In NZ, Sharing Ethernet With A Whole CIty 282
ryuko writes: "Normally LANs are used by a single organization at best, but Wellington's 13-square-mile LAN comprises many of the city's businesses. The city council garnered a UNESCO Digital Access Award in recognition of its achievement in installing the 1,000 Mbps network.
The full article is here on ZDNet. Drool ... gigabit internet ..."
open source too (Score:4, Insightful)
that is pretty cool. lots of other juicy details in there as well.
Scaleable? (Score:2, Insightful)
Right... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Correction (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah but the point is that many US organizations can afford, and do afford, a lot more than a T1. Wiring a city solves the last mile problem, but 9 times out of ten the organizations that a company wants to video or audio teleconference isn't conveniently in the same town.
The article seems to be full of errors. Firstly they say that it's 1,000 Mbps, but then call it Fast Ethernet (which is 100Mbps), and then state that it's 67x faster than a T1 (which would imply 100Mbps). Later in the article they say "With 100 Mbps of capacity, businesses can easily implement video conferencing and voice over IP (VoIP)." 1000, 100, Fast Ethernet, 67x T1...blah.
"Socialist!" (Score:3, Insightful)
Or not????
Better to s**t on everyone else, eh?
If the raw paranoiac/Hobbesian profit motive isn't behind it, most folks areound here would never go for it. Damn the benefits. Who knows? Maybe in 2050, members of Congress will be saying, "If we vote for legislation X, then we might catch up with New Zealand's GDP."
I dont see why not. (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the real question is (Score:5, Insightful)
WAN, not LAN, and other inconsistencies.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Normally LANs are used by a single organization at best true, but for a good reason. LANs that span multiple buildings are technically refferred to as WANs, regardless of the underlying technology.
And the 2.5k$ gigabit router? Not. A commodity PC cannot even reach maximum throughput on a single gigabit NIC, nevermind routing between them. The only way to do this would be to use a decent server-class M/B with 64bit/66MHz PCI bus - which would take the total system cost above 2.5k$. A more moderate PC could indeed be used for residential/small business gateways, but you would not get gigabit throughput.
Just my 2c worth...
-justin
Re:Very, very nice (Score:3, Insightful)
It states clearly that "It's a normal LAN with client-owned routers at the edge. Clients implement their own firewall protection"
The costs will probably be very low... using opensource and all their overhead will be at a minimum. The costs a company makes is nothing more then they normally would have to pay for materials like a router and firewall.. it can be whatever they want..
What i am interested in is if this scheme would work in rural area's. What would be it's breakeven point....?
Re:Have no fear! George W is on the case! (Score:2, Insightful)
And there you have it. The internet will just become an enhancement to cable TV.
What we need is deregulation of the Cable internet access, like there is with DSL.
Re:WAN, not LAN, and other inconsistencies.... (Score:1, Insightful)
was that businesses had access to 1Gbps,
do you really think that this is actually the
case?
I think it is more probable that each
business is running 100Mbps locally,
so saturating 1Gbps is a problem
they aren't interested in.
They are interested in cheap uplink to a fat
pipe, and that's what they have
for $2.5k instead of a cisco.
I agree that if they get to the point
where a business-to-business connection
actually wants 1Gbps, they are fucked.
Hello! Remember IBM? (Score:3, Insightful)
Those three letters were magic. At the time, computing was dominated by big expensive mainframes, and IBM had no less than 90% of that market. They were, in other words, the Microsoft of the 60s and 70s. To survive, your product had to be compatible with the IBM PC at every level. IBM itself took a long time to see this, and came out with non-compatible systems like the PCjr and the PS/2. Which is why the "IBM-compatible" market isn't dominated by IBM.
The one way Microsoft helped out was by providing a crappy operating system -- actually more like a glorified program loader. Since MS-DOS did such a lousy job of insulating applications from the hardware, apps had to incorporate a lot of hardware-specific functionality. Which forced IBM's competitors to emulate the PC at a very low level.
Everybody engineering to the same specs created opportunities for commodity manufacturers -- and created the "generic" computer. Which still has basic design features that totally suck -- like that big heat-generating internal power supply.
Perhaps if Microsoft had hired somebody who knew Jack Shit about re-entrant code or how to write a scheduler, we'd all still be using proprietary architectures. Kind of ironic.
Take that, QOS heads! (Score:3, Insightful)
QoS: No worries: Many IT departments say that prioritizing packets is vital if you want to run applications and send important files over the Internet. Because of Citylink's sheer speed and capacity, De Wit says adding quality of service (QoS) features isn't necessary. "QoS is a problem for others because they only have so much space in the pipe," he says. "We can fit all the traffic we want onto our Ethernet, so why do we need to worry about prioritizing?" Also, because of the generous capacity, DeWit says data collisions, which are often a concern on LANs, aren't such an issue with Citylink.
Seriously. QoS is a waste of time if you just have enough capacity.
Re:Take that, QOS heads! (Score:0, Insightful)