<WARNING>I got out an extra soap box to respond to Roberts comments.</WARNING> On Sun, 28 Dec 2003 19:50:26 +1300, Robert McDonald wrote
You'd also be awash with law suits from telecom. Thats a breach of their terms and conditions. There was some serious talk about them saying you may only use the connection on one PC (no shareing with your lan at home) That was dismissed, but im sure you cant give it away to your school legaly.
!!! FUD FACTOR 101 !!! --- Bring on the FUD Robert! Show me the exact term and condition that you might be refering to and I'll show you an ISP that won't do business in NZ for very long once we start telling students that their New Zealand telephone company wants to sue people for giving away a bit of bandwidth (that they have paid for and aren't using) to support the education of our children in New Zealand schools!!! If Telecom were smart (and I do accept that they aren't always) they would embrace the idea of using wireless to share ADSL connections back in to local schools. How many people would switch from dialup to ADSL just so they could also support their local school? Telecom could end up winning more local business than they would ever lose by the school not needing to purchase as much capacity - remembering that the school would still need some dedicated capacity anyway. Let's get a reaility check for a few seconds... Schools in NZ simply can't aford to buy up the amount of bandwidth that a consolidated pool of JetStart connections could deliver... or could they? In Perth the WA education department went out to tender for the supply of a 10mbit mesh network to be delivered to 400 schools on fibre. They paid about the same price for each 10mbit connection as the (then) current price for a 384k[1] ISDN link - Telstra (who won the deal) couldn't aford to allow its competition to win that sort of business away from them. WA schools are open to idea of sharing their new resource back into the community[2] - seen in NZ, that would mean using wireless in the other direction - you think Telecom would be more hurt then? I'm suggesting a way that the community can support their local schools and Telecom benefits... you really think they'll sue people over that? Cheers DiG Ps: Robert, I'm not out to shoot the messenger :) [1] The price for 384k was under $1,000AUD and closer to $700AUD per month. ISPs were paying ~$1300 for a 1mbit connection to the internet at the time - remember the schools were getting 10 mbits. [2] This acording to the guy who planned and managed the project. They also have an extensive web site about the project online and what they intended doing with the network. -- Don Gould The technology exists to give every home 10mbits per second for $10 per month! Ask not what your telephone company should do for you... ...but what you can do for your broadband community!