[MLB-WIRELESS] Public internet access

[Zik Saleeba]

I don't think anyone would sanely suggest that we can afford to do
this stuff the big business way. This is a hobby organisation and
everything has to be done the cheapass way. If you're talking about
renting towers or spending $100k on legal fees we're talking about
different things altogether.

I'm not proposing that the Melbourne Wireless hobby organisation
suddenly become a full commercial WISP business. What I am suggesting
is that it jump through the hoops so we can get internet access.
Obviously this is only going to be practical if it's cheap. We already
have a network so we don't need to spend any more money on that. And
the licensing costs are relatively small compared with the upstream
bandwidth costs.

It seems to me that the main additional cost we'd be facing is the
internet bandwidth. I'm sounding out an ISP friend to see what kind of
deal we could get on this. I'll be interested to see if it's possible
to strike a deal for a hobby organisation which is competitive with
ADSL.

Cheers,
Zik

On 9/22/06, Tim Hogard <thogard at knotty.abnormal.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > hmm, what would a ballpark for cost look like?
> >
> > capital equipment say 20 nodes at 1K / node
> More like $500 for installed wireless customer radios.
> The central managment pushes that up.
> > carrier license say 2K + 1K / year
> Legal fees are the major killer with a carrier license.  Others
> have spent between $20,000 and $100,000 that I know of.
> > bulk bandwidth ?? I have no idea
> $550 a megabit if your buying 10 or more plus a tail charge of
> $500 to $1000 per month.
> > some hosting for the onramp equipment
> A rack in a data center costs $600 to $1400/mo.
> > there's probably about 50k of startup cost at least.
> The tower that HVC is sitting on cost about $10,000 a year in rent.
>
> -tim
> http://web.abnormal.com
> _______________________________________________
> Melbwireless mailing list
> Melbwireless at wireless.org.au
> http://wireless.org.au/mailman/listinfo/melbwireless
>