Building a Town-Wide LAN?

The Mainframe asks: "My town (Hanover, NH, home of Dartmouth College, the Dartmouth Medical School, and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital, non-college population approx. 9K people, double that with the college) is conducting a feasibility study on building a town network. They'd like to deliver fiber to every home within town limits. This fiber will carry (certainly) the internet and (probably) cable-like television programming access. They're estimating that it will cost $40 per month per household. I just filled out and returned my survey (one sent to every Hanover household) in which they asked a number of questions like: 'What would your primary use of this service be?' and 'Would you be willing to pay $40 a month for this service?'. What reasons, other than the obvious benefit of having fiber to one's house, can you think of for making this kind of commitment to the infrastructure?

"I would imagine that there will be an enormous secondary benefit because we will become an attractive town to technically inclined people and businesses. At the same time, Is this a good idea? I, personally, think it would be wonderful, but (as an IT major) the technical challenges of laying fiber and maintaining a network to serve 9000+ citizens are mind boggling. Policy decisions, network abuse, outages, spam, filtering (god forbid), all nightmares that will require a dedicated, 24/7 network maintenance team. Any network engineers out there have any juicy morsels from their work on large networks?

I know the town manager, so I'd like to feed this discussion to her, after moderation has taken its toll (probably at a level of +3), so she can see what the technical community thinks."

External Connection?

[ibpooks]

What kind of out-of-town bandwidth will be provided? Sure, 100 Mbps to the local POP would be cool, but really useless if the whole place has to share a T1. Would out-of-town traffic be limited on a per-connection basis, or will I have to suffer with slow page loads because my 31337 neighbor wants to run a 64 user Wolfenstein server?

ROI?

[secolactico]

First and foremost: is this going to be a for-profit venture or a "Public Service"?

Is this $40/month a flat rate or a minimun rate without "extras"? Will everyone have the same benefits?

Obviously, bandwith *will* have to be limited. Who will admin this? City Hall?

Expect AOL to SMTP-block your netblocks as well.

How is the fiber going to be terminated in every drop? Ethernet transceivers? ST/SC/whatever...

If the town owns the wire...

[JuddRogers]

they can hire and fire the cable company
and the ISP.

Local control!

Skillsets

[d3ut3r0n]

By "town network", your post seems to imply that it will be entirely run by local citizens... how close is everyone in your community? Are they typically generations of families there? I could imagine this sort of cooperation working if the skills were local and the population relatively static... but what would you do if key people decided to leave town? Also, do you have a better breakdown of what that $40 per month covers? Will all citizens agree to flat rate fees? A flat rate is good for the 20-something year olds who use gigabytes of data a month, but I'm sure the granny's emailing wouldn't put much of a tax on the system. If you think about how flat rate for electricity would work in a similar environment, you might start to look at pricing models differently.

Block outbound port 25 by default

[Tackhead]

Block outbound port 25 by default. Turn it back on by request.

99% of your users have neither the intention nor the desire to run their own SMTP server. They'll use your mail server - that is, they'll talk POP or a similar protocol to whatever server you set up for them. That's enough for them - they just want email, and they'd rather not have to provide it for themselves.

The other 1% of your users are smart and clued enough to set up their own mail servers, and probably have legitimate reasons to do so.

Now, back to your 99% who have no intention of talking on port 25, anywhere. Of them, 10% of your users probably will set up an open proxy, or run an open wireless node. Whether they do so with malicious intent (unlikely) or out of ignorance (highly likely!!) doesn't matter.

What matters is the fact that these nodes will be abused by spammers.

So, if you want the 1% of your geeky-and-clued customers to be able to send email to the rest of the world from their own MTA, it's up to you to make sure that the 10% of your clueless customers can't.

Otherwise, expect your users - clued and clueless alike - will be talkin' to the 550 like 24.0.0.0/8, 4.0.0.0/8, 12.0.0.0/8, and 200.0.0.0/6, four big chunks of netspace I - and others - don't wanna hear from, because they have a million open proxies spewing spam for every legitimate customer.

I'm not saying block outbound port 25 for everyone. I'm saying block it by default, and lift the block for anyone who calls the support center and says "I can't send mail. Yes I'm running my own mail server, and I need to run my own mail server for $REASON", where $REASON is basically anything other than "The guy who sold me the Millions Of Addresses CD said port 25 blocking was censorship!" :-)

Just what we need...

[Mr Thundercleze]

another entire neighborhood linked together. I live in a neighborhood that has 700+ houses connected by fiber optics. Some of the problems I've had is that during peak usage hours, my internet will slow down considerably (maybe because we don't have a very good server. I don't know specs on it). My computer also seems to be hacked a lot more in this neighbor hood than a non-wired hood. I personally prefer not having a centralized network, but thats just my opinion. Also, the support here is not well maintained at all.

Don't Want It

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

Call me a Republican, but I don't want any more government monopolies. Broadband is catching on throughout the country and I doubt that it's not available in the cited town.

First of all, you're assuming 9,000 people will be on this network. Knock that number in half. With the fact that not everyone owns a computer and there will be more than one person living in a house, you've got 4,500 people requesting cable. Why is this potential profit being taken from the cable companies and given to the government? What is the reason for it? Is it that the government has to do it since this is a service the people need but one the private sector cannot provide due to the size or the financial feasability of it? No, certainly not. Cable companies are doing well.

So forget about the challenges of this project - think about the need. I don't see that getting people on high-speed for $40 a month (to the government) outweighs the cost of having the government tightly coupled with my flow of data. Carnivore fans? Are you out there? Pipe in.

Municiple cable company

[kwerle]

The town I live in, San Bruno, has one of the very few remaining municiply run Cable Companies in the state (US?). It's really great. I used to use them for Internet access, which they farmed out to a 3rd party. Unfortunately, the 3rd party ISP got bought out and moved on to focus on greener pastures. When the cable company decided to move to @home, I took off (seeing the writing on the wall at that time).

Anyway, my advice:
If you figure that $20-$30/month goes to TV, that leaves somewhere between $10-20/month to an ISP. The upside is that the city is going to take care of the cable issues (and hopefully do it well...). $15x3000 (1/3 of the folks actually want internet) is $45K/month. That may not enough to run a new ISP, but it might be a nice additional chunk to an existing ISP.

The real trick is to find a GOOD ISP that is willing to pick up the extra customers. There may be a local (or nearby) ISP that is willing to pick up a job like this. My advice is to try to find a local house that will do it, and avoid the nationals if you can.

On the other hand, if someone was willing to set up a municiple ISP as a not-for-profit, they may be able to do well at it.

Good luck.

Would this be optional or a "tax"?

[Alinraz]

You'll have people that have no interest in this. Perhaps they don't use the net much or are perfectly happy with their $20.00/ month AOL dialup (or whatever they charge now). So do people subscribe or do they get charged with the local taxes, water, garbage or whatever? How do you deal with someone that abuses the TOS...if they have to pay for it in their local taxes or other "fees" I don't think you can leagally cut them off.

Also, if you put a locally run cable company on this, usually you'd end up with a few locals + a few cable channels. Forget any choices with special pay channels or DirectTV or so on. "Wait, I pay $40 a month for this thing and I don't even get TiVo service?"

My sugestion would be to setup a local ISP to handle the accounts and service with infrastructure (fiber) provided by the town and leased to the ISP. The infrastructure could be built using standard tax stuff (find room in the budget, try to pass a bond, etc), but since there's a private ISP running the accounts they can sell the access, maintain the network, and deal with TOS issues.

Just my $.02 of course.

- Alinraz

Blacksburg did something like that way back when..

[truenoir]

Years ago Blacksburg (home of Virginia Tech) did something sorta like this (except it was mid 90's, so internet access period, not broadband). Perhaps a little ambitious, and honestly I can't say I can see any real difference from other towns. But it relates. http://www.bev.net is the still existing homepage http://www.cni.org/tfms/1995b.fall/BEV.html has some other info...

802.16 WMAN?

[Yonder Way]

I have been kicking around the idea of an 802.16 WMAN for the city of Philadelphia and surrounding counties, with the idea that it would be a private network address space with the option for local ISP's to provide Internet gateway services to paying customers. On the upside, local folks could set up their own ftp mirrors, p2p services, etc. without having to pay the high bandwidth costs associated with the wired Internet.

This would of course require volunteer management of the address space, DNS, etc. but there could be great benefits to a free high speed WMAN with commercial (and maybe free?) options for Internet connectivity from there.

Re:Fast net and TV are both essentials

[RighteousFunby]

Tivo like functionality is easily done with FttH, without upsetting network operators (delayed TV in effect - all programming stored on a giant server for several days - watch it when you want).

Over here in Britain, we had a similar service called Homechoice. Everything was on a central server, and you could use your remote to choose what you wanted to watch (even music videos), and it would come over ADSL. It was cheap, being about 6GBP a month. Amazingly, it's still running [homechoice.co.uk] and it also provides broadband into the deal! No signup details on site X-(

Add phone service

[tchdab1]

Get your town to consider adding phone service to the list. Local calls free, and bulk long distance charges.

When you figure out that everything you buy has, oh, 35% - 100% or so (or more) profit tacked on to the cost, you begin to wonder why everyone isn't doing all of it on their own. Everything.

Potential Uses

[canolecaptain]

Here are some realistic potential uses:

- Long Distance related -

1) Video phones. I have kids, and would pay to give them a video phone so that we could communicate via sight instead of just sound. If I lived there, I'd buy one too so that the rest of my family could join in -> virtual teleconference anyone? As someone who also has family overseas, this becomes even more important.

- Local Industries -

2) Distance learning. People in the town could realistically take classes from the university without having to physically attend class. Even better, the class could be taped and purchased for download (digitally) for less than the cost of actual enrollment, but the student base could go way up without major facility improvements.

3) True downloadable video on demand. Local servers in the town, perhaps even owned by the town, but with distribution rights, could sell/rent downloadable videos to the residents. Tivos can already file share within the house - why not across the neighborhood?

4) Yes, online games would rock. More importantly, localized community games would -scream-. How about hosting bridge/chess/etc parlor type games within the community? For a small fee to cover server expenses, a whole bunch of the older generation could play together from their homes, and TALK AT THE SAME TIME. Again, this is another local industry that could be started.

5) Town meeting multi-casts. Now, people don't have to crowd into some small room to discuss town policies. They can watch it online, and use VoIP to conference in (with a moderator of course).

Of course, these are just a few. If you can concentrate on local industries, more useful applications for the technology will appear. Best of luck. Maybe I'll consider moving a little further north if this is put in place. :-)

Other services

[Tomun]

The vast majority of a town's population won't be die hard geeks like us. I expect only about 20% to happlily accept the $40 fee without some obvious non internet benefits.

With a fiber network in the town you can offer very high speed local networking to the people and only limit bandwidth for external connections. Most people wont know what they can do with that, so you'll need to set up a few services that people can start using right away.

A few ideas off the top of my head for people with PCs:

Free video telephony.
Your own tv channel
Local news
Video on demand

The last one being the killer app of course. It would require some kick ass servers or 9000 dvd players at the local 24 hour video store, but trust me, its what people want.

I think you need make all the services you provide available at a flat rate (at least initially) just to promote usage and experimentation.

Discuss

How about looking at local information flow?

[danlyke]

When I first got into the Internet back in the early '90s, we were looking for ways to build a local real-time network, and building an ISP was the only way we could think of to fund it. But some applications I'd like to see based on the things we were talking about back then:

• If every business can afford to have a network, a lot of business that's currently ineffeciently conducted over the phone could be done via the network. Every restaurant with a take-out menu should, at the very least, be encouraged to put their menus on a server in the restaurant.
• Hopefully some enterprising college student can leverage this into giving approximate wait times, or perhaps tying online ordering into a restaurant management system.
• It's a dangerous one, but think about what public records could get put online. If there's a server in the town hall, putting minutes of meetings and everything else that gets typed into that LAN should then be easy. For a while we had one of our town councilmembers doing that on his personal pages, but if it can be automated that's so much the better.
• Encourage manufacturing companies to think about what real-time high speed communication with other in-town companies could mean. "Just In Time" and inventory management becomes that much easier when you can get companies to share production information.

And if that's not bidirectional for $40/month, at least for in-town bandwidth, then do your best to fight it and let the phone companies and cable companies compete for your business. As a public utility, this only has value if it lets people communicate, rather than merely being an entertainment delivery system, ie: point-n-drool cable TV.

Check out Epsom and Pittsfield

[Anonymous Coward]

We in Epsom were completely re-cabled about 2 years ago - they ripped out the old 1/2" aluminum stuff, and put in dual 7/8" jacketed aluminum throughout both towns, and now we have broadband up the wahzoo.

Note that we're on Metrocast, NOT AT&T/Comcast !!

The former cable company (Lakes Region) was bought out by Metrocast. They *listened* to the boards of Selectmen in both towns (as well as many others, I think) and the chief complaint we had was that the old cable system was installed only in the parts of town that had the highest population density. They ignored a lot of the outlying areas (many of which were in the shadows of mountains and couldn't get a peep off the air). So, the deal was, if they wanted the franchise, *everybody* was to have access. They made it happen, by golly.

You can check the rates for yourself online at
http://www.metrocast.com

No, I don't work for Metrocast, and I didn't even subscribe. (For various personal reasons)

Add Mobile IP capablity and now u have roaming

[Anonymous Coward]

vola... now your laplop is as good as your cellphone...true mobile ip.. I am running the linux client from HUT, win32 clients can be found at birdstep.

Re:Why not use wireless?

[kaszeta]

The trick with this is that to cover all college land, we bleed over into the town a *lot*. And since it's an unsecured network (anybody who knows the SSID can join), a not-completely-insignificant portion of the town that surrounds the school gets free internet access.

Hey, I *like* being able to surf from the Dirt Cowboy (the only coffee shop in Hanover, for you non -Upper Valley of VT/NH folks) for free using Dartmouth's 802.11 network. And to think that when I travel Starbuck's wants to charge me... :)

Closing thought: Strange that the first I hear of a local issue is via Slashdot...

It's been in the papers, but it hasn't exactly been front page material. (Then again, the next office at work houses one of the Hanover Selectmen, so I hear a lot through the walls, too)

You lucky Hanover folk... Down the road in Grantham, NH, I can't get *any* broadband except for satellite, which is worthless (Adelphia is bankrupt and won't do capital improvements, Verizon refuses to put a DSLAP in so we can get DSL, and I don't have line of sight to the local school for 802.11 access). :) And I tried getting a second line, but if you get a second line down here Verizon multiplexes the line so the best throughput you get is ~28 kbaud.

Oh well, one doesn't move to the north woods without giving up a few things... :)

Re:Clear TOS

[Alien Being]

And there's no reason why the cap shouldn't be applicable to the base allowance. Allow the user to budget his bytes over the month.

Let's say they allow 30G/month. They divide it into 1G/day and increase the cap each day. The user would have the option of dipping into tomorrow's allowance. So if I'm offline on the 1st of the month, I have 2G to play with the next day. OTOH, if I dl a bunch of ISOs on the 1st, I'll have 1G/day for the rest of the month.

This would give the user a way to manage the byte allowance similar to the way they manage the household budget. If the user elects, he can slide the cap right up to the limit (or beyond) and be careful not to run out prematurely.

Like cable?

[anethema]

Sounds like you are trying to do exactly what cable from (here) shaw does. They deliver tv and radio content, plus internet, all for around 40 dollars a month, at least here in canada.

How is what you are proposing different?

Things to do with Fiber

[pavera]

I am currently working with a large master planned community they are running fiber to every home, and they are delivering phone/internet/tv/movies on demand to every home over the single fiber link. The ability to run everything over 1 cable is a very large benefit... I would pay $80 per month to have these services all bundled together... and at this community they are only charging $35/mo per house.. its great.