Brisbane Bandwidth Collective

December 7th, 1999

"You will be assimilated"

I encourage anyone who wants to add something to either send me links, or whole chunks of content, and I'll put it up/link it in. Or just copy the whole idea, run away, and set it up yourself. I don't care, as long as you let me join when you get it going. :-)

Status:

There is interest from many people, but no actual organisation or even a clear strategy. The primary problem is that I don't know where to get cheap bandwidth from. I don't know how we're all going to connect to it. All I know is that the current situation sucks ass, and I'm sick of it.

Background:

Getting a decent connection to the 'net is a pain. The best commercial providers offer $40 a month 'all-you-can-eat'. meaning: Press reload every minute, (otherwise you get dropped) assuming you can get on in the first place, using modems which never seem to connect at full rate. Hamish and I have made this actually work OK, but only by being terribly clever with computers.

The basic problem is Telstra. Remember their record profits? The biggest in Australian corporate history? That's because a standard 64K ISDN line (basically, a plain telephone line with a shiny new name and some things removed) costs about $300 a month to run, when it should cost $10. And that's the smallest digital pipe you can buy. After that it starts getting expensive.

But the real kicker is the 'bandwidth charges'. Telstra charge $0.18 per megabyte to carry internet traffic. Optus charge not much less. Eighteen cents per meg does't sound like much, but it mounts up so fast that it usually overwhelms the line rental cost. These charges are totally bogus. Neither Telstra not Optus are charged per meg from anywhere. They pay flat rates for their international channels. But while they are the only source, there's not much we can do about it.

Here's the costs assosciated with Internet access through an ISP..

Your Account signup with ISP (~$20)
Your Account rate. ($40/month)
Your Telstra line installation (~$150) **
Your Line rental. ($10/month) **
Your Local call costs ($30/month) **
ISP in-line installation (~$100) **
ISP in-line rental. (~$10/month) **
ISP out-pipe installation ($$$) **
ISP out-pipe rental ($$$) **
ISP out-pipe bandwidth charges. ($$$$$$!) **

If you include installation and setup, then there are 10 billing points in the process, and Telstra is eight of them. ISP's exist not to give you internet access, but to protect you from the complexities of the Telstra billing system. ISP's only charge based on time, because splitting the costs into connection, time, and bandwith is just too much for the customer to handle. I'd truly hate to be an ISP. They're in the dangerous game of trying to predict how much bandwidth their customers are, en-masse, going to consume, and then set a flat rate which covers it.

As I said. This sucks ass.

The solution is for all the people who are sick of this crap to pick up their toys and play elsewhere. This is hard, but not impossible. It's been progressively getting easier as time passes.

Possible Solutions:

First, we'll get my little obsession out of the way: I figure, as long as we buy services from large telecoms, we're going to get screwed somehow. So, I favor basically building our own communications network using cool new tech like cheap wireless ethernet, or the venerable 'coax cable over the fence' approach. The drawback is a big initial outlay for the equipment. ($500-$1k per house) The benefit is no ongoing costs. (Basically, "It's better to own than rent") This kind of gear tends to reach only a kilometre or two with good line-of-sight, so a diverse network of people would be needed to string the WAN across the city. People with houses on top of hills are encouraged to apply within. :-) This doesn't solve the bandwidth source problem, but it does create a high-speed distribution network/intranet.

The more regular way to wire up the collective is to use modems and phone lines, just like an ISP.We could set up a box connected to our own Fat Pipe. Each person is then responsible for running their own link (made up of a pair of modems and lines, one for each end) which they completely own. (And if you went insane and got an ISDN line, you'd have somewere to run it to.) This is cheaper to set up than the radio gear (since we've got half the modems/lines already) but has ongoing costs.

There's two general approaches: The centralized way where we locate a 'server box' somewhere and hang all the connections from it, or the distributed approach, where the equipment is spread out amongst all the participants. Distributed approaches, while tricky to plan, tend to be more reliable. Backup paths and all that.

Getting bandwidth is an issue. That 18c/Mb cost is the biggest problem. There are a couple of approaches:

Modem Pool: Get three or four all-you-can-eat ISP accounts and some clever proxy software to spread the load between them. That would provide 120-160kbit/s of bandwidth to the collective, but no single inbound transfer would be able to use more than one modem, so individual files wouldn't be any faster. The 5th Avenue collective manages to share a single connection among 3 fairly heavy users (and extra guests) with a little care, so we can say that a 3:1 user to modem ratio works. If we had a dozen people, four bonded modems should carry the load.
Satellite: Hughes have a satellite internet service. You stick a dish on the roof, point it at the sat, and get up to 400kbit/s (but generally around 120Kbit/s) of all-you-can-eat bandwidth. I've heard some very average things about this service, though. And it's not very available in Brisbane. We'd probably have trouble getting one. Satellite has two drawbacks: the upchannel, (the dishes are recieve-only, so you need a separate internet connection for outgoing data) and ping times of up to 800ms or so, (the signal has got to reach geosynch orbit and back. That takes time.) which really makes deathmatches suck. On the other hand, it's a direct connection to Palo Alto, isn't censorable, and has no per-meg charges. It might be really good in combo with two or three bonded modems: all the http and file transfer could shift to the sat, and the outgoing channel and games go through the modems.
Optus Cable: An announcement is happening in a few weeks. There are rumors that it will be an all-you-can-surf deal. If this is so, then we ride.

Lets face it. Money is the problem.

Technical Stuff:

More here later. For the moment, look at these: