Community Fiber
Wm Leler
>
> The Personal Telco Project wants open-access fiber-to-the-premises
> last-mile infrastructure in Portland. It would be awesome if Google
> helped us get that, but even if they don't, really people, this is
> something we could be doing for ourselves. We can't sit around and
> wait for some magic benefactor to sprinkle pixie dust on us, we
> should be taking charge and building the network we want. I want a
> network with massive capacity, that lets me own rather than rent it,
> and that lets me connect to who I want, how I want. How about you?
>
>
> --
> Russell Senior, President
> rus...@personaltelco.net
Russell, I didn't realize that Personal Telco was interested in last mile fibre-to-the-premises. This is something I've wanted to see for a very long time.
When I lived in Wellington NZ, they had created a fantastic open fibre network covering a large part of the city called CityLink (http://www.citylink.co.nz). Each person or company on CityLink ran their own router, which was built using a standard cheap PC running Linux, with a multi-channel fibre optic interface card. Router software was open and free. Cost back then (for all new parts) was around $500 to $1000. Nowadays, you could do the same thing using older, used computers, and the cost of the fibre cards has come down dramatically. Other than the fibre cards, you could do the whole thing using hardware from Free Geek (and maybe they would want to get involved helping build them!)
Each node was connected to 3 to 6 other routers, so it was a true mesh network. All you had to do was connect to your nearest neighbors. So it was reliable through redundancy, with a multitude of routes between every node, and *very* cheap. No need for centralized very high speed (and expensive) routers that the more common star-configured commercial networks require. The city owned the fibre itself, and charged around $30/month to be connected. And the system ran at 100Gbps! That's 100 times faster than what Google is proposing now. That was over 10 years ago; maybe we could do terabit fibre now!
The only down-side to their network was that in New Zealand, due to their location, international internet connections were very expensive and were generally metered. They avoided this problem by having each person on the network pick their own hosting provider. All the local hosting providers were on CityLink, so you had a wide choice for international internet connections, but that was an extra charge (amount depended on the plan you picked). I think this would be far less of a problem in the US. But we should still provide multiple redundant connections to the world outside of Portland, although it might make more sense to have the network organization itself manage the peer connections and spread the cost over all subscribers.
If this catches on, I could see the whole concept being replicated at a larger scale, with each city having trunks connecting to its nearest neighbors, creating a HUGE local area network that stretches across the whole country, if not the whole world.
Plus, as Russell says, we would own this network, not rent it, and it would have absolutely massive connectivity (not just because of raw speed, but also though massively redundant routing to every other point in the network). Since we would own it, we could add a cheap wireless access point to each router, blanketing the city with wireless too. And just imagine the services that could be provided over such a network, even beyond the obvious telephone (VoIP) and video.
Let me know if there is anything I (or Open Tech Space) could do to help.
Wm Leler