On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 09:26:24PM -0500, Austad, Jay wrote:
> Well, if you're offering service using this, you need to look at this from a
> support perspective too.  

ok. I think I see where you're coming from. To me 'providing service' meant
"offering connectivity to a private community of geeks, in exchange for a
few dollars to cover costs, to anyone clueful enough to be able to set up
gear at least somewhat on their own (or ask politely enough to get help to
do so)".
	we'd offer access to game servers, FTP servers, IRC servers; by dint
of people wanting to share such services with their friends across the
wireless network. 
	anything larger than several hundred geeks, gets too impersonal and
unwieldy (compare the Internet of several years ago; or the BBS scene; to
the Net of today); so I'm kind of opposed to it. In short, being an ISP does
not bring happiness; being part of a community of clueful people comes much
closer. That's just my view, tho. Feel free to discuss. :)

> There is some firewall trickery that we could probably use
> to get most protocols to work, but there are still going to be things that
> won't.
	I view this as not necessarily being a bad thing. it provides a
natural mechanism for controlling bandwith use. 

> As far as roaming goes, using public IP's isn't going to change the
> functionality of that at all.  Your border router routes for your public
> address range, and your routers on the inside handle the individual routes
> for each ip and tell the border router(s) how to get there.  
	true. point taken.

> This can get
> messy though depending on how many subscribers you have and what routing
> protocol you use.  
	yes. I am aware of that. :) as the admirable Mr. Horwath pointed
out; my original statement mentioning BGP may not be the best way. It's just
the first thing that came to mind. OSPF or something else may be better, but
I don't know squat about dynamic routing protocols (I half-slept through
those chapters in my networking classes, and even what I didn't sleep
through didn't sink in very deep).

On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 11:52:19PM -0500, Mike Horwath wrote:
> Cache servers rule.
> You can save a TON of bandwidth that way.
	absolutely. we'd definitely be well-served by putting a number of
those in at the gateways.

> Also, throwing local content onto the network instead of heading out
> for it will make a big difference.
	exactly. this is why I discussed having our own game/IRC/FTP
servers. This is one of the things that Bob T. really wants out of a
city-wide network -- cut down on the usage of our own T1s by letting people
leech FTP across the wireless link.

> Peering with people can help there immensely.
	in what way are you thinking?
	I've always been thinking along the lines of having a city-wide
network that has numerous gateways to the wired world. (of course, we need
to make sure that we don't inadvertently become a peering link for the wired
world -- another consideration for a dynamic routing system).

Carl Soderstrom.
-- 
Network Engineer
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com