Starting a greenfield carrier backbone network that can scale to national and international service. What would you do?

Fri Apr 4 01:50:19 UTC 2014

Let's start with your basic assumption here.  Why would you build a 
backbone at all if your goal is to solve last mile problems?

It seems to me that the expense and distraction of building a large 
backbone network doesn't contribute to your goals at all, given that there 
are many high quality, nationwide backbone networks in North America today 
available at reasonable cost.

On Thu, 3 Apr 2014, charles at thefnf.org wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> It's been some time since I've been subscribed/replied/posted here (or on 
> WISPA for that matter). I've been pretty busy running a non profit startup 
> (protip: don't do that. It's really really terrible) :) I'm cofounder and CTO 
> of the Free Networking Foundation. Our goal is to bring broadband (5 mbps 
> symmetric to start) bandwidth to the 2/3 of Americans who currently can't get 
> it (rural, urban core, undeserved, "$ILEC stops on otherside of street" etc).
>
> Efforts so far primarily have consisted of WiFI last (square) mile delivery 
> using Ubiquiti hardware and the qmp.cat firmware (also meraki access points 
> that were donated, for some reason this seems to happen quite a bit). We've 
> helped numerous networks get started, grow and (soon we hope) become self 
> sustaining in Austin, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Detroit, New York and a few 
> other places throughout the US. The networks are in various stages of 
> maturity of course, but a number of them are fully operational and passing 
> real traffic. Especially the one in Kansas City (it spans both states).
>
> These are (point to point, routed) access/distribution networks which connect 
> into colocation providers blended networks.
>
> So that's the background and current state of affairs. Not really NANOG 
> material.
>
> The next step is to secure our v6 space and AS number. Now that's not 
> horribly difficult or really worthy of NANOG (though I do greatly appreciate 
> folks on the list who helped me through the theory/practice of that process 
> sometime ago). It appears to be fairly straightforward if you are not an LIR. 
> Simply go through the paperwork (LOA, submit to ARIN, get out the credit 
> card, textbook BGP config and done). And if FNF was operating the networks 
> (we don't, we just help with organizing/consulting/software guidance/hardware 
> spend optimization/logistics etc) and if there was just one POP (and 
> associated administrative body), then again it wouldn't be that interesting 
> or worth cluttering up NANOG.
>
> FNF goal is to serve as an LIR, SWIPing out /48 chunks to neighborhood level 
> operators. They would then peer with whatever upstream ISPs are regionally 
> close and announce out the space. This of course would be associated with a 
> training program, registration in an IPAM tool etc.
>
> Regarding the above?
>
> What do the operators on this list wish they could of been trained in 
> starting out? I mean obviously they should have good mastery and working 
> experience of CCNA level material, along with exposure to higher level 
> concepts of WAN networking. What are the tricks, the gotchas, the "man that 
> would of saved my company a million bucks in transit costs". Yes I realize 
> these sort of things are usually closely held. I also am striving to create 
> an entirely new breed of operators running BGP enabled sites with ipv6. The 
> more I can do to help ease those folks integration into the internet, the 
> better. In short, the often debated issue on this list of v6 endpoint 
> explosion is going to be very very very real.
>
> What IPAM tools out there can scale to a multi hundred million node, 
> distributed, "eventual consistency" national level? (I've been working 
> closely with guifi.net, and we are attempting to relaunch that as a very 
> slick Apple like experience with a libremap (couchdb based) system.
>
> I'd love to hear from folks across the spectrum of experience and network 
> size. From folks who have been dual homed for <~1 year at a single site, to 
> tier1 operators who were there when it all started.
>
> So what would you like to see done in a greenfield, open source, open 
> governance carrier backbone network? What would a dream TIER1 (and I use that 
> in the default free zone sense of the word) look like to you?
>
> Also how the heck would one get this bootstrapped at a sustainable pace? 
> Would one create numerous tier2 regional carriers, and they would feed into 
> an over arching tier1? I'm thinking something like a 501c8 type structure ( 
> http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Other-Non-Profits/Fraternal-Societies[1] 
> )
>
> As far as I know, this is the first time that an intentional community type 
> approach is taken and a tier1 is the end goal. Not evolving into one, buying 
> ones way into it, but a manifest destiny type approach to building a 
> backbone.
>
> Please feel free to reach out to me directly (charles at thefnf.org[2] ) if you 
> wish to have a one on one discussion. In particular I'm interested in legal 
> expertise in these sort of areas (law/compliance/contracting/negotiations for 
> right of way etc etc etc).
>
> Thanks for reading. I look forward to the discussion!
>
> PS: Yes, I'm young and idealistic. I'm also grounded/practical/focused. I'm 
> currently working on making the access portion of the network as smooth and 
> turnkey as possible. (That basically means packaging up 
> zeroshell/observium/powerdns/libremap/trigger and other bits/bobs into a nice 
> livecd/ova/openvz package). I also like to think about the next wave of 
> issues while working on the current one. It will take another year or so 
> before we need to really be building out the backbone (if nothing else, to 
> link up the rapidly growing regional networks).
>
> This is about physical, layer 1 infrastructure. This isn't yet another 
> overlay network (CJDNS/GNu FreeNet etc). Yes it's messy, yes it's all about 
> non technical end users, yes it's about taking a rather complex stack 
> (auth/network awareness/routing platform) and making it accessible to power 
> users/"IT professionals". It's also a whole lot of fun!
>
>
> Please feel free to visit us at https://www.thefnf.org for more information.
>

-- 
Brandon Ross                                      Yahoo & AIM:  BrandonNRoss
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