[MLB-WIRELESS] Public internet access

[Zik Saleeba]

A few responses to Rowan's email:

On 9/22/06, Rowan 2006 <rowan2006 at sensation.net.au> wrote:
> - A non profit organisation cannot apply for a carrier licence. MW would
> need to become (or create) a Pty Ltd company or similar, which comes with
> its own costs and administrative reporting requirements.

Non-profits also have similar costs and reporting requirements.

> - Yearly fees include a base component of around $1k plus a percentage of
> gross revenue, which means someone needs to be good at balancing the
> books. :)

To be precise the regs say "under $1000" rather than "around $1000"
but who knows what that really means? There's no doubt that setting up
a service like this would take good bookkeeping.

> In short setting up a carrier is probably not for the faint of heart - you
> would really need to know what you're doing.

I totally agree. It'd definitely require some serious effort. I guess
it all comes down to "do we want it enough to make the effort?"

> Let's play hypothetical and assume that MW would be exempt ...
>...
> You can't raise the membership fee in order to be able to offer "free" internet access!

Exactly. I suspect that doing this as "exempt" is probably going to
end in a financial mess. And in any case we've got buckleys of doing
it as an "exempt" service because that requires us to essentially lie
to the ACMA and say that the internet service is unrelated to the
membership fee. If was the ACMA I'd laugh that one out the door.

Ok, how about a practical example where a few key members of Melb
Wireless who currently run a backbone "sell" their equipment to the
group's company and we get a carrier license which lets us legally
distribute internet connectivity on it. (I'm thinking the company
would return the equipment to the members if they wanted to leave. It
would be an "on the books" kind of thing. Details still to be worked
out...)

So we have a company which can legally distribute internet services.
Let's just say that 30 people in the group connect to this backbone
for internet access and are willing to pay $50 a month for internet
access. That's a total pool of $18,000 per year for an internet link
plus upstream bandwidth, minus around $1000 for ACMA fees. Minus
around $1000 a year in company admin costs. Which leaves about $16k
for the link. This sounds like a do-able starting point to me.

Is there someone here from the ISP biz who could say what size pipe
that'd get us?

Cheers,
Zik