bearing in mind that most of these questions are applicable in an infrastructure type application. unless people want to build out a tunneling infrastructure (which will chew up their b/w anyway) these questions are largely moot. when last we saw our hero (Monday, May 13, 2002), Mike Horwath was madly tapping out: > On Mon, May 13, 2002 at 09:53:18AM -0500, Nate Carlson wrote: > > On Fri, 10 May 2002, Mike Horwath wrote: > > > Hate to sound like a naysayer, but bandwidth costs money. :( > > > > Never said there wouldn't be a charge for access. > > > > To start with, it'll just be us hobbiests, and I'm sure some of us will be > > willing to give away (semi-legally?) our cable/dsl bandwidth to other real > > geeks.. but, once we start to grow, we'll have to figure out a way to > > charge for it. > > And how are you going to 'share' that bandwidth? > > Some horrible and massive NAT table and central router? Sounds like a > bitch to maintain. > > A big ass caching proxy server? (which would be very cool). there are a variety of mechanisms available to share b/w in this manner. captive portals with b/w limiting mechanisms are pretty straightforward to configure. applying intelligence at the edge to address this is clearly the most scalable means of doing this. if this is a route that folks are interested in going we need to make sure that there are "canned" configurations that simply require filling in the blanks to get online. i can discuss a couple of sample architectures for doing this at our next meeting if people are interested. but given the geographic difficulties associated with this type of network buildout i surmise that this won't be a real issue for quite some time. > > > I wish it were free, I would love to give away some. > > > > You _sure_ you don't want to donate 3mbit of that shiny new OC3 to > > tcwug? It's not like you're even stressing it yet... heck, that'd > > even make it worth turning TCWUG into a real nonprofit so you can > > get a writeoff for it! :) interesting thought given some of the recent activities taking place with the other wireless groups around the country. > I don't make those decisions alone. > > Also, how would you get 'my' bandwidth? I am not going to pay for > more roof space (already did that for other projects) and while I > would happily host it out of my home, the T1 costs are still $220/T1 > per month. And being in Golden Valley - who lives around me to > 'relay' off of? Then let's get into the issue that 802.11b doesn't > allow me a nice clean solution for my inhouse wireless, think of how > much interference I'll get if I had a roofmount antenna? > > > If you guys can find a way to get the bandwidth from 'me', I'll find a > way to donate some. There will be a big AUP put into place, though, > as I can not stand abuse or theft of services. This might make some > people shy away because I am a hardass. So be it. this is a nice segue into the issue of abuse. while creation of a public network is a great thing from a convenience perspective it is also subject to abuse. people willing to share their b/w need to have mechanisms to limit their exposure to this kind of abuse and mitigate triggering flags on their SP monitoring mechanisms as well as staying off the spam filter lists. captive portals do provide a mechanism for circumventing some forms of abuse. -- steve ulrich sulrich at botwerks.org PGP: 8D0B 0EE9 E700 A6CF ABA7 AE5F 4FD4 07C9 133B FAFC