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On Mon, 21 Dec 2009, tom wrote:
A Bristol group have done a reasonable job but as Gordon pointed out for some people 'community' means the ability to parasitise. Always work on the principle that someone will try and rip you off and make it so that they cant.
That's actually a major hurdle... And it's a difference between a community service and a paid-for service. With paid-for, you must define the limits absolutely, but with community, the boundaries may be somewhat "woolier", as long as the community co-operates. In one area of 50 subscribers, I had 1 person who was running p2p software 24/7 and that 1 person consumed over 95% of the resources of the entire network until I had the means to throttle them. (And I could only do that after the company went bust and I took over sole running of the network)
However in my experiences it will always boil down to cost. The true cost of each install we did was a shade over £250 - and we considered that to be doing it properly - we had proper outdoor transcievers (with power over ether to the outdoor box), we did the spectrum planning properly to minimise overlaps, paid people who had insurance to go up the ladders and do the installs and drill holes through walls, etc. Found (and paid!) central locations to host the base stations and so on. We were charging £25 pcm too - which barely covered the running costs (~£1000 pcm)
No-one nowadays will pay anything like that for service.So personally, I'm happy with my 8Mb connection now and am happy to wait a bit longer for anything more... If I had a 2Mb connection - well, I'd probably whinge, but live with it (get_iplayer to the rescue) . Less than that, I'd whinge louder. Actually, I have 2 clients who get about 1.5Mb on their connections, and it's usable as long as no-one actually does anything silly like p2p software, but these are businesses rather than homes with more demanding users (ie. teenagers ;-)
Gordon
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