and it does work reasonably well, although Cambium is noticeably more robust. The latest stuff coming out is fixed 4G LTE, several companies pushing that gear in to the WISP space and I suspect that's where things will start to take off.
2) 30-50 for Cambium and Ubiquiti APs. Fewer if possible. On a large network the APs tend to be the bottle neck.
3) Fiber to primary POPs and then high capacity licensed wireless backhauls 2 to maybe 3 towers deep in the network. Depending on the local weather it's not unrealistic to get a licensed link that can support 800mbps to maybe 1.2 gbps over 3 to maybe 5 miles.
https://www.alliedmedia.org/dctp/digitalstewards
Something like 70% of Detroiters lack net access and this group is slowly trying to change that. They could be better organized about asking for outside help. If you've got an old router or want to just send them a buck it goes towards putting more families on the Internet. They're also looking for developers to write programs for specific community needs, most of them are hardware people.
But this may prove to not be scalable. It's almost certainly against most terms of service for those that actually pay to connect to the internet. Of course, I'd say "if everyone connected this way, where would the internet come from?" but then they'd all be connected anyway...
How? Though I totally agree with the general idea that wireless is the way to go. You can dramatically reduce build-out costs by just building fiber to the node and point-to-point wireless for the last hop.
A lot of people shared their internet bandwidth which here in Spain was not illegal or blocked by the ISPs if you where smart. There are also several small ISPs that have been created that sells internet and telephone services over the guifi network.
The sad thing is this isn't a NEW approach. Community approach is how the internet spread before it got commercialized by the big companies. Spread via universities and small mom and pop ISPs
Internet service providers have to connect to each other somehow and this is done at IXP (internet exchange points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_exchange_point )-- basically a huge building where separate providers can come together and exchange traffic.
I imagine that a peering connection in such a facility requires a heroic amount of maneuvering around 800 lb gorilla companies, but it certainly is possible if one has enough traffic and money.
Edit: grammar
There's a threshold beyond which peering make more sense than transit... (http://packetpushers.net/transit-vs-peering-makes-sense/).
I'm sure it'd be much easier if people just moved into their closest DC. That last mile really is such a drag.
Whoa, who told you that? Lets think about this in simplified terms, if you could run a coax cable to houses around you without caring about it being buried or hidden and start earning $50-$100 a month would you do it? I would be doing nothing else until I collapsed. I would go up and down the street with cable spools of cable putting posts in the ground to split it to people's houses. In one long day you could be earning what you would get from a minimum wage job. In a week you would be middle class. In a month you would live like a lawyer, in two you would live like a doctor, and you would never have to work again to make the same amount of money. Gold mines don't even do this well.
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Building networks is, to no one's surprise, expensive. Financial analysts last year estimated that Google had to spend $84 million to build a fiber network that passed 149,000 homes in Kansas City, with the cost per home at $500 to $674. That figure did not include additional costs for actually connecting each home that requests service. A national Google Fiber build out passing 15 percent of US homes would cost $11 billion a year for five years, Wall Street analysts have estimated.
Montgomery discussed the challenge of finding what some people call "patient capital," or investors who are willing to put money into companies that might take five or 10 years to make a big profit.
"Costs are fixed. You're going pay your staff and maintenance people whether you have one customer or 10,000. All your costs are basically going to be the same," he said. "For a fiber network, you need to reach about 30 percent of the local market within a couple of years, or you're going to go out of business."
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"One big reason we lack Internet competition: Starting an ISP is really hard
Creating an ISP? You'll need millions of dollars, patience, and lots of lawyers."
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/04/one-big-reason-we-la...
The reason AT&T was able to gobble up the entire country in the 20th century was in part their ability to sell convertible securities that delivered premium returns with low/moderate risk.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Takes-Billions-in-FCC...
If you're a cable company who already built all of that, it's marginally very profitable to layer on internet service.
If you think that you can go run a coax cable to someone's house and start collecting a monthly check from them, and collect routinely, without a) billing issues, b) collections issues, c) service outages, etc. etc. -- I mean, maybe for 3 neighbors it would work. But not at scale.
Btw 'at scale' all the overhead you mentioned decreases. I doubt it costs $70 a month per customer. You see issues constantly, but how big is the customer base? 100k? That's 7 million a month. With bandwidth costs of around $1 per person I'm going to guess there is a lot of room for profit.
Their operating margins are like 97% profit, and depending on the maturity of the network, the costs on debt service are something like 25% to 90% of costs. It's a business that generates consistent long term profit and cash flow.
Cable companies make bank btw.
Since we already have ATT/Comcast I think they will be pain to deal with when trying to run new fiber.
There are a few providers doing fixed wireless, but even that can only reach a fraction of everyone in the community.
The last mile is much more of a pain in the ass. You have to bring connections to everyone's house and you are then installing one cable that carries one connection. This is why there has been little competition and people are generally unhappy with their ISPs.
Guifi is addressing the last mile market with a network built by a cooperative non profit. They are in no way "renting infrastructure from the big guys". They are reselling bandwidth in the way that a supermarket resells produce. If the big guys had put last mile infrastructure into Catalonia, Guifi would not have started.
Are you in a multitenant / shared installation? I've heard if there's enough people in a building you can get vaguely higher but unspecified speeds.
Sorry you didn't get a reply. We respond to every inquiry, but sometimes the responses end up in one's spam folder. We run our own mail servers and despite our best efforts (DKIM, SPF, never being on any blacklists) some mail providers bin us.
If you give us a call (415-974-1313) we can look up your address and give you a better idea of what to expect, though we tend to under-promise and over-deliver.
The website is a bit... dated, but we're working on a new one with a new coverage map[0] and more details about our service in buildings that are already on-net.
[0] A slightly better representation of coverage can be found on our outage map at https://monkeybrains.net/map/