Last-Mile Solution For A Rural Land Co-op? 312
macguys writes "My community consists of about 150 households spread out over several hundred acres in North Florida. We are far enough away from the nearest city that broadband cable and DSL services don't make it here. We're well organized, and used to working together on projects. We have a lot of home based business offices here and high speed access something that many of my neighbors are hungry for.
We've looked at projects like http://www.magnoliaroad.net and know that others have addressed the issue with 802.11b/g/etc.
There is no big problem getting a T-1 to the community. That part is easy. The hard part is distributing the bandwidth among those here who want to participate. Wireless works in places but in general this land is covered in hardwood and pines and the signal drops off quickly.
We have a long history (community is 25 years old) of working together to solve problems. Running copper or coax is not out of the question if we can find a reasonable way of distributing the bandwidth.
Any suggestions are welcome."
Long-reach ethernet (Score:5, Informative)
Easy (Score:4, Informative)
Wireless mesh (Score:5, Informative)
LocustWorld [locustworld.com] have a system which can be downloaded and booted on a CD [mirror.ac.uk] or via a harddisk. They also sell solid state mesh boxes ready to go. Check out what other community projects have managed to do with the kit [kingsbridgelink.co.uk].
On a slightly larger scale, but..... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Long-reach ethernet (Score:3, Informative)
Multiple Options (Score:5, Informative)
If fiber is out of the option, you could run coax, get a CMTS (can be had on ebay for $5k-$10k) and run a cable modem system over your coax. You could also then get a big sat dish (not the DSS things, the C-Band things) and provide basic cable as well for a reasonable cost.
Failing coax, DSLAMs can also be had cheap and run over just about any kind of wire as long as it's twisted together
Basically, you're spread out enough that using the same technologies the telcos and cable services use is feasable. You could also start running T carrier, but that may get a bit expensive in terms of hardware.
As for wireless solutions, look into directional stuff (obviously). A mesh system may be most useful as it would allow the network to keep working even if one residence isn't reachable for repeating. Various 2.4GHz solutions exist, not just 802.11, or you could also look in to free-space optical. The RONJA project (google for it) is kidna neat, but probably not feasable in this situation.
Have you considered... (Score:2, Informative)
Something similar's been discussed before (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.rric.net/
Basically, when their local telco refused to provide DSL provision, they invoked a statue which forced them to colocate some DSLAM equipment of their own, and they set up their own DSL ISP. Should be just the sort of thing you're looking for. I'd get a fatter uplink than a T1.
Anyway, yeah, plenty of informative info there, take a look. </karma_whore>
How I would wire a community. (Score:5, Informative)
You could do copper, but you're limited to 300m for Cat5. Anything longer, and you'll have to do some sort of modem. I don't know if you can put ?DSL modems back to back..
You could do fiber, but that'll probably end up costing you some bucks, and you'll have to be sure that the lines are safe (like, no one will accidently dig through them).
You don't say exactly where in N. Florida you are, but knowing Florida you're probably in a relatively flat area with lots of pine trees. You said several hundred acres, so I put that in an area calculator and found 1000 acres = 1.56sq miles, so none of your points are really very far from each other.. I think you're definately a candidate for wireless, if the trees stay out of the way.
Check out fab-corp.com [fab-corp.com] for antennas.. No, not an advertisment. I just bought some stuff from them last week, and they were easy to deal with. They're also located in Florida, so your order will be there quick. My order got to California in about 3 days. If you were to put a sector antenna (like, the first one in the sector antennas section) in the center of the property, you should have good coverage to the whole property. I'd recommend for the best connection, get a good antenna for the receiving ends also, such as a 24db parabolic antenna.. Make sure when you mount them, you bolt them down tight, and be *VERY* sure you do good lightning supression.. I lived in Florida for years, and survived the hurricanes, and daily thunderstorms.
To give an idea of what kind of range you can expect, I bought a "24 dBi Mag Grid Antenna" (bottom of the parabolic antenna list), and attached it to a "Senao SL-2511CD PLUS EXT2" card. From an upper story of an office building, I started sweeping around with this antenna just listening (to estimate range. honest.) With a 4.5db blade antenna, I could hear 6 AP's, but only had a workable signal to one. With the 24db antenna I could hear over 2 dozen AP's. None of them were named for what they were, except one that said "YMCA"..
I asked some of the people who know the area well, "Is there a YMCA in that direction"? I know there's one closer, but it was about 60 degrees from where I was pointing. Turns out the YMCA I heard was a few miles away. So, with my 24db antenna talking to something resembling a normal AP (I doubt they had a directional antenna pointed at my office), I had a workable signal.
Before you start buying cards, I strongly recommend you check out Seattle Wireless [seattlewireless.net]. They have a *GREAT* page comparing wireless cards.. I highly recommend the Senao SL-2511CD PLUS EXT2.. It has two external antenna jacks (external antennas are required on this one). They also show an AP with the same card built in.. The Seano cards are suppose to put out 200mw, as opposed to most cards and AP's that are only around 30mw (check their chart), so you'll get much better range with them.
I hope this helps.
Consider Waverider 900MHz (Score:5, Informative)
Waverider is the first name that comes to mind, I hear Alvarion has some sort of 900MHz product in the works also.
I'd suggest you go to http://www.isp-lists.com and sign up for the isp-wireless list - plenty of people there will have hands on experience with what you're trying to do - much better source than all of the arm chair quarterbacks that inhabit slashdot.
Re:Multiple Options (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Easy (Score:5, Informative)
T1 is not the solution here.
For 150 houses, a few T1s are just fine. Figure 15:1 overcommitment and 500Kbps, and you get roughly 5Mb covering everything. Run 4 T1s together and you have all you need. If bandwidth becomes a problem (probably won't), then you can think about Frac-T3s. The reason to stay away from T3 setups is that a T3 is expensive, as is the equipment, and these people are not liekly to be running datacenters out of their farmhouses. Email and web describe the majority of their activity.
[Magnolia Road post] Re:With respect to the T1... (Score:5, Informative)
Also, with T1 circuits, you are more important to the telco than a DSL, which is just a dry pair and billed much less. In rural areas this may be more important than you think... If you are not too far from a large city, the break-even point for doing a T1 is probably ~12 people willing to pay $50/month and who have Line of Sight to a central point. This doesn't include startup costs, just monthly recurring.
The Magnolia Road coop (from which I am posting this incidentally- I laugh at your puny /. effect) had outages last summer caused by lightning strikes[0] which took out the telco's repeaters.
A T1 outage will get a much faster repair time than average for DSL. With T1, you call up your provider and go through the food chain to get the telco dispatched. With frame relay (at least through Qwest) Enterprise Repair calls you to see if you are available for a dispatch (this is true even when Qwest is not the ISP per se, but just the FR circuit carrier). Frame relay pricing is also not distance-sensitive as T1 is (at least here in Qwest-land, YMMV). It turns out we get better customer service on a FR than T1, while loop costs on the latter are higher!
I mentioned this cam [lazyz.org] in another post just a few days ago. It looks at Thorodin Mountain, which is a central hub site for our network. This is what latency looks like going across that mountain right now (worst time of five separate monitoring points). This is via two hops on 5Ghz Trango radios [trangobroadband.com], ~ 14 miles round trip:
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 3.425/4.236/6.832/0.951 ms
One moral: stay away from 2.4Ghz as much as possible. Everyone and their brother has a 2.4ghz phone/mouse/x-10 cam that will cause interference. Those times above were in 100's of ms when the links were at 2.4Ghz. We still do end-user AP at 2.4, but channel crowding forced us to upgrade all of the point-to-point backhauls to 5.8Ghz
Mike
coyote at magnoliaroad dot net
[0] In one instance, lightning apparently entered a NOC via the T1, and fried a couple grand worth of equipment in one moment. We surmise it was the T1 because all of the radio gear was kicking. The catalyst switch was still semi-functional from the console, but was showing link on ports even after cables were removed :( In another instance, the same storm blew two different repeaters. Qwest managed to replace one of them and restored service for about ten minutes before the next one blew out (at which point I asked them to wait for the storm to pass). Enterprise repair is one of the few parts of Qwest which doesn't suck!
Re:Long-reach ethernet (Score:3, Informative)
You can also use the line for a phone at the same time (just like DSL), and the incoming phone line connects to the LRE-capable switch (well, a splitter).
The main problem will be getting access rights to the actual copper phone lines in the ground (which would be owned by the local telco).
Hummingbird just might work. Kickass range. (Score:5, Informative)
I've been working here for some time as their resident linux freak / tech support slave / biased security know-it-all / networking software guru / site surveyer. I don't have an easily definable job title (I just HAD to be a religious
We're actually working on getting an entire town in Louisiana, St. Joseph, up and running. Last I heard, we were doing it with a whopping TWO ACCESS POINTS and no range extenders. In a rural area. Two towers, two T1s, no other cabling outside of the towers themselves.
We've also got some interesting stuff in the works for Orange and Volusia counties, under the Wireless Law vendor. Basically, insanely-secure wifi for courtrooms. Biometrics, encryption that'd make the NSA hate us, our families, and our pets if we sold it on the open market, the works.
Despite St. Louis being swamp/forest area, we've been able to get a connection using 802.11b via an integrated laptop card from as much as 2 miles *outside of town.*
Depending on the local topography and what man-made structures might be available, we might or might not want to build a tower or two to provide coverage in your area. If you have a few tall buildings that get enough clearance above the trees, rooftops alone might suffice.
Our antennas, which utilize some dead-sexy proprietary technology that *still* makes me drool, can keep up a connection to the average laptop for up to three miles in open-air under ideal circumstances; the worst range I've seen was 1/2-mile and that was with an *entire office building* between me and the nearest antenna, using a low-power Linksys 802.11b CompactFlash card in my PDA (Sharp Zaurus 5500 ^_^), with the antenna being only a few stories off the ground.
We've yet to see anybody do that without using a system that looks like a cold-war-era radar dish, let alone push that kind of signal through an entire building and into the rear parking lot successfully. Even the radar-looking setups don't do that as well as we do, despite being several times the size.
We don't even need to over-amp the antennas.
We also implement some decent QoS that, instead of simply capping your bandwidth like a cable modem, just gives you a "fair share" of what's available.
We can run from anything as simple as a 56k modem up to a set of full data T1s *per antenna*, the main limitation being the 802.11b protocol's limited bandwidth. This will go farther once 802.11g is finalized. In addition, we can (of course) set up range extenders with our antennas to make the most of a single pipe.
If you're ever going to be in the Maitland area just north of Orlando, contact us and we'll see about doing a demonstration of our technology at the local testing site. We have other locations in the works in Florida, but this is the only one we currently use for demos.
For more information, visit http://www.hbwireless.com/ and read up. Contact info sits up there as well. I'm known in the company simply as "Ken" if anyone asks.
No, Communes and Communities are very different (Score:3, Informative)
In short, a community is a village; an Intentional Community is a village founded and tended on the principle that everyone really, really likes the color blue; and a commune is where everyone who's part of it dedicates all of their possessions and income to the community's goals of promoting the color blue, kindof like they're all married to each other.
Basically, any group of people who live together and interact are a community. A group of people who live together on purpose are an Intentional Community (or generally capitalized Community) who will generally share many ideals.
The governance and ownership of the IC could be open to everyone living there or more restricted, sometimes to the founders or long-timers. Or pick any governance system you like. Typically there is some kind of arrangement where you have to work and/or pay to live there.
In a true commune all of your possesions and income are shared within the community. Being in an IC _often_ does not involve giving up the ownership of personal possesions or whatever income you might have. And some people do live in Communities and have "normal" jobs.
Of course, a bunch of people who don't believe in possessions living in a Community would be pretty hard to tell from a commune, even if the part about the possessions wasn't a prerequisite for living there.
(My sister lived for a while at the Dancing Rabbit EcoVillage in Missouri, which has some people who hold communist ideals but also some who are downright capitalist)
Re:Who gets control over the T1? (Score:2, Informative)
TM
Re:Long-reach ethernet (Score:3, Informative)
bandwidth usage (Re:With respect to the T1...) (Score:2, Informative)
This graph [magnoliaroad.net] shows a snapshot I just took of our aggregate bandwidth usage for the core network (there is another discrete T1 not represented there).
DIY DSL? (Score:3, Informative)
I got a solution for you (Score:3, Informative)
Re:ummm, not enoug bandwith.... (Score:3, Informative)
your 56kb actually runs in a DS0 which is 64KB/sec with inline switching so it is 24 lines.
Regardless how the lines are shared - normal browsing is highly asymetrical and so is web serving. The two co-exist quite nicely.
Games can place a very significant demand for bandwidth.
Re:Long-reach ethernet (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Long-reach ethernet (Score:4, Informative)
At the customer end you will need either a 575 LRE or 585 LRE The 575 has a single fast ethernet port as well as an analog phone port, the 585 has 4 fast ethernet as well as the analog phone port. You should be able to find the 2950 24 LRE for around $2900 The 575's for about $95 and the 585s for around $150 For around $5200 you can get the 2950 24 LRE and 24 575 CPEs.
Cisco rates the units to provide between 1Mb and 16.2Mb up to a distance of 5000 feet (this is the distance of the copper not driving distance). While the unit is rated for 5000 feet I have personal set up a few of these with distances close to 7000 feet and still was able to pull 1Mb.
Your next step is to order a (well as many as you have customers) dry pair from you phone company. Some telcos will call these opx or alarm circuts. No matter what the case make sure that you specify that you want unconditioned (no dial-tone or battery power) with no side legs/taps (in other words a pair from point a to point b with no other connections along the way.) Depending on the telco these may cost you anywehere from a couple dollars a month to around half the price of a standard residential phone line.
The last part of the equation is some sort of high speed connection run to the location of the lre switch (T1 or higher). The great thing about the Cisco solution that other products mentioned here do not offer is QOS as well as per port rate limiting.
If you want to carrty this one step further you could become your own CLEC by adding a call manager server to this setup and a pri to bring the voice into the mix. Now not only can you provide broadband to your neighborhood you can provide dial tone as well. The pri can carry 24 simultanious calls and can have as many unique did numbers as you like.
With only 24 subscribers on the switch you are actually going to be very undersubscribed on the voice end of things. At the customer side you can either supply an ata 188 to connect to their existing telco wiring meaning that they can use all thier existing phones or you could siply provide a Cisco 7902/7905/7912/7940/7960 phone and have them be straight ip phones and then provide many additional services. The ATA 188 can provide 2 unique call paths so when one of your customers requires a second line all you do is either have them plug into the second port on the ata and configure it to go or you make a service call to them and wire it to a punch down block so that they can add the second line to mulitple phones. The possibilities are endless and while the setup costs might seem a bit high the recurring charges are minimal other than your ISP line and access charges.
Intentional Communities are a broad movement (Score:3, Informative)
rural last mile (Score:2, Informative)
We are using wireless. Actually I am using a linksys (with a decent antenna) and it works well going out to half a mile or better with decent antennas (15 db mini-dish). One of the new linksys would do better, or you could go with a 24 db dish and get something like a factor of 3-5 on range (+3db = double the power). A lower frequency will work through trees better (900 Mhz). In our case (2.4 Ghz) a tree kills about 5 db (more if it is wet) or drops you to 30% range. In your case it depends on how many trees are between the customer and base stations. Note there are limits to the linksys for number of people connected, so if you are going to have a lot per node (greater than 30) you should invest in enterprise level (cisco or tranzeo, I did like aeronet (cisco), but their new software has some issues. I haven't got the new tranzeo yet, but they look very good). You will probably want to use decent antennas on the systems, you might try hyperlink (www.hyperlink.com) but there are probably cheaper places on the net or ebay.
For our location trenching and running wire or fiber was cost prohibitive.. so I expect it will be for you also. Though fiber does wonders for bandwidth. If you can get the cooperation of your local phone company DSL might work for you (see ruby ranch), but have found at least locally that doesn't work. (old phone lines and uncooperative phone company).
For bandwidth I would highly recommend say something like packeteer, however if you are a true geek, I have found that a cheap linux system with ipchains (or iptables) is much more cost effective. There is more setup involved, but you also get more flexability. I use ipchains, NAT and TOS mangles to manange the bandwidth here and it is very effective.. though what is "fair" can be hard to say some days.. in this case e-mail, goes first, then http, then ftp and finally others.
Currently the neighbors are averaging around 100 B/s, peak at 128 Kb for a couple of minutes (since that is the limit they can get) and in total move about 98 Meg a month.. they are rural (and not slashdotters..) so they are pretty much e-mail and http. Generally they aren't running servers. A T-1 will work well to start (IMHO, contrary to others), but of course it will grow as you get more people on, and they start using more bandwidth. Remember (for some of you city folk).. they were on 21 Kb modems on a good day so this is much an improvement! Don't need to make a superhighway today when just a decent dirt road will work fine (and gets the job done faster and cheaper.)
Re:Long-reach ethernet (Score:2, Informative)
bandwidth throttling (Score:3, Informative)
IIRC, iproute2 is able to selectively throttle connections based on username and other identifiying qualities (such as per IP address, etc.). I haven't looked at the package (no need as of yet), but I would imagine that this would be a good tool to use against kazaa servers, etc..
The best thing is, the luser eating all your bandwidth doesn't have to be told that you're cutting back on his speed --- you're the admin, you run your network the way you want, etc. --- and if you knock it down incrementally over the course of a few weeks, he probably won't realize what's happening ;-)
How we are gonig to do it (Score:2, Informative)
telco fibre gov't woes (Score:1, Informative)
T1s ARE the way to go unless you can get cable to the main POP. T3s are waaay more expensive, take for instance a zero mile (they are billed by mile) T1 in NJ, 500 a month with a 5yr commitment. And a zero mile T3 with the same commitment? 12k a month.
These are *real* vz prices. I am a just recently former telco whore.
second, right of way.
Simply put, no. Only the local utility companies have right of way and there is NO WAY IN HELL they will let you put in dark (as in pure point to point no telco office stops) fibre. Simple reason, you can pump ANYTHING the media supports through it. Such as, maybe an OC 192? and they can't bill you for the speed increase (since they don't own it). Similarly they'll refuse copper. Any land between the nieghbors is automatically out of the question, since the local Telco(bell south) ownsright of way to it. The poles, conduit, pipes, and all, same deal. Wireless is the only way to go, and strictly speaking you only own so much of your airspace as well.
If the neighbors are NEXT to eachother you can do it, and with fibre, which is the most economical considering its massive bandwidth. if this is the case, go for it, dig away, but keep in mind troublshooting fibre breaks is the a pain in the ass. And You'll want to bury it reasonably deep, say 4-6 feet, and it sounds like through roots no less. In any event thats my $.02 good luck!
Re:Rural Connectivity (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wire Up The Cows (Score:2, Informative)
Some of the very first phone lines were run through barb wire fences.
The wires were already in place, seperated and isolated from one another on insulated (wooden) posts.
They really, really did use to do this..
http://collections.ic.gc.ca/exploring/homestead
"Another type of phone used in this area was the barbwire phone. This phone was introduced in 1945. A barbwire phone was installed by using one pasture fence line for each user. The return feed was made with a grounding post drove into the ground. In the early days people would use the same government phone box with switches and an extra bell. They then moved on to use old telephones, which were available and installed separately. When the barbwire telephone first came out, the wires were stapled directly to the fence posts. This didn't work well. When it rained it would weaken the transmission. Later on insulators were put on and reception would be clear. The barbwire was a good way of communicating; it tended to be very reliable and didn't break down like the government telephone would. This telephone was especially handy when a bull got out of pasture and did not completely break the wire, everybody would listen on their end of the phone and they would tell each other where the lost bull was heading. This type of phone lasted until a modern government telephone system was put in with underground wires. "
wireless may work anyway (Score:3, Informative)
The only mailing list that I know of dedicated to long-distance WiFi (802.11) links is wireless-longhaul [openict.net]. You can subscribe here [openict.net]. There's also a Wiki [openict.net] with plenty of links to projects that have successfully deployed long-distance wireless networks in all kinds of different places.
Don't go into proprietary wireless unless you absolutely have no other option. There's some interesting new technology that's already available e.g. from Alvarion, using OFDM you can make non-line of sight connections at microwave frequencies. Eventually there will be 802.16 standards for them but right now it's not ready yet. The proprietary solutions are many thousands of dollars for each box.
simon