Do It Yourself Wireless Broadband

aaronc

Scenario: Provide wireless broadband to medium density Dublin residential housing area.

Costs:
1. 512Kbps point-to-point wireless broadband link €550 per month,
2. 512Kbps link to internet in City West data center €100 per month,

Total Monthly Costs: €650

Revenue:
1. Charge 20 customers €40 per month for 512Kbps/512Kbps broadband (20:1 contention which is better then most ISPs) and VoIP to get rid of line rental (therefore for people with landline it'll cost them only €15 per month to get broadband!)

Total Monthly Revenue: €800

Obviously there are setup costs, you'll most likely need some WiFi access points in the estate. Then there's the whole customer support but you could always do it as a group scheme.

The numbers get better as the bandwidth goes up, e.g. a 5 Mbps wireless link prob. cost around €2000 per month and 5Mbps internet connection €750.

With 5Mbps:
Monthly Costs: Total Monthly Costs: €2750
Monthly Revenue: Total Monthly Revenue: €8000

Food for thought.

Aaron

SkepticOne

Good idea. Individuals in IrishWan are also selling internet in various parts of the country. You might get in touch with Steve Reader in the DublinWan section on IrishWan.org. I believe someone originally from that organisation is also selling 2 Mbit/sec access to apartments in the IFSC area but as a separate network to DublinWan.

Chalk

surely you need more than 1 512k link if your reselling it to twenty people?
if im downloading at full speed , which i do regularly, what about the other 19?

SkepticOne

Chalk wrote:

surely you need more than 1 512k link if your reselling it to twenty people?
if im downloading at full speed , which i do regularly, what about the other 19?

20:1 contention ratio is quite low. Most of the lower end Eircom offerings are 48:1.

Blaster99

Problem #1 is finding a high-site that costs nothing or close to it. In Dublin probably extremely unlikely you'll get one. Problem #2 is getting to the bandwidth, which is everything but easy and probably requires a bunch of relay sites. This is the sort of stuff that the IrishWAN guys spend all day trying to solve with reasonable success. Apart from the Dublin setup, where it is semi-feasible to get access to decent uncontended broadband, most of these setups use 2Mbps ADSL links and that works quite well. In Dublin there are so many broadband alternatives available that these home-cooked networks don't really make sense. The punter isn't going to pay €40 for Blaster's Homemade WLAN when he/she can get commercial grade ADSL for less. And if you're interested in getting rid of the phone line, IBB has increasingly good coverage.

Chalk

i might need this to be explained to me then.

i have broadband at home, as do my mate who lives next door, as do a number of other people on the same road.
we can all get 55-60kB at the same time.

are we currently all on separate lines or what?
where does the contention come in and actually affect your downlaod speed?

Blaster99

You have a virtual circuit in a big fat pipe. If there's available bandwidth in the big fat pipe up to the max speed you're paying for, you'll get it. Chances are contention ratios are lower than advertised and you're sharing the big fat pipe with a lot of users who may not be online at that moment in time.

aaronc

Chalk wrote:

i might need this to be explained to me then.

i have broadband at home, as do my mate who lives next door, as do a number of other people on the same road.
we can all get 55-60kB at the same time.

are we currently all on separate lines or what?
where does the contention come in and actually affect your downlaod speed?

Try making a voice call over your broadband connection each evening this week at around 6:30pm... this is where contention will hurt you (try here if you don't have VoIP set up, http://www.testyourvoip.com/).

I have noticed that people on DSL do better then people on wireless broadband products.

Aaron

OfflerCrocGod

Blaster99 wrote:

You have a virtual circuit in a big fat pipe. If there's available bandwidth in the big fat pipe up to the max speed you're paying for, you'll get it. Chances are contention ratios are lower than advertised and you're sharing the big fat pipe with a lot of users who may not be online at that moment in time.

Exactly which means that your backhaul is *NOT* a 512Kbps line but a much bigger one which means Chalk's original question still stands, were are you going to get the backhaul to support your 20 connections? 4Mbps is what you'd really want that way you can support 8 people at a time everyone at full speed, so where is €ircons 4Mbps offering?.......Oh yes wait it doesn't exist! This is a bit tougher then proposed we need access to some real speeds to make sure people don't choke on a meagre backhaul.

SkepticOne

aaronc wrote:

Try making a voice call over your broadband connection each evening this week at around 6:30pm... this is where contention will hurt you (try here if you don't have VoIP set up, http://www.testyourvoip.com/).

I have noticed that people on DSL do better then people on wireless broadband products.

Aaron

Of course, the download caps on Eircom and resellers ensure that people don't download 24/7 although they are a rather crude way of dealing with the problem. This enables makes a the relatively high contention of 48:1 possible. I think if you run an uncapped service in Ireland you need to have about 8:1 realistically or else take more sophisticated measures. Uncapped services tend to attract the heavier users away from capped ones for obvious reasons and this adds to the problem.

aaronc

SkepticOne wrote:

Of course, the download caps on Eircom and resellers ensure that people don't download 24/7 although they are a rather crude way of dealing with the problem. This enables makes a the relatively high contention of 48:1 possible. I think if you run an uncapped service in Ireland you need to have about 8:1 realistically or else take more sophisticated measures. Uncapped services tend to attract the heavier users away from capped ones for obvious reasons and this adds to the problem.

While it depends a lot on what you want to do, a low contention ratio won't necessarily be the whole solution. Even with a ratio of 2:1 it's possible for a realtime stream, such as voice or video to get degraded. This is due to the nature of TCP and UDP which both attempt to make maximum use of available bandwidth, albeit TCP in a slightly better behaved fashion.

As internet users most of us wouldn't care if a 20MB download took 5 minutes or 10 minutes but if the VoIP call or video stream breaks up we notice. A lower contention ratio is beneficial in that it reduces the odds of someone doing an FTP download or P2P upload at the same time you are trying to make that important voice call. Until we see some QoS mechanisms such as MPLS, DiffServ etc. on ISP links the problem will exist and I don't know if there's a lot of interest or demand for this yet.

Once you get to the Tier 1 internet providers there tends to be more then enough available bandwidth and the QoS largely goes away (at least until a major router goes down). With the Tier 1 providers you are much more likely to get the bandwidth you pay for unlike with downstream ISPs. Of course half the problem is you never know what you are getitng anyway but if I can't make a good voice call using a 13Kbps codec on a 512K/512K broadband connection I tend to get a bit disappointed.

Aaron

Blaster99

Perhaps it's a pricing issue mostly. If VoIP is cheap nobody minds a few glitches here and there, but if it's priced as a POTS call you expect circuit switched quality. I'm curious to see where the whole thing is going, as most/all providers do free VoIP to VoIP calls. One happy day we will probably all be doing just VoIP calls, so presumably somebody needs to charge somebody? I suppose maybe it will be like e-mail.

I haven't really looked into the whole Internet VoIP to phone thing much, but how does it work as a provider? Do you use the Internet in turn to terminate the call in each destination country? I would guess you are or I can't see where the saving would be. If so, there must be QoS issues there as well. I suppose what I'm asking is, if I'm a user who uses a VoIP service to call a POTS line and there are quality issues, is that necessarily between me and the SIP exchange or could it be between the SIP exchanges (or whatever way the call is routed)?

SkepticOne

aaronc wrote:

While it depends a lot on what you want to do, a low contention ratio won't necessarily be the whole solution. Even with a ratio of 2:1 it's possible for a realtime stream, such as voice or video to get degraded. This is due to the nature of TCP and UDP which both attempt to make maximum use of available bandwidth, albeit TCP in a slightly better behaved fashion.

I forgot that for the proposed service a full voice service would be part of the package and this would need to have reliability similar to that of a fixed line. How giving VoIP packets top priority for as far as you can and then routing them over a separate dedicated internet connection.

jesus_thats_gre

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

Exactly which means that your backhaul is *NOT* a 512Kbps line but a much bigger one which means Chalk's original question still stands, were are you going to get the backhaul to support your 20 connections? 4Mbps is what you'd really want that way you can support 8 people at a time everyone at full speed, so where is €ircons 4Mbps offering?.......Oh yes wait it doesn't exist! This is a bit tougher then proposed we need access to some real speeds to make sure people don't choke on a meagre backhaul.

Correct me if I am wrong, but with ADSL, the backhaul is what is contended, i.e. 2mb is shared between 48 people.. While with the like of IBB you pay for a 1mbps service with a 20:1 contention.. Effectively giving the same thing???

OfflerCrocGod

jesus_thats_gre wrote:

Correct me if I am wrong, but with ADSL, the backhaul is what is contended, i.e. 2mb is shared between 48 people.. While with the like of IBB you pay for a 1mbps service with a 20:1 contention.. Effectively giving the same thing???

Nope the backhaul is still contended in the same way (the concept anyway - physically it's different) - you connect wirelessly to the "exchange" but essentially the same thing happens in the backhaul (contention over the shared backhaul), I find it hard to believe that IBB only have 1Mbps backhauls. With 4 people out of 20 downloading they would be lucky to each get 30Kbps - from what I hear on the 1Mbps service you can get 120Kbps rock steady for hours.

Moriarty

The reason that contention works is because it's done on a large scale. It's never truely 48:1 or 20:1. All the backhaul is mixed in together with the entire userbase, so you're dealing with at a minimum multimegabit and usually at least tens of megabits in the tightest contention areas. This leaves the peaks and troughs smooth themselves out because no one (or even a small number of..) user(s) can directly saturate any contended bandwidth.

The overall effect that people see is a steady peak and trough of available bandwidth, instead of constant sudden erratic fluctuation's.

aaronc

Blaster99 wrote:

I haven't really looked into the whole Internet VoIP to phone thing much, but how does it work as a provider? Do you use the Internet in turn to terminate the call in each destination country? I would guess you are or I can't see where the saving would be. If so, there must be QoS issues there as well. I suppose what I'm asking is, if I'm a user who uses a VoIP service to call a POTS line and there are quality issues, is that necessarily between me and the SIP exchange or could it be between the SIP exchanges (or whatever way the call is routed)?

There are a mulitude of VoIP (SIP/IAX/H.323 etc.) termination providers on the internet and all of them usually terminate onto the PSTN Worldwide. So you only normally use 2 or 3 of these providers instead of one in every country.

The quality issue for VoIP, and other time sensitive traffic, is 99% of the time going to be confined to either the link between you and your ISP or the ISP's contended link to the internet (and if you're making a VoIP to VoIP call the same goes at the other end). What we know as the internet is really the Tier 1 carrirers exchanging traffic amongst themselves. Bandwidth and contention aren't usually much of an issue here unless a major router goes down or an email virus gets busy; you can fit a lot of 48:1 512K ADSL connections on a single fiber!

The reason I personally interested in contention ratios and QoS is that I would love to get rid of my analogue telephone line and the €25/month rental and use my wireless broadband extension instead. Something is not right when I pay €35/month for 512K broadband that I use extensively for a range of tasks and then am forced (yes I know I'm not forced but I don't want to make people that need to call me pay a mobile rate) to pay €25/month for an analogue line that I use on average 5 minutes a day for a single task!

Aaron