[Cu-wireless] next meeting

[David Young]

Mark,

Thanks for leading on this DSL research, it is important.

I appreciate your taking on the lectures, too. A monthly lecture works
for me. I prefer that technical speakers are technical, and non-technical
speakers are not. =)

Dave

On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 08:49:45PM +0100, niteshad at whopper.de wrote:
> 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
> 
> -- 
> This email account and domain name will be deactivated
> on 31 December 2002.  Please make arrangements with 
> the owner regarding alternate communications prior to 
> 20 December 2002.  
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Cu-wireless mailing list
> Cu-wireless at lists.groogroo.com
> http://lists.cu.groogroo.com/cgi-bin/listinfo/cu-wireless

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Engineering from the Right Brain
                        Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933