In NZ, Sharing Ethernet With A Whole CIty

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 ..."

Too much money makes Jack a dull boy

"We never had the luxury of spending lots of money," says Naylor. "We needed to be able to make do with less."

So in other words, all of the people elsewhere with massive budgets have been conned into buying large amounts of expensive kit to get less for their money than these guys.

Brains 1 - Suits 0

The most impressive thing about this is the simplicity of it. This isn't next gen tech or anything this is just someone who had the smarts to think

"Hang on we supply electricity via a distributed network rather than Point 2 Point, why can't we do the same with the internet... hang on its cheaper as well"

Real issue here though is that the City backed up the smart guy rather than getting CorporationX to do it, had then gone for the latter route they would be right where the rest of us are with our T1s to the Telco backbones.

I predict this won't happen in big cities because they have too much money to be sensible.

open source too

As another cost-cutting measure, Citylink uses a generic computer running Debian Linux and SMTP management software, as well as a number of other open-source tools: NetSaint Network Monitor, NocMonitor, MRTG, and Cricket . And the company builds its own routers, rather than dropping the money on hardware. Naylor says a comparable Cisco router would cost him $25,000 NZ or roughly $11,500 U.S.; Citylink builds its own routers for $2,500.

that is pretty cool. lots of other juicy details in there as well.

Kiwi's with a supa fast MAN?

Wouldn't that be a MAN, not a LAN?

It's bloomin' rad is what it is. It's actually nice when a city provides, what's seen as, neccessary infrastructure to the businesses in the city.

But, uhhhh... think of all the sheep porn going over those cables, man! The amount of sick, New Zealand sheep porn you can get on the internet will increase a billion fold once they get all 1000 Kiwi's on the network.

New Zealand - Where men are men and sheep are nervous.

"Socialist!"

I don't live in NZ. Nor do I live in Europe. I live in the U.S. If city sewer systems were invented this morning, any town council member in a randomly chosen Midwest U.S. town who suggests that the city maybe ought to connect a network of sewers between all the houses and businesses and then get a system to pay for that (a collective good) out of the collective treasury, surely there would be an uproar. "How dare they take my money for a service whether I want to use it or not!"

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 think the real question is

why hasn't anyone thought of this before? I could certainly see broadband catching on as a public utility type of thing, instead of a luxury thing. Much how telephones and then cable television did in the past. Not only would it allow for cheaper overall costs, but having a citywide intranet @ gig-e speeds would be amazingly useful for telecommuting/VPN, gaming with friends, or any other number of good stuff.

WAN, not LAN, and other inconsistencies....

OK - I think the ZDnet editor should get him/herself a dictionary of computer and networking terms:

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

Until it gets tot he US

New Zealand has a fiber optic pipe that crosses the Pacific Ocean, which maintains generally high bandwidth along the way

And then when the fiber connection terminates somewhere in the United States we slow it back down so those people down under don't look better then us.

Article inaccuracy?

As another cost-cutting measure, Citylink uses a generic computer running Debian Linux and SMTP management software [...]

Hmmm... Shouldn't that be SNMP as in Simple Network Management Protocol?

Straight from RFC 2962:

There are currently three versions of SNMP. SNMP version 1 (SNMPv1) protocol is defined in STD 15, RFC 1157. The SNMP version 2c (SNMPv2c) protocol is defined in RFC 1901, RFC 1905 and RFC 1906. Finally, the SNMP version 3 (SNMPv3) protocol is defined in RFC 1905, 1906, RFC 2572 and RFC 2574. See RFC 2570 for a more detailed overview over the SNMP standards.

Drool some more

Hehehe, some of you are drooling over 1 Gbps. You might be interested in 10 Gbps Ethernet [convergedigest.com] which is now close to ratification [convergedigest.com].

802.3ae [ieee.org], as the IEEE lovingly calls it, is backed by the 10GEA [10gea.org] (10 Gbps Ethernet Alliance). The founding members of the 10GEA are small companies you might have heard of such as 3Com, Cisco, Intel, Nortel or Sun.

Why Our Tellecomunications Company sux

Reading articles like this just make me so damn depressed. In South Africa, we have a major problem with our Telecommunications company. They're a monopoly who controls absolutely every single aspect of communications in this country. We are being held back by huge laws which prohibit the use of any other internet connection system or device if it is not using Telkom's infrastructure. The worst thing is that the best connection we can get to the internet in this country is ISDN if you can't fork out the megabucks for a Leased Line solution. What absolutely grates me more is the mere fact that they close down companies who attempt to run alternative connection systems. Wireless providers start up but get shut down very quickly thanks to the Telkom legislation. Connecting to your neighbour is also illegal if you take a cat5 cable and run it over the wall! By the mere definitions in the legislative clauses Telkom enjoys the right to force you to rent their equipment only. And when you have 3.5 million people connecting to the internet over a duplexed 45meg pipe to the international spectrum, it must measure up to the worst infrastructures for Internet enabled countries in the world. And we're supposed to be the gateway to Africa?

I hope that someday things will change and we can also have a 1000 mbps LAN connecting our cities.

The Citylink website is

The Citylink website is:
www.citylink.co.nz [citylink.co.nz]

Imagine a beo...

...awww, fuck it.

Take that, QOS heads!

I loved this:

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.

Addressing Scheme

Since they consider themselves a LAN, I was wondering what addressing scheme they're using.

Are they using "real" IP addresses? If so, what class?

Or are they using public address (10.0.0.0) with a NAT box to access the internet?

Just wondering.

Citylink is extremely good

I am the sys. admin for a Wellington-based technology business, and we use Citylink to connect to ISPs and other sites.

Recently, we moved premises and because Citylink was available in both locations, i have been able to securely bridge my two locations (using Linux-running routers on both ends) transparently over Citylink, which means the users don't even notice that all the servers and outbound router are still down the road.

LAN traffic averages about 2Mbps across the link, and if we had done this using our link to TelstraSaturn (our ISP) we would have ended up with a bandwith bill of extraordinary proportions.

The link was set up simply by assigning an unused 192.168.x.x address to both ends of the connection, running VTUN across this link and then bridging the virtual interfaces using Linux's bridge-utils.

There is no reason this concept couldn't be expanded to link arbitary numbers of sites into a nice, flat, stable, secure 'WAN'. In fact, this is exactly what i will be doing to fulfil some of my company's disaster-recovery requirements.

I couldn't be happier with the support, stability and speed Citylink provides.

Citylink is good

I live and work in Wellington, and our company is wired with Citylink. My last employer (a government department) were also wired on the network.

Basically we get a full duplex 100Mb Ethernet cable hanging in our machine room, and we can participate on the BGP peering system available on the network.

In New Zealand, ISP tarrif charges can be high (at least, this is the dirty rumour going about). For about, er, NZD$350 per month, we can get all-you-can-eat traffic to any of our peers without crossing an ISP. It's free, and fast.

The slowest access available is 10Mb (Ethernet). So, worst case scenario is that your updates to local servers (like linux.wellington.net.nz, for example) are blazingly fast; 100Mb access to the same server is staggering.

Naylor's vision was extraordinary, and has enabled Wellington to be a wired city in ways most people can only dream about :) We have cheap access to a high speed MAN, peering with our neighbours, and a really quick and easy way to connect to our ISPs without paying telco frame relay charges etc.

Unfortunately, it didn't just spring up overnight. I've been working with Citylink connected places for what, about four years now. The network has grown and expanded since then, gaining better core kit and so on. It's amazing now, and promises to get better. What cities need to appreciate is that it won't happen overnight; your network needs to grow organically overnight. Pick a good location for installation, get some interested companies, and be willing to take a little bit of a hit in the first year.

Wellington is kind of unique in that the entire central business district is walking distance from everywhere; you can cover the city on foot in any direction for business purposes in about 45 minutes or so. However, Auckland (a larger city in New Zealand) is starting to get on the ball with their APE (Auckland Peering Exchange). Auckland is a sprawling behemouth that has traffic congestion problems shocking for a city its size. But if they can do it, so can you :)