[MLB-WIRELESS] Fwd: [mesh] WOAH!

[KevinL]

On Mon, 2002-07-01 at 13:02, Steven Haigh wrote:
> to throw a cat amoung the pidgeons....
> 
> why are we wanting to set up a pipe?
> 
> Why don't we let the ISPs come to us? we provide the existing network, the ISP 
> takes care of billing etc... lets make our network work for us, not against 
> us...

There's very few ISP's that have the tech available (and the time, and
the interest) to provide billing down to individual users within an
organisation.  Most likely, any ISP that rolled 'net access up to "our
doorstep", would provide billing on a per-Mb or per-pipe basis, to the
whole organisation, and let us deal with figuring out who pays for what
bit.

That means we're almost certainly in the position where, if 'net access
is to traverse the network at any point, someone's going to have to do
something about monitoring it, both in terms of tracking resource use
for provisioning (and that applies to all heavily-trafficked internal
links, too, ideally), and in terms of working out who pays how much.

As far as I can see, Airnet's offer is essentially the same as anyone
else's offer - they can provide bandwidth, they'll do it cheapish
because they like community groups, but that's it.  The one thing that
_is_ intruiging (I found buried amongst everything else on whirlpool),
is that he's offering Nominated Carrier Declarations for community
groups that can show their installs are of sufficient quality.

That'd mean we _could_ legally carry third-party traffic over the
wireless network.  The practicalities of managing such would, I suspect,
be too much to deal with at the moment, but it's an interesting
thought...

KJL