[MLB-WIRELESS] Internet Access

[Donovan Baarda]

On Mon, 2005-06-27 at 04:03, David Ashburner wrote:
> Ah, I think what Dan is refering to is MW establishing a fast link to the 
> internet that can be accessed via the MW network. Not sharing our private 
> conections.
> 
> The interesting point being that if  we operated within the guidelines it 
> may be possible for us to turn of our direct ISP connections and all access 
> the Internet  via the MW fast connection.
> 
> Setting up that fast connection would probably cost a bit but that could be 
> covered by  increased subscriptions or donations - as long as MW is not 
> making "profit" on the service it is providing.

I don't know if any of you watch prices of stuff, but Australia has a
tendency to cost more $$ per MB the higher you go. The cheapest $$/MB
you can get is consumer grade ADSL/Cable. This is part of the reason
APANA Melbourne closed it's hub; people could buy cheaper ADSL bandwith
individually than APANA could buy in bulk and resell.

The _best_ way MW could do internet is for most people to buy their own
ADSL, preferably from different ISP's, and load-balence them all. This
way you get to share your bandwidth, and get redundancy. ADSL is very 
unreliable, so the redundancy alone is a good idea.

How to do the load balencing is the tricky part. Things like squid can
do it for http easily, but other stuff is harder. It's particularly hard
to get the redundancy working properly. However, even if you just get
squid-peering to load-balence upstream connections, it's probably worth
it.

-- 
Donovan Baarda <abo at minkirri.apana.org.au>


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