[NCLUG] Linux-friendly satellite modem service

[John L. Bass]

	> ya, but if you actually use bandwidth, they ask you to leave. i've got two
	> friends who were CWX members who were asked to leave because they created
	> too much traffic playing online computer games.

Although I've attended a few of the NCLUG meetings, I've never subscribed to this list
until this evening.  I get enough email to deal with already. I missed the lead-in
to this discussion ... I'm just responding to clearify some mis-statements.

First a correction. CWX has NEVER asked any member to leave. We are a member owned,
member operated community ... no single individual owns CWX, we are not a big Corp.
We operate CWX as an open community that is very hands on. We use group concensus
exclusively to make decisions. The volunteer Board of Directors and Architecture
Teams are all member/users with a vested interest in providing service to not only
ourselves, but the membership as a whole. We operate our network as an open resource
to local ISP's, businesses, and individuals where the usage is a good fit. Currently
we are partnered with FRII, who with dual 45mbps DS-3 connections is one of the
few places that can provide full bandwidth for a high speed wireless service. We
sell transport to FRII customers, in exchange to being able to buy and resell
bandwidth from FRII. We are completely independent of FRII, and always interested
in partnering with other local ISP's too. Many thanks to Andy Neely of FRII in helping
us get started, and acting as our President during the first year and a half.

We have a "shared" medium, not direct connections like dialup, ISDN, or DSL. Actions
of other members affect everyone, specifically flood-pinging our network is an
effective denial of service ... and prevents access by all members. Several games
using high rate streaming UDP protocols, effectively act like flood pings, and
completely disrupt the service for all members - especially when mixed with sustained
high bandwidth FTP traffic. This is a hard technology limit for 802.11 wireless LAN
devices. The gamers involved compained about poor response times, other members
complained about their network connectivity effectively going away for long periods
of time ... since the TCP protocol responds to buffer overrun packet loss by slowing
down the data rate to a crawl - to the point the http surfing was unusable during
high rate gaming. It was obvious to both groups we had a significant fit/expectation
problem here - several of the high rate gaming households decided to look for
other access when objections were strongly raised to the disruptions ... we still
have a number of other gamers on the network which play games with light to moderate
bandwidth demands.

Although CWX has yet as an organization to ban this type of gaming, it has been
made it clear to several individuals that it severely impacts the usage of nearly
50 other members, and that continued disruptions by this activity are not friendly
to the larger member community. This was a learning process, none of us were aware
of the impacts of high rate games on 802.11 networks until after the disruptions.
I hope there are no hard feelings on either side of this learning process.

Secondly, we purchase our bandwidth at about $1/kbps 95th percentile from FRII, and
we collect about $17/mo from members using CWX as their ISP to pay for that bandwidth,
adding about 17kbps to our bandwidth pool per member. The economics are that our
upstream bandwidth is oversubscribed by 17/250 = 15:1 ... to make higher speed
access affordable for most of the members. Our network delivers better than a
megabit/sec most of the time ... a member (or group of members) attempting to transfer
at that rate for more than 30 hours/month is going to incur a $1,000 upstream bandwidth
bill - which is fine if they are willing to pay for it. Otherwise we respectfully
ask for volutary rate limiting for long/large bulk transfers to minimize the billing
impact of the use under the FRII rate plan. Based on working out the oversubscription
math during the prime-time afternoon-evening window, and factoring that to monthly
averages, we have an upper limit of about 3.6 GBytes per month for the 256kbps
flat rate $60/mo plan - which is about 3-4 times more data than our average user
consumes during a month. Most ISP's have similar limits. Go above that limit
regualarly and we request that the member bump up to the 512kbps $135/mo plan, or
be willing to pay for the additional costs to CWX for the excessive bandwidth.
In short, none of us are willing to pay the $1K bandwidth for someone else building a
200 CD napster library in a month - we kindly tell them to back off, or be willing
to pay what it costs CWX.

The point here is that we believe that all members should be respectful of other
members on this shared medium ... and as individuals in a non-profit cooperative,
everyone should pay their own way ... we do not ask all members to subsidize
the excessive use of a few. We have had one member leave, switching to @Home
for a better gaming access to the internet. We have two other shared households
moving off the CWX network in January due to their strong interest in certain
high rate games which are simply not compatable with the 802.11 wireless technology.
If, as you say, those members are complaining about being "kicked off" our network,
then I hope this explains the situation. No one is trying to be unreasonable
here ... just that the technology and econcomics in a shared community sometimes
are not a good fit for everyone, or every application.

We started nearly two years ago, a group of individuals who mostly only had poor 19.2
dialup as an alternative. I tried ISDN thru NCIC for about a year, it was expensive
at nearly $300/mo and continually locked up. USWest was unable to stabilize the
PairGain system my ISDN was connected to, I would go thru days at a time where the
ISDN TA's were unable to maintain a 5 minute voice call without dropping the connection
due to the PairGain system losing "sync" and clearing the ISDN analog POTS call.
I tried 5 different brands of TA's ... all had hang firmware bugs in this unstable
environment. I Bug reported several dozen Netgear RT328 problems, and talked with
the product manager regularly before finally just giving up on ISDN and switching
back to 19.2 until we got the wireless coop started.

Many of CWX's members have similar stories. If someone can get DSL or @Home, or a
T-1 connection ... and can live with the server restrictions, then those are
probably a better choices for most people. Our antenna pattern lights up an area
of about 40 x 60 miles, about 2,400 square miles.  We have 40% coverage under
the patern, so we have a potential customer base of about 1,000 square miles of
rural residential/ranch areas that are not likely to have any high speed connectivity
in the next 10-20 years. That is our market - and includes people that live off the
grid without either power or land-line phone service. Our typical customer is
an engineer, manager, or business owner. Some of us are self-employed consultants.

CWX turned up commercial service after an extensive test net period last Nov. We
have been debt free and cash flow positive since last Feb. We still face some
technology issues, some growth issues, and some identity issues. But it sure
beats paying $80/mo (data line and ISP charges) for slower unreliable dial-up
alternatives. Even with the limitations, this is the closest most of us can
expect to data heaven for a VERY long time. Besides, the coop has been fun
for the core group of techies that have made this possible, and continue to
participate and operate it today.

John Bass