Wireless Neighborhood Networks in Canada 120
Anonymous the younger writes "Cringely once again has another column, this time with a company in Canada that does neato stuff with Open Source."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Wireless Neighborhood Networks in Canada
Related Links Top of the: day, week, month.
Genetics explains why you look like your father, and if you don't, why you should.
The conglomorates will put and end to this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm, I wish that everyone could have a large dish in their neighborhood. Hell I had to put up with a ton of shit at my apartment complex to get a small dish ($400 damage deposit -- $300 non-refundable, make sure it wasn't attached to anything, etc). I have to sign a waiver at my house because of the HOA. I thought the FCC mandated that having a small dish was legal and easy? I just can't see anyone having a large dish to bring this in at least in my area.
If getting this stuff for
Losing revenue from residential customers - not. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Please. (Score:5, Interesting)
You can build multi terabyte capacity systems for a few thousand bucks...
Storage of video isn't and issue. 500-800KBps WM9 at SIF res is good enough for tv..
So the system that tapes eveything that isn't on disk is not "bullshit". The company that I work for builds hardware for the broadcast industry that is designed to do such things.
What about the bugs? (Score:2, Interesting)
Observations (Score:5, Interesting)
This Andrew guy is obviously an UberGeek. Congratulations on achiving such notariety.
2)
This system is absolutly amazing. It is an interesting test of the application of exising technology. He didn't create anything new, he just used what was already avaliable.
3)
Everything seems perfectly legal, but some big companies are loosing money on the setup. Will Andrew's work lead to harsher laws in Canada? Once this type of setup is common place, I think that the non-communist values that some law making Canadians have may be overpowered.
4)
Another great article Cringely!
Re:Losing revenue from residential customers - not (Score:5, Interesting)
So what you are saying is that they make no money on their residential customers and they only promote the service out of the goodness of their hearts right? They have no interest in spreading their power across the country and buying up every little company out there to take under their wing right?
This is America and we work under the Capitalist system. If something isn't profitable it is either done away with completely or bought up by the government. Comcast wouldn't be buying up every cable company in the country to spread their influences if it wasn't profitable.
Believe me. The conglomorates will not appreciate losing customers to this sort of operation. Luckily for them they can control the content that these neighborhood groups can receive and at what cost.
Either way we'll lose.
"disintermediation" my butt (Score:4, Interesting)
Wrong: Andrew Greig isn't "disintermediating" anybody, he's "alter-mediating", meaning in plain english that he's cutting the grass under some other middlemen's feet and setting himself up as the sole replacement middleman for all the people he serves. Likewise, if he wanted to get rid of the internet providers, he's go into the business himself.
His business is that of a concentrator of services, no more no less. Cheaper, more friendly perhaps, but nothing so glamorous as what Cringely portrays him to be. If he's clever and maintains his services, he should make money out of it too.
Re:The conglomorates will put and end to this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The conglomorates will put and end to this... (Score:5, Interesting)
He buys the shows from the conglomorates, the only people he's competing with are the service side of the industry.
His solution scales until there's an old dipshit on his cul-de-sac waking him up at 3 AM screaming because something went wrong and today's Oprah got cut off.
The content is really cheap, (another argument against "broadcast flags" and DRM). But the larger your customer base, the more they'll expect from you, and the stupider they'll be.
Comcast charges 40 bucks a month markup because people keep digging through the cables, can't get their cablemodem working, etc.. (Comcast sucks and is a ripoff)
Re:What about the bugs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Secondly, this setup sounds very compelling until you start to read between the lines and realize that this guy's got a whole cellar full of hardware...
1. The C-Band satellite dish in his back yard and probably 10+ receivers.
2. Two or three MythBackend Systems each with multiple hardware mpeg encoding cards. These machines would probably also need at least 2 gigE cards each.
3. A database server running mysql to hold all of the recorded program meta data.
4. A storage system capable of storing 30,000 movies/tv shows/mp3's. This solution should be robust enough to support having multiple streams being written (since you've got those 3 mythbackend boxes constantly writing) plus having any number of reads as any number of Myth Front ends read data from the array. So, this would either be some sorta direct connect SAN or some type of NAS toaster with a shit loads of disk on lots of spindles.
5. A couple good gigE switches/router to connect all of this too. You would probably want to look at switches that are capable of trunking and creating VLANS.
6. WAP equipment. I'd go for something that had some really good management tools that'll allow you todo bandwidth throttling, usage monitoring/logging, traffic shaping, etc.
7. A good omnidirectional wireless Antenna so that everybody can connect.
8. An ISP that's
a) going to be cool with what your doing (such as speakeasy)
b) can provide the bandwidth necessary so that a whole street worth of people can surf the Internet while also chatting on the phone.
Now, there's also some other considerations.
Because of the cost of the equipment, Electricity and bandwidth bills, your going to have to charge for this.
So, unless your going to try to get NPO status, your going to have to get a business license and start keeping track of what you take in for profits so you can pay the tax man. Not to mention that the cost of this equipment means that you'll probably need to take out some loans for the initial acquisitions, so you'd have to figure out your THAC0 so that can hit zero to at least break even. Also, you'll need some infrastructure so that you can keep track of who's paid you and how much and who hasn't paid you, etc.
Beyond all that, we haven't even gotten into the aspects of providing tech support for all the clueless users who'll call up at 3am when they can't make a phone call and the problem isn't at your end, it's at the ISP's
Now, you've got 10 people with these Starnix thin clients in they're house hooked up to their TV's. Who's going to do the initial configuration of these things? I doubt they come pre-configured with the mythfrontend (though it would be nice), so you'll probably need to configure these things to all the settings for your myth back end.
Also, since your now their ISP, you can expect (since they're paying you for network access) that they'll be calling you whenever their completely unpatched, spyware addled Windows ME box shits all over itself... Not to mention that they'll be calling you whenever they want to put another piece of wireless equipment in their house, which means you'll have to start page listing all the gear you know works with your setup...
With all that said, this solution would work, it's just going to require a bit more work then Mr. Cringely makes it sound...
To all the naysayers... (Score:4, Interesting)
Neighbourhood-net howto (Score:2, Interesting)