I live in a little tiny town that only has Big Box Huge Company DSL (don’t know if I can give the name) DSL, but they have not maintined their equipement and have not been accepting any new customers for almost a year. Also, people are paying for 3 or 6 megabit speeds and are getting roughly 512k.
Is it legal to get two or three T1 lines and then divide up the connection between the 50 or so families in town using a WLAN like a big internet co-op? Not really make any money off of it, just cover the costs? I got a quote of about $750 a month for three T1 lines, and people are paying about 80 bucks a month currently for their 512k speed.
Certainly it would be legal.
It would also be expensive to set up, and you’d need to either have a well-trained technician on staff or not offer most of the typical ISP services (email addresses, web hosting…).
The equipment is a lot cheaper than it was when I ran a hosting site, but it’s still complex to balance loads over multiple T1 lines, handle wiring and distribution to the 50 homes (you can’t use someone else’s wires without permission, obviously), install and maintain firewall and router (keeping up with security updates), and keep industrial-strength UPSs on the lines so things stay up during power outages.
You might consider using wireless instead of wired if it’s a fairly small geographic area, but you’d still have the expense of setting up the broadcast antenna.
In a nutshell, this is not a simple task, and the monthly cost of the T1 lines is only one piece of a substantial pile of costs.
Well the town itself isnt’ very large so I was thinking WLAN… and just doing a barebones “here is your internet connection, get a wifi card and we will set you up a password/login and go for it”. The public outrage for internet access is getting pretty big here, and I was thinking it would be quite a solution to the problem.
You need to think about your last mile. What do you mean by wlan? Do you mean off the shelf-wifi? If so then your effective range in a couple hundred feet and maybe 6-10 active clients before interference knocks them off the air. If you want more than that then you need to run cable to the next access point, so now you have things like property rights, running lines, building codes, etc to worry about. Not to mention 24/7 maintenance. Wifi is really limited to only so many channels. Youre not putting on on your roof and serving the town. Your range and capacity would be terrible.
Not to mention, 3 T1s is 4.5mbps. Most people consider 1.5mbps the minimum for broadband, so even if you oversell by 100% you have at best 6 customers. 200% 12, but then theyre getting the 512k/512k on average that they complaining about.
Or do you mean setting up a WISP? If so you’ll need licensing for the equipment and probably a few hundred thousand just to start up. You’ll need a lot more than 3 T1s to handle a town. You’ll need a T3 or an OC3 minimum.
Oh I see. I was thinking about maybe getting the town motivated in going after that broadband rural America thing and maybe getting this going.
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The only low cost way I can think of doing this is seeing if you can implement WDS. This allows you to have a wifi access point talk to another without putting a wire between them. So you could theorectically build a local wireless mesh that could fill a neighborhood. Each of your neigbors would have to host a WDS access point and a normal access point plugged into it. The latter would be for the computers to connect to and the WDS access point would be there to talk to the other WDS access point next door. With a proper antenna you can have two WDS access points talking to each other from fairly decent distances.
I think you still run into issues that limit your network size, but its something to consider.
I think the real issue is getting all the bandwidth to share. You might want to look into some municipal internet projects. Some involve starting your own little DSL ISP and buying leasing rights from the phone company, laying your own fiber, retrofitting wifi into streetlamps, etc.