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Community fiber optics is the way to go. In Bucharest, in 2000, when fiber was really expensive a small community, like a block of apartments, would get much better quality service by sharing a business type of connection than buying for each apartment a "home/personal" service. The initial cost is that someone needs to step up, build the infrastructure and start the sharing service. In Western countries this might be a little bit more difficult than it was in Bucharest in 2000 because of the regulation regarding wires, cable tunnels etc. However it is not impossible and the benefits of such a service in the community exceeds the initial pain of setting up the service.

In Bucharest, experience showed that once a community connected to internet via a dedicated fiber service, self maintained, the neighbouring blocks and adjacent residential areas start to press for connecting to the same service. Soon a network serving 30 families, grew to 100 then 500 or even more. A single connection became 4 load balancing the load. You had a problem with your connectivity? Just pick up the phone and call a guy 10 houses away from yours.

I may not be very accurate about the prices in 2000 but the first connection we had in our block was a 350 euro/ month + 150 set up fee for a 100Mbs bandwidth with no traffic limit. In my block 27 families out of 36 decided to join the network and the initial set up of the fiber + local ethernet infrastructure cost was split among residents. No filtering, no connection throttling, no interference. We were paying 15 euro per month to cover some maintenance cost and future failures of cables and routers. These 100 Mbps are not much they were 100 Mbps were steady. The thing is that when we upgraded our link to a 500 euro/month we got 250 Mbps. So bandwidth and cost don't scale linearly. The more people in your network the better the service.

Maintaining a large network can be a pain. However, if you give incentives to the sys admin, and the does a good job by deploying a network with little quarks, he can actually have a passive income without much of a hassle. Networks with more than 2000 families generally had a team of 1-3 sys admins taking care of the network full time.

We also had the traditional cable companies offering a package of TV + phone + internet based on coaxial cable. Their offering was so inferior to the "neighbourhood network". The large companies ended up by stepping up their game and offering similar quality services. They were actually struggling to keep up the pace. The local networks, created around 2004-2005 a backbone network which allowed every "neighbourhood network" to connect to the other networks via high speed 10Gbps fiber cables. This became later the ANISP a national association. Yes, the small networks were in the end bought by large companies but at least the standard was set high enough so that it cannot be rolled back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Romania



No seed accelerator? No big name co-founder? No funding round? No buzzword-laden bullshit talks at fashionable conferences (ted)? What about 'professional' ex-lawyer CEO paid >$100K with no clue about networking? Saas? Cloud? can this even scale? Where is the growth?

One sys admin? 500 homes? bootstrapping? low prices? What are you? some hippie commie geek man slave? You want to actually work for a living of something?


I remember this, happened across country actually and we had one in our smaller town but the infrastructure between apartment blocks was built using coax instead of fiber.

A few years later the guy that started it initially(96-97??) wrapped everything in the first CATV local internet and tv network which runs even today.


How would these Internet "coop's" deal with the tech support? I would worry that regular users would constantly have all sorts of problems with spyware, viruses, cheap APs/routers and broken network configurations.


There are indeed a lot of problems with individual users. Small networks as such were generally maintained by sysadmins like teenagers/students/grads which sometime fix these config problems for a small amount of money. Plus, good tech guys were always requested by neighbours to fix problems as such, change a HDD, change a cable or a faulty plug.

It is indeed a local community type of network. Plus, in every family there is a teenager willing to step into network configurations. Teenagers, students and young professionals were those that made these networks so popular because they were demanding high quality connection and they were tech savvy. People like them are generally willing to do the hard work of learning something about setting a network IP to a router or AP. Setting a DHCP server in your network was something that released a lot of pressure in my network. Mac addresses were also used quite often to block unauthorised devices from accessing the network. You had to call your sysadmin and send / spell over the phone your mac address.

When everything was at very beginning, during storms a lot of equipments connecting two blocks were getting burned, UTP cat 5 cables broken and required fixing. People who started this kind of networks were to become country's first big generation of top notch dev ops who faced networks growing from 3 users connected by a BNC cable to thousands of users distributed all over a large neighbourhood.


I am sure their would be an enterprising local computer tech the community Internet "coop" could contract with and recommend for their users.


I ran a similar but smaller network back in high school. I was in Bulgaria but the setup was exactly the same. Me and several other kids wanted to play Starcraft and dial-up was bad. We bought a lot of cable and connected 3 apartment buildings.

Soon our neighbors learned about the network and started asking if they can join. At the peak we had wired about 20 families, this was all supported by me and a friend. The incentive for me was free internet and some side income.

In retrospect I find it amazing that such DIY approach brought us in the top of the internet speed rankings surrounded by the most developed countries in the world.




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