Make Your Own DSL

Logic Bomb writes: "Robert Cringley's latest is a striking set of instructions on how to create your own DSL service, or even your own "socialist Internet Service Provider". A cookie goes to whomever manages to implement this first! :-D" Cringley is on a roll.

its called a Co-Op

[cybercuzco]

Yes, except that then you coulld say, start up a local internet co/op in your neighborhood/apartment/housing project. Offer service for 30 bucks a month and if you get enough takers (approx 17 subscribers) you can afford a REAL T1 line to the net. With only 20 or so subscribers, chances are good that when you load up a webpage youre the only one doing so at that time. As long as no one is hosting linux distros, youre golden (and of course you can have a clause in your service contract to charge for thruput). Everyone gets cheap high speed internet access, and you get to make some money on the side.

No, that is the point...

[2nd Post!]

I think his point is valid.

If I had a dry pair to your house, we could shuttle info back and forth very effectively, right? If we both had a 802.11b point, then so could our neighbors, for about a couple miles or whatever the range is. You now have 30, 40 people hooked up to each other.

If one other person in each of these clouds also had a dry pair to another house elsewhere, and their own bridge, they could connect pairs of clouds... linked dumbbells, as it were. Each point would link up 10 or so houses, until a grassroots net could spring up, catering exclusively to the town. All it would take is one individual, perhaps working collectively with 20 other people, to get a high bandwidth connection, say a T1, or whatever, even a 'normal' 2mb DSL line, and this gathering of clouds hooked up by dry lines would be connected to the larger 'net. He doesn't mention this in his article, but it's a reasonable next step.

It's about communal, grassroots, bottoms up, emergent behavior type internet, and not the traditional top down subscription based allocated and doled up bandwidth that is the norm.

Re:No, that is the point...

[sbeitzel]

Hmm. Sounds kinda like UUCP. Takes me back to 1990, when I graduated from university, moved to San Francisco, and went looking for an email & news account someplace. Wound up at wet!sbeitzel, because I couldn't find an ISP whom I was willing to pay -- they charged a LOT. wet was connected periodically to Netcom, and eventually I got a Netcom account. Shell access, all the time, and a nice fat pipe to the rest of the Internet. Woohoo!

In case you hadn't noticed, there's a reason people don't do UUCP BBSes so much anymore. Sure, Fidonet still exists, and UUCP support still gets built when I rebuild world on my FreeBSD boxen, but that's not my primary method of interaction with the Internet, nor is it for most folks...because it's slow and cranky. Let's hear it for convenience.