[Cu-wireless] next meeting

[niteshad at whopper.de]

I suspect that the meeting would be very poorly attended if we tried to
arrange it on such short notice.  I must also concur with Dave that the meeting
should have a purpose beyond just talking wireless shop (which granted can
be a very enjoyable activity as well).  

I'm pretty much booked through Monday or so, however, if we arrange for a
meeting some weeknight next week, I'll be available then, provided we pick
the night by Monday.

BTW Dave, I volunteer to arrange the lecture series based upon the list of
people you provided.  I'll contact them as soon as we nail down a few
specifics.  This might be a good idea for the agenda.  Basically, we need to
decide how frequently we want the lectures, and what level of technical detail
we want to request from them.  My quandary on the tech. level is this:
personally, I would like to have a very detailed and technical lecture series, as
most of the members of the group are capable of understanding EM physics,
electrical engineering, wireless application programming and routing protocols
at fairly advanced level (e.g. undergraduate or graduate).  However, this
lecture series might be a good way to get our name out in the community in a
positive way.  For example, if we asked the speakers to give a talk aimed at
a more general audience, we could invite all of the people on Ivan's street
and use the lecture series as a way to generate understanding and
grassroots enthusiasm for our network.  If we go the general route, I'm thinking that
we should try to procure a space such as the Urbana Free Library's
auditorium for a more "professional" appearance.  What does everyone else think.

Another item for the agenda that I have been working on is tracking down
cheap local sources of "resellable" bandwidth to begin working on an Internet
co-op that serves the high concentration of DSL users on Ivan's street (the
reason why I keep referring to it thus is that I've forgotten the name of
it. =}  Right now, with only a minorty of available ISPs reporting, the odds
on favorites are 1024k business class SDSL from McLeod for $199/mo.
(+installation, DSL router, yadda yadda yadda) and $159/mo. 768k residential SDSL
from speakeasy.net.  Both include staticly routed IP addresses, allow
customers to run their own servers, and are willing to sell us more static IP
addresses if we need them.

At present my idea is to run two or three SDSL lines into various homes
around Ivan, for a total bandwidth of 2-3 Mbps shared among 20 households. 
The monthly recurring cost for this would be $20-30 per household (plus a
portion of the install fee, and the costs of one of our wireless router nodes
and omni antennas)  Any installation costs could be amortized over the course
of the first year to make the deal more attractive up front.  For the 20-30
bucks, each household would get an internet connection with about 160kbps,
symmetric, guaranteed and burst capability up to the whole 3 Mbps.  Basically
this solution would provide all of the benefits of SDSL, such as low
latency connections, with the ability to download at the same speed as my cable
modem.  Plus, it would cost $15-25 less than what Insight offers.  The only
potential downside is that we'll only have ISP tech support on the SDSL lines,
any problems beyond that point in the network are ours to deal with. 
Actually, having people on the street who _really_ enjoy maxxing out their
downlink connection by constantly downloading software, video and MP3s might also
be a problem.  The only solution that (while weak) remotely seems to work in
a community sense is just asking people to be polite with the connection. 
I favor asking people to coordinate their multi-ISO downloads of Linux or
hundreds of megabytes of MP3s.  With Linux, we could encourage people to
download it once and one person/family make multiple CD-R copies of the ISO
image(s).  

regards,

Mark

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