[TCWUG] Richochet boxes?

Fri Jul 19 11:08:02 CDT 2002

That's a good idea - I was thinking in terms of single occupancy residence -
a typical home.

That bottom estimate of bandwidth would be the worst case scenario, wouldn't
it?  So, technically speaking, would the speed be variable ala cable?

- Nick

-----Original Message-----
From: tcwug-list-admin at tcwug.org [mailto:tcwug-list-admin at tcwug.org]On
Behalf Of BN
Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 6:28 PM
To: tcwug-list at tcwug.org
Subject: RE: [TCWUG] Richochet boxes?

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

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