I was thinking that the Motorola neighborhood system coupled with traditional 802.11b would work pretty well. I live in an apartment complex. It would be ideal for a few 802.11b access points. It certainly would be a lower cost of entry coupled with enough people together that might make it work. Also, there are about 4 other apartment complexes within 1 or so. Its out of reach for standard 802.11b, but the Motorola neighborhood devices should work. So, with 5 buildings in my complex, each with 48 units. That's 240 units. I could probably get 20 or so to sign on. Multiply that by the 4 other complexes, I would have about 80 users. So, $2100+500*4 for Motorola Plus $1000 in access points That's $5100 for 80 users. Or about $64 + Wireless card per house startup. For access, I'd probably get the DSL Business 7mbps plan from Visi (if available in my area). That's $725 a month. Split amongst 80 users, that's a little over $9 a month. That's cheaper than dialup. Oh wait, just realized, it would be 5 complexes total with approx 100 people. Oh well. It would mean a sustainable rate of 87500bps if everyone access the network at full capacity at the same time. -----Original Message----- From: tcwug-list-admin at tcwug.org [mailto:tcwug-list-admin at tcwug.org] On Behalf Of Nate Carlson Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 4:24 PM To: tcwug-list at tcwug.org Subject: RE: [TCWUG] Richochet boxes? On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Nick Ryberg wrote: > In a crazy way, this might be a sort of odd little entrepenuer > opportunity - get together with 2 other people in your neighborhood - > split the $2100 cost for a startup AP + 3 subscriber units, and split > the cost of DSL to the AP. Hmmm... it's still darned expensive for a > normal user to get it up and running. But once, you got over the > hump, and had five or six other people sharing the costs, it'd > probably be a money maker. Remember -- reselling DSL is a risky business. For one, most cheap DSL accounts (ie, Real Time's TCLUG program) are for non-commercial use only, and any resale is prohibited. In our case, if there's not a ton of traffic through the line, we don't actively go see if the line's being used for commercial use. If it's sucking a ton of bandwidth, though, and we see it's commercial, it'll cause problems. Also, Qwest DSL circuits are just about their lowest repair priority, or so I've been told (even below home voice circuits). Only way I'd be comfortable reselling DSL is if it came from someone like Covad (SDSL), but since Covad's on shaky grounds.. *shrugs*. Reselling RR Business Cable's an option; I don't recall if they prohibit resale, but I know someone running a (small) web hosting business off it. Reliability is pretty good (from my monitoring, well above 99% uptime over the last 6 months), and the price is $99/mo for 1mb symmetrical. That includes 16 IP's, too. But there's also many places that are AT&T land instead of RoadRunner. Best bet would probably be to make a deal with a large provider to get T1's at a discount rate. Chances are we couldn't get them much cheaper than $900/mo for a full T1 (including local loop), though.. takes a whole lot of subscribers to cover that cost. And, again, we'd HAVE to limit customer's bandwidth.. let's say $45/mo per user, that's 20 users to cover the cost, so the users can't expect to each be getting T1-ish speeds. Of course, if you've got users used to RoadRunner, a T1 is going to seem slow, too. > I can take this offline if people think it's way off-topic and too > commercial for TCWUG. I like it, let's keep it. :) -- Nate Carlson <natecars at real-time.com> | Phone : (952)943-8700 http://www.real-time.com | Fax : (952)943-8500 _______________________________________________ Twin Cities Wireless Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.tcwug.org tcwug-list at tcwug.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tcwug-list