Let's start with your basic assumption here. Why would you build a
backbone at all if your goal is to solve last mile problems?
It seems to me that the expense and distraction of building a large
backbone network doesn't contribute to your goals at all, given that there
are many high quality, nationwide backbone networks in North America today
available at reasonable cost.
On Thu, 3 Apr 2014, char...@thefnf.org wrote:
Hello everyone,
It's been some time since I've been subscribed/replied/posted here (or on
WISPA for that matter). I've been pretty busy running a non profit startup
(protip: don't do that. It's really really terrible) :) I'm cofounder and CTO
of the Free Networking Foundation. Our goal is to bring broadband (5 mbps
symmetric to start) bandwidth to the 2/3 of Americans who currently can't get
it (rural, urban core, undeserved, "$ILEC stops on otherside of street" etc).
Efforts so far primarily have consisted of WiFI last (square) mile delivery
using Ubiquiti hardware and the qmp.cat firmware (also meraki access points
that were donated, for some reason this seems to happen quite a bit). We've
helped numerous networks get started, grow and (soon we hope) become self
sustaining in Austin, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Detroit, New York and a few
other places throughout the US. The networks are in various stages of
maturity of course, but a number of them are fully operational and passing
real traffic. Especially the one in Kansas City (it spans both states).
These are (point to point, routed) access/distribution networks which connect
into colocation providers blended networks.
So that's the background and current state of affairs. Not really NANOG
material.
The next step is to secure our v6 space and AS number. Now that's not
horribly difficult or really worthy of NANOG (though I do greatly appreciate
folks on the list who helped me through the theory/practice of that process
sometime ago). It appears to be fairly straightforward if you are not an LIR.
Simply go through the paperwork (LOA, submit to ARIN, get out the credit
card, textbook BGP config and done). And if FNF was operating the networks
(we don't, we just help with organizing/consulting/software guidance/hardware
spend optimization/logistics etc) and if there was just one POP (and
associated administrative body), then again it wouldn't be that interesting
or worth cluttering up NANOG.
FNF goal is to serve as an LIR, SWIPing out /48 chunks to neighborhood level
operators. They would then peer with whatever upstream ISPs are regionally
close and announce out the space. This of course would be associated with a
training program, registration in an IPAM tool etc.
Regarding the above?
What do the operators on this list wish they could of been trained in
starting out? I mean obviously they should have good mastery and working
experience of CCNA level material, along with exposure to higher level
concepts of WAN networking. What are the tricks, the gotchas, the "man that
would of saved my company a million bucks in transit costs". Yes I realize
these sort of things are usually closely held. I also am striving to create
an entirely new breed of operators running BGP enabled sites with ipv6. The
more I can do to help ease those folks integration into the internet, the
better. In short, the often debated issue on this list of v6 endpoint
explosion is going to be very very very real.
What IPAM tools out there can scale to a multi hundred million node,
distributed, "eventual consistency" national level? (I've been working
closely with guifi.net, and we are attempting to relaunch that as a very
slick Apple like experience with a libremap (couchdb based) system.
I'd love to hear from folks across the spectrum of experience and network
size. From folks who have been dual homed for <~1 year at a single site, to
tier1 operators who were there when it all started.
So what would you like to see done in a greenfield, open source, open
governance carrier backbone network? What would a dream TIER1 (and I use that
in the default free zone sense of the word) look like to you?
Also how the heck would one get this bootstrapped at a sustainable pace?
Would one create numerous tier2 regional carriers, and they would feed into
an over arching tier1? I'm thinking something like a 501c8 type structure (
http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Other-Non-Profits/Fraternal-Societies[1]
)
As far as I know, this is the first time that an intentional community type
approach is taken and a tier1 is the end goal. Not evolving into one, buying
ones way into it, but a manifest destiny type approach to building a
backbone.
Please feel free to reach out to me directly (char...@thefnf.org[2] ) if you
wish to have a one on one discussion. In particular I'm interested in legal
expertise in these sort of areas (law/compliance/contracting/negotiations for
right of way etc etc etc).
Thanks for reading. I look forward to the discussion!
PS: Yes, I'm young and idealistic. I'm also grounded/practical/focused. I'm
currently working on making the access portion of the network as smooth and
turnkey as possible. (That basically means packaging up
zeroshell/observium/powerdns/libremap/trigger and other bits/bobs into a nice
livecd/ova/openvz package). I also like to think about the next wave of
issues while working on the current one. It will take another year or so
before we need to really be building out the backbone (if nothing else, to
link up the rapidly growing regional networks).
This is about physical, layer 1 infrastructure. This isn't yet another
overlay network (CJDNS/GNu FreeNet etc). Yes it's messy, yes it's all about
non technical end users, yes it's about taking a rather complex stack
(auth/network awareness/routing platform) and making it accessible to power
users/"IT professionals". It's also a whole lot of fun!
Please feel free to visit us at https://www.thefnf.org for more information.
--
Brandon Ross Yahoo & AIM: BrandonNRoss
+1-404-635-6667 ICQ: 2269442
Skype: brandonross
Schedule a meeting: http://www.doodle.com/bross
