At 11:40 p.m. 27/12/2003 +1300, Simon Lyall wrote:
I'm sure somebody would be happy to start the "Suburban Wire Trust" or something which could gain the status and do it on behalf of every body else.
the Electric Fence Trust ?
On a practical level, we had a walk around my block and counted 89 houses/flats in my block and 36 and 40 in nearby ones. At say 20-30% takeup it should be too hard to dig some little tranches down the back boundary and have a L2 ring ( anyone know the cheapest switch model that handles trucks? ) for say $200 each setup.
D-Link DGS-1005D - but no trunks - why do you need them ?
The main problem is that I've now got to hook my little block into the rest of the country. I'm inner suburbs Auckland ( Near Dominion Rd, between Mt Roskill and Balmoral Roads) but Tangent is at least 3kms from where I am. Even assuming I can convince them to extend their Network and plug me in I'm told their minimum port cost is now around $1000 per month ( I think this might the the telco mentality that other mentioned).
use wireless. When we started CityLink we used a 2mbps microwave to VUW for at least 2 years. THats where Netlink were. Of course they shifted just after we got fiber there........ Remember this is the Inter Net, so use what ever works while you build. Most users will be happy if its faster than a 56k modem for now and if its cheaper.. I aimed for a price point of $100 per month, but that was for fiber down the road.......
Quick website checks say that Micro trenching gets down to just $US 10 per foot so if I wired up Dominion Rd I'd be looking at a good $100k. Of course I'd be able to service around 80 blocks on the wires and probably close to 10,000 houses. Double this for luck since I've got no experience in this technology. Repeat about 20 times and I'd probably have Fibre to the block for around 400,000 people for 4-5 million dollars. When I get more than 10 people on each block interested I charge them $100 each and do a cat 5 loop though the back boundaries.
Charge people $20 per month to connect and offer them 10Mb/s g'tee and 100Mb/s most of the time. They can then buy their Internet off whoever and their who off whoever else (see vonage.com for that model).
At least thats the model that you can adopt if you have a few million spare or are some far thinking council (which seem to be thin on the ground in NZ).
If I'm just a geek I can probably get the block wired up and then maybe spread to nearby blocks slowly but getting to the other side of town would seem to b the problem.
How do others see it happening? (I suspect what I've written above has several holes and big cost underestimates).
great starting point. The figures are pretty right. Getting a Council to accept microtrenching is a challenge, but maybe we can all pressure them on that one. They certainly want the development. And thanks Simon for starting the thread - its been a great discussion. rich