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

Fri Apr 4 11:54:55 UTC 2014

I recently saw an interesting talk about this at 30c3, this is the way some
French ISPs are solving this:

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5391_-_en_-_saal_6_-_201312291130_-_y_u_no_isp_taking_back_the_net_-_taziden.html

D.

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On 4 April 2014 03:50, Brandon Ross <bross at pobox.com> wrote:

> 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.
>>
>>
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