[mesh-dev] What we learned today

[Alexander Papazoglou]

Today April and I spoke with Tim and Chris about our
problems with obtaining an uplink. The tl;dr version is that
we have two possibilities for circumventing the last-mile
shakedown: BART and radio links.

You probably don't need to read the rest. :)

First off, the prices quoted to us for a 1Gbit were fairly
normal. They are due to the last-mile being neither competitive
nor transparent. Zayo may still be an option, but getting the
building wired for fiber may be a huge ordeal and it still might
be very expensive.

The only workaround may be to find an alternative, cheaper
route to a data center; IP transit is cheap these days and
getting cheaper. There are two sources of problems
here: transport (the connection from our network to a
data center) and data center internals.

The data centers we have available to us are: "365 Main St."
in downtown Oakland, Evocative in Emeryville, and then
things further away such as Hurricane Electric. Unfortunately,
the AT&T CO near the Omni is probably not useful to us.
There's a whole lot of cost and complexity involved in getting into a
data center and it would be nice to avoid paying for co-location.

Transport is tricky. We learned that BART can provide transport
(not just dark fiber leases), but we don't know where we can
connect to them physically, so an additional radio or fiber link
may be necessary. Don't know how much it'll cost.

The other intriguing option is a two-hop radio link (up to the
hills and then down to a data center). We discussed using
licensed bands for this, and it seems feasible with some
perseverance. Again, don't know much it'll cost.

We also discussed my idea of attaching fiber to poles, which
seems to be feasible in theory but probably prohibitively expensive
for us.

Alex
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