Michael I think for the people in the situation you are describing, the best bet would be one of the wireless technologies. Someone on the thread mentioned LTE (which should be coming out in a couple years time), and to that we can add WiMAX and even the 3G/3.5G HSPDA type wireless. The prices will not be USD19.99 but for less than USD70/month it is quite possible to get reasonable high speed Internet access. Will it be as fast as GigE to the house? No. But it will certainly support most web apps. The only challenge is that some of these wireless technologies still have much higher latency when compared to the wired DSL/cable modem links. Regards -----Original Message----- From: Michael Sokolov [mailto:msokolov@ivan.Harhan.ORG] Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 4:05 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Locations with no good Internet (was ISP in Johannesburg) Brandon Galbraith <brandon.galbraith@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm very familiar with those folks of course, they've been an inspiration to me for a long time. However, my needs are different. RRIC's model basically involves a specific community with a well-defined boundary: bring the bandwidth into the community via a bulk feed, then sublet inside the community. But I don't have a specific community in mind - I'm trying to develop a more generic solution. (The case of my friend who is at 31 kft from a Covad-enabled CO is only an example and nothing more.) Again, consider a town with a Covad-enabled CO plus an outlying countryside. The people in the town proper already have Covad xDSL available to them, and if we could stick my SDSL/2B1Q repeater in the middle of some longer loops, it would enable the people in the countryside to get *exactly the same* Covad (or ISP-X-via-Covad) services as those in the town proper. My repeater approach would also allow me to stay out of ISP or ISP-like business which I really don't want to get into - I would rather just make hardware and let someone else operate it. A repeater is totally unlike a router, it is not IP-aware, it just makes the loop seem shorter, allowing farther-outlying users to connect to *existing* ISPs with an already established business structure. Anyway, I just saw a post on NANOG about an area deprived of "high-speed Internet" services and thought I would post my idea in the hope that someone would have some ideas that would actually be *helpful* to what I'm trying to do. If not - oh well, I'll just put the idea back on the dusty shelf in the back of my mind until I'm ready to try presenting it to the folks who own the CO-colocated DSLAMs it would have to work with - gotta finish a few other things before I open that can of worms in the earnest. MS