Other Community Networks

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Nathan Borson

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Nov 4, 2015, 11:01:47 PM11/4/15

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Gustavus Broadband Stakeholders,

Two friends sent me this article about a community network in the San Juan islands in Washington state, and I thought I would forward it in case others were interested, with my comments below.

I’ve spent some time at Doe Bay over the years but did not know about their community networking efforts. They’re laudable, to say the least. It gives me great pleasure to see locals building for themselves what the incumbent telecoms fail to deliver.

When I think of being one of those locals, however, it sounds like a huge headache. My experience with wireless has really turned me off to distributing Internet that way because the performance and reliability are inconsistent at best. I have come to regard such a system as a support nightmare, an imperfect interim solution if that. But more power to those tree climbers! It’s a good thing not everyone is as burned-out as I!

Other comments I had as I read the article…

· The barriers are lower for Doe Bay than for a place like Gustavus. For example, the article notes that DBIUA pays StarTouch $900/month for a 100 Mbps upstream connection. The Gustavus Community Network pays half again as much for a mere 4.5 Mbps, which makes it impossible to offer the reasonable end-user prices and unlimited data that DBIUA does.

· Personally, I’d be a lot more interested in the efforts of Orcas Power & Light to build a wired network. It costs a lot more up front but will be capable of gigabit broadband and will be far more reliable. That’s the kind of network I would like to manage.

· It’s a rare person or community that has the ability and is willing to devote the effort to make something like this happen, given “We’re not making any money here, we’re just covering our costs.” It’s far rarer that such an effort is sustainable over time given volunteer burn-out. I was such a willing person as recently as a decade ago, but my willingness faded gradually over the last 10 years. I’d like to check in on DBIUA in 10 and 20 years. If they are still around, it will be due to Sutton successfully recruiting and training additional volunteers, or professionalizing maintenance and operations.

· DBIUA’s best-effort delivery is much better than what was available and is fine for many users but is not something a business can rely on and does not fairly allocate cost among users with drastically different usage patterns and service expectations. “During outages, customers can call a help line number to hear a message with the latest information on the network status. People on the island understand that this is all a volunteer effort and that there will be occasional problems” is not going to work for everyone who would like to live or work in Doe Bay. As expectations grow over time, it isn’t going to work for many of Doe Bay’s current residents, either.

…none of which is a reason not to pursue such a noble endeavor! Even if the community network is eventually supplanted or matures into something altogether different, it has filled a yawning gap in its day, which is how I feel about the Gustavus Community Network.