Community Sets Up Their Own DSL

Thrazzle Throne writes "The folks in rural Ruby Ranch got tired of lame dial-up server. They fought the phone company for use of their un-used lines and installed their own Dsl service. Very cool read."

Old news

[brsmith4]

This is a VERY old story. Nonetheless, it is still quite amazing that a small town banded together to set up their own dsl server, DSLAM, servers, routers and all. I only wish that my neighborhood had done that. Of course, I am too lazy to organize.

This is a repeat story

[Ryvar]

This [slashdot.org] has already been submitted, thanks.

--Ryv

Recycled News

[SloppyElvis]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/09/124226 &mode=thread&tid=95 [slashdot.org]

Deja Vu

And they're down for the count

[Hatter]

Slashdotted.

Here's the google cache: linky linky [google.com]

Link to another Ruby Ranch article

[Anonymous Coward]

Do-it-yourself DSL is no pipe dream
http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2002/0408netb uz z.html

Site contents

[afidel]

About the Coop

The Coop offers DSL service to all homes in the Ruby Ranch neighborhood in Summit County, Colorado.

The Coop was founded in 2001 because no one offered DSL or cable modem Internet access in our neighborhood, and because the voice telephone service to the neighborhood is of such poor quality that it is not possible to get modem connections faster than about 26K bits per second. The Coop is a Colorado nonprofit corporation and is federally tax-exempt under 501(c)(12).
The Coop's History

The Coop has launched service.

By far the biggest challenge faced by the Coop, a challenge that dwarfed any of the Coop's technical and financial challenges, was gaining access to subloops from Qwest under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. (The subloops are needed to connect the DSLAM to the subscriber homes. The buried telephone cable in our neighborhood has some three times as many subloops as are actually needed for voice service, and the subloops we wish to rent are among the hundreds of spare subloops which otherwise would generate no revenue for Qwest.) The course of negotiations was such that the Coop found it necessary to file an informal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission and subsequently found it necessary to pursue arbitration before the Colorado Public Service Commission ("CoPUC"). In the arbitration, the CoPUC found that "all of [the Coop's] proposed equipment is compatible with the Qwest network," and that "Qwest is technically able to accommodate [the Coop's] proposal." The CoPUC found that the Coop is entitled to pay "wholesale" rates for the subloops rather than much higher retail rates. Finally, the CoPUC found that because the Coop will be providing only data services (not voice services) and because the Coop will be offering its services to everyone in its service area, the Coop does not need to be a CoPUC-licensed telephone company. (This is very good news, since being a licensed telephone company would impose prohibitive accounting and record-keeping burdens.) After the CoPUC's arbitration decision there were further negotiations with Qwest, and a signed Interconnect Agreement between the Coop and Qwest has been approved by the CoPUC.

Colorado has a long history...

[tenchiken]

Of cheap internet access. A while ago parts of the community came together to form The colorado internet co-op [coop.net]. In fact, if you look at the network diagram of this group, they use nettrack, which also has a connection to the co-op.

Some of the more prominant Unixers on the co-op board are Trent Hein, and Evi Nemeth (two of the authors of the USAH) was also involved. The CO-OP has played a nice part in keeping colorado up and wired.

Re:Why didn't they just roll out CAT5?

[Target Drone]

I've said this many times before, why are people in this kind of situation rolling out DSL? Why not just lay down new copper in the form of CAT5?

Here's the answerfrom their FAQ [rric.net].

Why not simply bury your own cable? In our neighborhood, the ground is full of rocks. This means that many ways of burying cable, such as a vibrating plow blade or a Ditch Witch, are unworkable. Pretty much the only way to bury things is with a backhoe. Backhoe work is expensive. Our neighborhood has many miles of roads, and we would likely have to spend well over a hundred thousand dollars if we were to try to bury new cable in the neighborhood.

Burying new copper under our roads is particularly frustrating to think about, given that the existing phone cables buried by Qwest were overbuilt by a factor of three or more. In other words, some two-thirds of the pairs in the cables are spares right now, spares that would never get used by Qwest for revenue service. Qwest ought to be delighted at the chance of collecting monthly revenue from us for some of these pairs.

Re:Why didn't they just roll out CAT5?

[catfood]

I've said this many times before, why are people in this kind of situation rolling out DSL? Why not just lay down new copper in the form of CAT5?

One word: right of way.

Oh, that's three words.

But the simple reason you don't just run CAT5 all over town is that the state won't allow it. You could theoretically get permission from the owner of every property the wire crosses, but even then you'd need an easement from the city or township for every crossing of a public street.

This is one of the more important reasons why one has some recourse when the ILEC won't provide a needed service. They've been given unique privileges by the state, and in return have a well-recognized legal obligation to act in the public interest.

Scooped by... yourself!

[aridg]

Gee, didn't I see this story somewhere before [slashdot.org]?

(BTW, check out Carl Oppedahl's comments to that story...)

Re:So there was no satellite service in their area

[afidel]

most vpn solutions don't work over satelite (2 ip's one for upload one for download) and alternative os's are often out. There are many reasons why splitting a couple T-1's via dsl drops is a good solution. Plus this way you have presumably more controll over your internet experience, eg need more bandwidth, call a motion and if people are willing to pay you get more. Code red got you down, block incoming request on the appropriate ports etc. Plus almost anything interactive sucks arse over satelite. Oh yeah and there is that monthly bandwidth cap and random slow as 56k speed caps etc.

Re:Why didn't they just roll out CAT5?

[t0qer]

You could theoretically get permission from the owner of every property the wire crosses

Yup, that's what we did...
Sorta funny how it started out. I originally just shared with 1 neighbor, but then a guy on our street (who's also a pushy saleman) wanted to get on our network. Problem was he was 10 doors down from us. So he went door to door and asked all the neighbors in between if they wanted to participate.

Re:Why didn't they just roll out CAT5?

[afidel]

It is due to Time Delay Reflectometry to be more exact, and it is a tolerance thing. Good copper and more acurate gain controll on the MAC will allow reception of the signal without degredation at longer lengths. I work with some guys that make a popular wireless access point, during testing we made a 150m cable and tested the AP talking to various pieces of equipment, of several dozen pieces of networking equipment and about as many nic's we only had problems with one low cost nic, all the other equipment (mostly cisco switches, 3com nics etc) was able to talk fine at 150m. This was over CAT-5E and CAT6 cable.

Re:BAPA circuits

[AIXman]

Phone companies such as Qwest usually try to de-tariff (make it so you can't purchase) the use of dry copper pairs in their infrastructure and run your own network on them.

They would rather sell you value added ($$$) digital data services (56K, ISDN, T-1) and DSL (in high population density areas close to a central office) which are much more profitable for them.

So if you try to buy such a circuit from your phone company, don't be suprised if they won't sell it to you. I know Qwest won't.

Re:Why didn't they just roll out CAT5?

[jguthrie]

The 100m limit is there in order to make it possible to do collision detection on half-duplex links. That's also why Ethernet has a minimum packet size. If you're running full-duplex links, you can run the cable much farther because there'll never be any collisions. I don't know what the limit is with CAT-5, but you're electrically limited if you're running full-duplex. I would expect several kilometers, at the very least.

I, Cringely article

[pknut]

There was an "I, Cringely" article [pbs.org] about this last year. Nonetheless, it's still pretty damn cool.

Good Idea. Wrong technology.

[stere0]

Rolling out a community network is a great idea and probably any network geek's dream. But DSL, oh my! Many [nocat.net] wireless [bawug.org] community [personaltelco.net] networks [nycwireless.net] have proved 802.11b is the perfect technology for this. These guys in Seattle [seattlewireless.net] are trying to cover the whole city and IMHO they're very likely to succeed.

So you want to roll out a network in a small city ? UseNoCat Auth [nocat.net] for authentication, connect everything to the net, and already you'll be able to read slashdot while sitting in the middle of the street.