Wait a minute! You do have a choice now:)

Matfinn

Lo all,
Matt here again. Id like to let you all know that you do have a choice here. If you dont like giving your hard earned cash to people who obviously dont deserve it, then you dont have to. To see what Im talking about, go to http://www.irishwan.org . This is a site promoting the use of wireless area networks in Ireland. We plan to have our own intenret backbone with in the next 5 years, built by the internet user, for the intenret user. If no one wants to give us DSL, who cares?? We can all work together to get this thing off the ground. Here are some links to pages already made for our organisation, IrishWan.

http://dublin.irishwan.org
http://cork.irishwan.org

Ill post new links as soon as the following other registered areas have their pages up ( wexford, waterford, carlow ).

We can spend money on overpriced internet access, and ramble on about companies that dont gice a **** about us, or we can lift this thing off the ground.
Thats all from me now, Ive been up for hours;)

Gluck all

Matt

chernobyl

but how many ppl would you need to get coverage over ireland.
Right, your expert bkehoe who lives in wexford, how does he get access to this backbone when most ppl are going to be from dublin.
surely the whole Ireland Offline community is too dispersed for it to work unless you start venturing into high powered, expensive transmitters which require lisences and the wrath of an "anti mast" community.

yellum

The majority is Dublin ? 29 people are interested in it in Cork. Our first meeting is this week. We can more than likely link Cork to Waterford to Wexford. Theres a broadband source in Cork for testing at the moment and there might be a cheap source in waterford.

High power transmitters wouldn't be needed if enough people are near to each other.

DM.

m1ke

how are you going to get an internet connection once the WAN has been setup ?

Matfinn

Originally posted by m1ke
how are you going to get an internet connection once the WAN has been setup ?

For our internet access, we will be using Eircoms Adsl product, called I-Stream enhanced. This product is multi user, has speeds of 1mbps down and 256kbps up, and is uncapped. The cost for this service would be very expensive for just one user, but for 10 users accessing an access point on a wan lets say, it will not be so expensive. This method to access the net seems the only viable method for now. New services with lower prices emerging soon will sway our decision towards them ( such as satellite internet access ).

hudson806

Originally posted by Matfinn


For our internet access, we will be using Eircoms Adsl product, called I-Stream enhanced.

Are you certain that Eircom will allow you to resell their bandwisth like that? Many ISPs don't

Matfinn

Originally posted by hudson806


Are you certain that Eircom will allow you to resell their bandwisth like that? Many ISPs don't

We will not be reselling bandwidth. We are non-profit organisation. The Eircom I-Stream enhanced service is a multi - user service, so hooking up 10 computers in any way is our business. We arent selling, we are recruiting members into our organisation who pay for their own hardware. We exist in order to get cheap intenret access for everyone, which has been the goal of Irelandoffline for some months now. Wether we have all our computers in the same room or all over Dublin makes no difference in my opinion.


Thanks for reading this

Matt

fixer

I suppose there's a fine line between sharing costs and reselling services, but that part shouldn't be a problem. The level of i-Stream that anyone would use already allows for multiple users, so there wouldn't be any violation of TOS there. Now, it all depends on the exact wording of Eircom's TOS...

Boston

Great idea, but eircom will get you, if you try to charge for their sirvice, which you will have to od, whos going to pay for the monthly costs, simple way around that is to make a LTD company and sell shares, make it so each "shareholder" has to by X amounth of shares each month.

Ps call the company some thing like, handicapped, deprived, orvans internet services. Id love to see eircom sue a company call that, that would be the end of all their pr crap

PiE

Uh, they arent charging for the service. A group of people getting together to buy the network option.

Why on earth would they have to set up a LTD?!

Matfinn

Originally posted by «Bo§ton»
Great idea, but eircom will get you, if you try to charge for their sirvice, which you will have to od, whos going to pay for the monthly costs, simple way around that is to make a LTD company and sell shares, make it so each "shareholder" has to by X amounth of shares each month.

Ps call the company some thing like, handicapped, deprived, orvans internet services. Id love to see eircom sue a company call that, that would be the end of all their pr crap

We wont be charging for any service. Basically, if 10 users are on the wan, for arguments sake, and we get an I-stream account for lets say £220, then each user pays £22. Theres no profit in this, and the administrator of the node or access point will not get more money than the rest:)

Ive decided to stick with the name Dublin Wireless for now, as the name for the Dublin division of Irishwan.org

Gluck all

Matt

m1ke

with 10 people on I-Stream you'd probably be better off with ISDN no ? considering the costs of setting up the WAN, and considering gaming pings would be v bad.

PiE

They'd be paying per-minute with ISDN, which would basically be pointless, because if one person went mad and stayed online for days...well...

With the ADSL they'd have UNLIMITED internet access.

R. Daneel Olivaw

1Mbit/512Kbit down/up is plenty of bandwidth to share between say 3 people.

£180+phone (£14.45/month) = £205/month.

So would you pay around £65/month for unlimited 384Kbit/170Kbit ADSL?

Drop it to 256/128 and you get 4 people on it for around £50/month (hence why I think 3 is best, as it is very good bandwith for downstream, and is not much more expensive.....I would figure £65/month was what people should expect to pay Eircom for ADSL unlimited transfer anyway, as it's around £40-45 Sterling, same as the price of ADSL there.

With only 3 people, pings would be OK. You'd need a heck of a router though to ensure perfect throughput for each user, even before you fiddle with wireless WANs.

If they can offer 1MBit bandwidth unlimited for £180/month, I can't see why they can't offer half that (512KBit) for half the cost £90. Instead at that level you get half the bandwidth, half the cost, but lousy 3GB cap.

And why would they care about that as they admit that only 1 person on the trial went over 3GB a month. Or WAS THAT JUST A LOAD OF BOLLOCKS.

In fact, if the know that most people won't go over the 3GB cap, why have a cap at all with exorbant prices above it?

hudson806

Originally posted by R. Daneel Olivaw
1Mbit/512Kbit down/up is plenty of bandwidth to share between say 3 people.

Realistically, it could be shared between a lot more than 3 people - more like 15-20 would be fairly realistic

Drop it to 256/128 and you get 4 people on it for around £50/month (hence why I think 3 is best, as it is very good bandwith for downstream, and is not much more expensive.....

Its not like that at all - as everyone would be sharing the total bandwidth, each person should get rather more than 1/x of the total, if x is the number of users.

With only 3 people, pings would be OK. You'd need a heck of a router though to ensure perfect throughput for each user, even before you fiddle with wireless WANs.

Not at all. Cheapest junk out there will do fine for such a miniscule throughput.

If they can offer 1MBit bandwidth unlimited for £180/month, I can't see why they can't offer half that (512KBit) for half the cost £90. Instead at that level you get half the bandwidth, half the cost, but lousy 3GB cap.

People with half the bandwidth don't download half as much as everyone else, hence a 512k service doesn't cost half as much as a 1024k service to provide.

SkepticOne

Originally posted by hudson806


Realistically, it could be shared between a lot more than 3 people - more like 15-20 would be fairly realistic

Is there a maximum number of people that this multi-user product is for?

SkepticOne

Actually, I was thinking this might be a good thing for the I-stream product, i.e., that people band together to share a single uncapped 1Mbit/s line.

As it stands, hardly any private individuals will go for the 'solo' product at nearly £100/month, so this product will hardly be sold at all.

Small business of 10-15 people will purchase the 'enhanced' product. but they will be using it mainly during the day, which will free up the bandwidth for use in the evening.

So Eircom might secretly be in favour of the idea since they are selling a product that would otherwise not be sold.

BTW, I don't approve of people becoming the 'ISO King' or anything, just 5 or six people making use of a product that during the day would be used by 10-15 people in a business.

R. Daneel Olivaw

20 people on a line that can download around 120kB/sec is not that great.....comes down to 56k speed really.

I suppose it would be good to offer "flat-rate" 56k-speed-equivalent to a bunch of average home users. That's why I figure 3-4 users would be better for people who want high-bandwidth. It should be "rationed" equally as otherwise one person's 650MB Debian ISO screws it for everyone.......

I am more worried about the contention ratio, which no-one appears to have brought up yet. BT introduced it at around 30:1 to 50:1 (yes, 50 to 1) when they brought out ADSL in the UK in mid-2000.

Also, if the i-Stream is aimed for business users....then obviously those prices reflect daytime bandwidth consumption. As it stands, the heavy users who want unlimited ADSL (i.e., everyone here) would be download mostly at night anyway, as most people work during the day (unless of course it's ISO-king-server-while-u-work)

Urban Weigl

I think having an IrelandOffline fixed wireless WAN is not only a great idea, but also a very achievable one at that. Best of luck with it. And: if anybody from Ballyhaunis Co Mayo is interested in such a project, I would very much like to become involved as well. I've already toyed with the idea for some weeks.

SkepticOne

Originally posted by R. Daneel Olivaw
20 people on a line that can download around 120kB/sec is not that great.....comes down to 56k speed really.

I suppose it would be good to offer "flat-rate" 56k-speed-equivalent to a bunch of average home users. That's why I figure 3-4 users would be better for people who want high-bandwidth. It should be "rationed" equally as otherwise one person's 650MB Debian ISO screws it for everyone.......

To a certain extent this will happen anyway. Imagine someone is downloading an ISO image and you decide to download a 10K web page. For the time that both are being downloaded, the bandwidth is divided up evenly between you and ISO King (assuming no server problems at the far end). So even though he is downloading a huge ISO, you still appear to have 512kbit/s of useable bandwidth.

Nevertheless, it is likely that people will want to limit the number in each group to increase their apparent individual bandwidth. It would all depend on peoples budgets and organisational ability.

[EDIT: Sorry if you may already be aware of this.]

SkepticOne

DUPLICATE DELETED

Urban Weigl

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I would be happy to spend up to a grand to help extend the network to the Ballyhaunis Co Mayo area, plus of course lots and lots of time.

yellum

Whos the nearest group to you so far ?

http://www.irishwan.org has listings

DM

Urban Weigl

Originally posted by yellum
Whos the nearest group to you so far ?

http://www.irishwan.org has listings

DM

The nearest community relative to where I'm based in actually Dublin, which is sadly almost 200km away. I'm also on the boarder to Roscommon (10 minute walk away), and not too far from Co Galway.

Matfinn

With regards to the worries about ISO's and people hogging up internet bandwidth downloading them, we would try to setup our own ftp server. There would be a host of open source operating systems on this, aswell as opensource programs and game demos. Based upon user requests, we would download the relevant software, and upload it then to the ftp servers. That would hopefully alleviate the problem of bandwidth hogs:)

Gluck

Matt:)

hudson806

Originally posted by Matfinn
With regards to the worries about ISO's and people hogging up internet bandwidth downloading them...

Agreed - its not something to worry about.

Essentially, everyone should stop worrying about this issue, IMHO; there are many, many ways of shaping and restricting traffic, all of which are pretty easy to implement. The best ways to use bandwidth effectively will become clear once people are actually using the network, and frankly, discussing it in this sort of detail now is just plain stupid.

The huge issue for now is getting a wireless netowkr off the ground in the first place. (Traffic shaping=easy, building nationwide wireless network=hard)

R. Daneel Olivaw

hudson806:

building nationwide wireless network=hard

LOL! No ****! Still though, you have to think big..............it would be cool eventually (5 years time) for there to be enough people on a wireless broadband that you could walk around the cities and be online with a PDA or something. You'd get beaten, but at least it would be worth it.

Or driving into Dublin you have a laptop online as soon as it comes into range of a broadband wireless network. Of course it's all sounding a bit like Star Trek at the moment but there you go.

Snaga

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-7301549.html?tag=tp_pr

news story on news.com, very interesting, very interesting indeed.

dahamsta

Originally posted by Snaga
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-7301549.html?tag=tp_pr

news story on news.com, very interesting, very interesting indeed.

Heh, as I've said before on this topic, over there you can wander around and pull high-speed connectivity out of the air, for nothing. Over here, we're not allowed *pay* for it!

adam

Boston

Originally posted by PiE
Why on earth would they have to set up a LTD?!

something called Limited liability, look it up, its in the dictionary