wholesale dilemma (and solution)

Who wants wholesale access to our community fibre networks?

1. government want to see wholesale access offered if there's public money spent on their construction
2. ISPs believe they have a right to offer services on networks where there is a monopoly operator (irresepective of who paid for it)
3. consumers want a "choice" of ISPs

Sounds reasonable but the downside is that to engineer wholesale access can result in an inferior technical solution.  The standard wholesale architecture sees IP packets to and from a subscriber "tunnelled" to the serving ISP which can be quite some distance away.  Packets can't be processed (routed) at the Digital Village Pump.

Open letter to the Fast Capel Broadband campaign

Fast Capel Broadband Campaign
The Village Cottage, Coldharbour
DORKING, RH5 6HD

3rd January, 2011

I read today on BT's Race To Infinity web site that, by BT's measure, Capel's campaign wasn't successful.
 

It may not have met BT's target but it did demonstrate the demand for better Internet access and the resolve of local residents to work together to achieve this.  There is now an opportunity to leverage the support that the campain mustered to go beyond BT's idea of "Infinity."

To me - to you

A couple of years ago we were fortunate that the water company decided to install a sewerage main in our road.  Prior to this we had a cess pit, the scourge of rural life.

I recall at the time the letter came through the door asking if we were interested in a connection (were we!)  and the terms were straightforward.  They would tee off the new main to the curtilage of our property for a modest fee - and it really was modest as they took into account the fact the navvies were there anyway laying the main so it was little more than the cost of the materials they used.

Asymmetric side effect

In comments posted on an article about the FTTP project at Ashby de la Launde it was pointed out that a PC infected with malicious botnet software on a traditional broadband connection is limited to adding at most a couple of hundred kilobits/second of bot traffic to the Internet.  A botnet PC on a FTTH connection could be pumping out 100Mbps of bot traffic.  A few tens of these could do the damage that takes thousands of botnet computers inflict currently, not to mention saturate the precious Internet uplink.

Not an Internet Protocol IDS

Perhaps we need to deploy Intrusion Detection Systems at the digital village pump to catch infected subscribers and maybe apply some kind of automatic quarantine to their connections.

This is a problem that commercial ISP's don't need to worry too much about. Apart from the asymmetric bandwidth limitation, they make money selling bandwidth so the more that's used the better whereas a community network needs to take care not to squander the expensive uplink.