Geek Houses?

Alan LeFort wrote in to mention something that I'm gonna post even though its a little strange. They are setting up an apartment complex where they are taking into consideration, and in fact targetting geeks as residents. Cheap bandwidth, IPs, Hubs allowed, all OSs allowed, but they're only in Houston. Local Linux mirrors, local quake server, 10 megabit net access. Sounds like utopia. I've attached his whole message below if you're curious. I just find the geek commune idea interesting I guess. I wonder how long before bandwidth is as essential as phone.

"Our company, Walden Internet Villages, is currently offering 10 megabit LAN ethernet access with static IP addresses in our pilot apartment complex in Houston. Our goal is not to make money with this service but to provide a special community for hackers to share knowledge and ideas. Currently of 200 apartments, 100 of them are filled with hackers and computer enthusiasts, most running Linux although we have a few NT people to educate still.

We are considering going to 3 more properties in Houston. We expect this internet service to cost about 45-75$ per connection at 10 megabits. We allow residents to put hubs into their apartments, as many DNS entries as they need, we allow all operating systems, and best of all we dont care what you with with your computers as long as its not adult-xxx web sitde stuff. ( a poor use of our bandwidth.

Other services our complex provides are:

• 40 gig sharable fileserver
• DHCP IP/Masquerading for running multiple machines
• 10 Megabit switched ports on a fiber backbone
• Lan Parties for 50 ppl every two weeks
• Linux User Group
• Quake2 server
• Internal Linux mirror site

  Rob, or whoever reviews this, as marketing director, i am very interested at seeing what your readers of slashdot think of this idea. Our company is run by geeks for geeks, our main goal is not to make money on this service. We want to create a community of hackers/computer enthusiasts that know what to do with a 10 mbit connection. Please visit our websites and have a look, we would we happy to host you and slashdot here at walden Internet Villages by the way. link link link Perhaps you could run a poll on slashdot asking users how much they would pay for a true 10 megabit ethernet connection in their apartment. ( we currently have 0C3 from our apartment complex to our ISP which has dual T3s to MCI and Sprint. When we go to four properties in Houston, we may get our own busrtable T3) Thanks for your work man. your site is the number one site at Walden Internet Villages. Just barely ahead of www.rootshell.com and freshmeat.net. If you need any more information regarding our Internet village concept or regarding our offer to host you and your site here in Houston call me at [phone]. Thanks,

  Alan LeFort
  Marketing Director, Network Admin
  Walden Internet Villages
  "