[MLB-WIRELESS] Wireless internet in Melbourne?

[Tony Langdon]

I'm dumping the HTML.  Unfortunately, it's gonna screw up the quoting. :-(

time for a rant... (RFC)
(disclaimer - On the whole, this is my opinion.  I may be wrong. I have been
talking to some people in the industry who may or may not be well informed
and this has structured my opinion.  I am open to correction and
clarification)

There's a lot of rumours going arouns ATM...  Anything's possible at this
point in time.

TANSTAAFL!
internet access and community wireless: incompatable bed fellows?
I can see numerous technical solutions to the whole broadband wireless
internet access issue.  some work better than others.  but what will be the
sticking point IMHO is the regulatory issues.

Agreed.  Technical issues can generally be overcome with ingenuity.
Regulatory ones are typically harder to solve. :)

Technical solutions - 
shared broadband connections - DSL or cable connection to access node,
shared amoungst friends/members geographically local and connected - fibre
or wireless.

Well, sharing isn't an issue technically, we've all been doing that in some
way for ages.

regulatory problems - crossing property lines, definition of service
provision

I reckon this is a fair way to do business in the sense that as long as you
pay for the common download pipe, people who sell you the pipe should have
no cause for complaint.  You become a business service provider that pays
per MB.  Lets face it, the majority of us are not about to give up our
dialup or broadband accounts because we have melbwireless.  It's an
extension rather than an alternative...

Agreed.  I will definitely be keeping my cable...  Melbwireless is more of a
technical challenge, as well as a great community movement.  

so this is really the prefered choice in some senses.  an augmented internet
access shared amongst multiple people. if we can get the regulatory issues
ironed out, and the payment issues addressed (i.e. howmany access points,
how to count the costs, who downloads what, how internet access provision
nodes get paid for) then I think we could approach any of the broadband
ISP's as a high volume customer.

someone on the Brisbane MESH mentioned APANA as a possible internet access
provider - being of similar inclination to melb wireless...  anyone know
much about this...

APANA would have technical ussies in Melbourne - their current bandwidth is
extremely congested at the gateway.  Hrmm, so I do a traceroute and it
proves me a liar - currently 110mS ping times to the Melb gateway...

shared cache - the majority of caching benefit is in the first 100 MB or so.
It is certainly technically feasable to have your internet cache on the
wireless side of you homeLAN firewall (we all have one of those, right?
Right!?). this would potentially lead to a shared cache of several GB
available to members within a reasonable number of hops on the wireless side
and might greatly reduce the amount of download you would have to do on the
internet side of things...  ofcourse, there might be security and privacy
issues with this...  and technically it is feasable but not completely
easy...

A shared cache / peering arrangement could be very useful for those on
capped accounts.  Similarly, local mirrors of important data (like
Linux/*BSD distros, whatever), would save a lot of people blosing their data
caps or waiting endless hours if they're on dialup.

    regulatory problems - not sure.  still smacks of service provision, but
then so should file sharing in that case.  doubt that'll get you into much
hot water unless someone wants to stop you.  note: this could be done in
addition to broadband access.... - that would be a real bandwidth saver...

Very grey area here...

file share model.
    like gnutella writ geographically on a true mesh net...  firewalls
everywhere protecting private data and people selective about what they
place on the wireless side.  Ah, harks back to the days of Fidonet, etc.
(I'm lying folks.  I'm old enough, but I came to computers well after
fidonet had been subsumed by the internet.)

Well,  remember Fido well - it used to be a lot of fun up until the mid
90's, when the Internet overtook BBSs.  Used to be some good chat BBss
around too.  Not only am I old enough to remember Fidonet, I used to be very
active (actually, still pick up the odd echo these days). :-)

    regulatory, I cannot see anything wrong with this unless people start
distributing porn to minors or similarly otherwise illegal activities.

Well, depends on whose lawyer you consult, I suspect, but it's probably a
good model....

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