I’ve been reading and rereading the latest Cringley column, describing a Canadian Linux user who has hooked up his whole neighborhood using 802.11 and Linux. He has become his neighborhood’s cable TV company, phone company, and Internet company, all legally and using Linux. Fascinating stuff!
I would love to replicate it here, if possible. I’ve got the know-how in Linux, wireless, and voice-over-IP. I’ve got a neighborhood of 500+ homes. I suppose all I’m really lacking now is time. If I built things one piece at a time, I could get it up and running.
I think I’ll start with my immediate neighbors, many of whom are computer geeks such as myself. I’ll let y’all know how the project progresses.
Please don’t hold me.
Sincerely,
Your breath
I’d like to know what kind of storage he has in that mythtv box. geebus.
jbroome
Andrew is getting the video content from C-band satellite receivers, but what about the Internet connection? Is he using the satellite dishes for this, or did he go with a land line? And how much bandwidth does the Internet connection have? I don’t think he can get away with just a T-1; he would need at least a fractional T-3 (or more like a whole T-3).
I wonder how much all this costs him per month. Even if you just broke even, it would be worth it to stop feeding the local monopolies (BellSouth and Time Warner).
Why would he need so much bandwidth to the outside? His neighbors are connecting to his servers, which are compressing video from the satellite. Most of the traffic stays inside his network.
As for phones, there again you’re dealing with “contention ratios” that the phone company itself uses, i.e. for every phone being used, there are ten not being used. And its plausible that a significant bit of phone traffic stays inside the network, too.
I’d say a cable modem or two, aggregated, could cover his needs. After all, cable modems are also a shared medium. If you switch the sharing from inside the cable plant to outside the cable plant, the amount of sharing doesn’t change.