[MLB-WIRELESS] Public internet access

[Rowan 2006]

On Fri, 22 Sep 2006, Zik Saleeba wrote:

> > 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.

The current membership fee is $10. With 350 paid up members I think it
would be *financially* possible for MW to offer free internet access...
assuming that, say, 50% of that $3,500 annual income is available to
dedicate to that project. Whether it's actually *useable* is another
matter - if you have 50 or 100 people trying to share a 1500kbit ADSL with
a 50Gb monthly download allowance then you're going to have to apply some
pretty strict limits.

> 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.

You might be lucky to get a 1Mbit/sec telco grade link for that price,
including data and the cost of the physical link itself. If you use ADSL
you could probably push it to 1.5Mbit/sec, for example the internode
product I have starts at $120 for 40Gb then is capped at $999 excess,
which effectively means unlimited transfer for $1119 per month. A
1.5Mbit/sec link at 30% average loading can transfer about 144Gb per
month; at 60% it can do 288Gb. In the latter case each of the 30 people
would have nearly 10Gb of download allowance.

Is $50/mo competitive for 1.5Mbit/sec bandwidth shared between 30 houses
with 10Gb download allowance each, delivered via a non telco grade network
that was set up by hobbyists who cannot reasonably be expected to be on
call 24/7 if something goes wrong? Probably not...

Cheers.