Broadband Shuffle

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Tom Guilderson wrote:

> John Chambers wrote:
> >
> > OTOH, I wonder if the people outside the cities  could  get  the  act
> > together and set up their own wireless networks. All it would take is
> > one tie-in to the Internet to give everyone in your area access. This
> > is how rural cooperatives have happened in the past.
> >
>
> That is exactly what some people in my wife's home town of Cork Ireland
> are trying to do:
>
> 	http://cork.irishwan.org/

A couple of real-world problems doing that here:

- The owner of that one tie-in, or owners of those few tie-ins, are
subject to rules and restrictions by their ISP.  Aside from the fact that
the ISP may shut them down for using too much bandwidth[0], you are also
letting complete strangers access the internet using an IP address
registered to you.  If they did something bad, and it was traced back to
that IP address, I'm not so sure that you would not be held liable.

- 11Mb/s just isn't that much bandwidth.  If just two of those people are
streaming audio, the whole network is sunk.  If you can set up quotas (or
traffic shaping), you might be able to get around this.

- You are creating a single point of failure for too large a group, a flaw
the internet was specifically designed away from.

- I'm not sure the FCC would allow an extended area of superduper antennae
and what not.  Every neighborhood has the crotchety old whiner who
threatens to sue with every leaf that enters their property from another
yard.  They're going to be calling up and complaining about interference,
whether it is real or not.  And the FCC can pretty much do what they want
with very little oversight.

[0] Time has shown that "unlimited" internet accounts are not really
unlimited, and many "unlimited" ISP's will shut down customers for
excessive use.

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DDDD   David Kramer                   http://thekramers.net
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