On Sat, 27 Dec 2003, Richard Naylor wrote:
At 05:28 p.m. 27/12/2003 +1200, somebody wrote:
Are there any rules now about putting a bit of cable up along the back fence?
What can I do if I want to run around my block but one neighbour doesn't want to be connected?
well get 10 homes and you write to Frank March asking for a Network Operators Licence (sorry Frank). Then use Section 13 (in the old act) which basically says "fess up or come see the Judge". [...] Nope - Frank doesn't charge. But try to buy him a lunch from time to time. Two folks that I know have achieved Operator Status this year. It is NOT hard. Except of course that I want personal status so I can get my cat-5 a bit further down the street and Frank won't do that. Maybe its time I bought you lunch Frank......
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. 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. 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). 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). -- Simon J. Lyall | Very Busy | Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/ "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT. "Those who sacrifice sound quality for hard disk space deserve neither."