Hi all, Some random observations following our field trip this afternoon. + The ground-level machine rooms are operated by Sky City, and not Sky Tower -- hence we didn't get to see them. I will try to get access/ power/environmental details once I have a contact at the casino. + CLEAR, Telstra and Telecom all own fibre up the tower; the Sky Tower people do not provide any fibre access (they just provide ducts). + There are three main types of colo floor on the tower: o enclosed in metal, with access to external antennas (e.g. the Sky Tower FM antennae or customer-mounted DMR dishes) o enclosed in glass, behind which it is evidently practical to hang KU-band, cellular and DMR antennae o open to the elements, with weatherproof antennae and mounting hardware + on the enclosed decks, full 2.7m cabinets are available, as well as shared "community" cabinets (which are cheaper) + The tower colo decks are fed by two independent 10kW AC feeds from the base, where each is backed up by three generators. No DC power is available. There is a potential 15 second delay between an external power feed failing and the generators cutting in, so usual practice is to feed a UPS from both power busses, and to take AC or DC feeds off that to power equipment. + All floors are ventillated (especially the ones that are open to the elements :) + Access to the tower decks is supervised, and is available 24/7 + The comms decks seem surprisingly empty (although we only looked in three or four of them) + The tower is very, very tall, and you can see a long, long way from the top of it (including down) Prices for colo in the tower seem to vary according to what the application is, rather than how much space you take up -- it's all very "supply and demand". Clearly colo in the tower does not necessarily make sense if we're connecting routers together and using fibre back-haul; however, if some people are serious about doing radio shots back to base we could arrange a pair of 100baseT switches (one up the tower, one in the basement) joined with independently-routed 100baseFX uplinks, so that people only have to buy colo space in one place or the other. I think it would be a good idea to have a get-together to talk about all this, prior to Uniforum -- say at Galbraith's some time late next week? How does Thursday evening at 7pm sound to anybody else? If we can get a few people to agree to move on this, I think there is every chance on getting this up and running in the next couple of months. Joe --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog