Locations with no good Internet (was ISP in Johannesburg)

Sat Feb 27 00:04:50 UTC 2010

Brandon Galbraith <brandon.galbraith at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.rric.net/

I'm very familiar with those folks of course, they've been an inspiration
to me for a long time.

However, my needs are different.  RRIC's model basically involves a
specific community with a well-defined boundary: bring the bandwidth
into the community via a bulk feed, then sublet inside the community.

But I don't have a specific community in mind - I'm trying to develop a
more generic solution.  (The case of my friend who is at 31 kft from a
Covad-enabled CO is only an example and nothing more.)  Again, consider
a town with a Covad-enabled CO plus an outlying countryside.  The people
in the town proper already have Covad xDSL available to them, and if we
could stick my SDSL/2B1Q repeater in the middle of some longer loops, it
would enable the people in the countryside to get *exactly the same*
Covad (or ISP-X-via-Covad) services as those in the town proper.

My repeater approach would also allow me to stay out of ISP or ISP-like
business which I really don't want to get into - I would rather just
make hardware and let someone else operate it.  A repeater is totally
unlike a router, it is not IP-aware, it just makes the loop seem shorter,
allowing farther-outlying users to connect to *existing* ISPs with an
already established business structure.

Anyway, I just saw a post on NANOG about an area deprived of "high-speed
Internet" services and thought I would post my idea in the hope that
someone would have some ideas that would actually be *helpful* to what
I'm trying to do.  If not - oh well, I'll just put the idea back on the
dusty shelf in the back of my mind until I'm ready to try presenting it
to the folks who own the CO-colocated DSLAMs it would have to work with
- gotta finish a few other things before I open that can of worms in the
earnest.

MS