Yep, DE-CIX is great and 32 Ave of the Americas is one of the most wired buildings in NYC. Great choice. Kudos on you folks, this is a great initiative. Reading this article made me happy. And I'm glad you are getting some press!
Actually - what you should do, is have a customer pay a fee of $100 to connect to the system - and take that $100 and buy another mesh was with each customer on boarding.
I think you misunderstand the goals of this community-run mesh. The FAQ has some info on why they don't charge, who runs routers, and what they're trying to accomplish.
Digi Desert LLC, which existed in 2010? Looks like that's the AS of some entity that predates the existence of your project and current public relations effort.
You announce a whopping total of two v4 /24.
Kudos for having enough clue to know that you needed to establish a presence at a major IX, and actually doing it, because it looks like you're adding peers. But your actual network presence is minuscule.
How do you intend to compete with the six NYC based companies I can think of off the top of my head that are putting fiber fed, $9,000 to $20,000 5 to 10Gbps 71-86 GHz PTP links on rooftops to build their own backbones, when you're playing around with 1000BaseT to the roof and AF24s?
You have high uptime? Do you have any of the following, because some of your much larger competitors sure do:
sites with parallel A and B side power systems
-48VDC rectifier + battery systems sized for 24 hour runtime at load
diesel generators
propane generators
generator resupply contracts
chassis-based routers with hotswap fan, N+1 power supplies, dual redundant routing engines
pair of identical core routers
singlemode fiber to the roof
-48vdc power to the roof
ironclad rooftop lease agreements with building owners, drawn up by professional telecom/real estate lawyers that run for 5+ year terms
Your original post was interesting because it raised legitimate questions about their operation. They answered those questions.
This follow up comes across as though you've drawn a conclusion and are now arguing towards that predetermined conclusion while ignoring the additional information provided. Plus your argument has kind of devolved from talking about specific concerns to throwing criticisms at the wall to see what sticks.
I'm sharing some harsh reality with them: The ISP market in NYC is highly competitive. If they want to be serious about it, it's not going to work as a nonprofit. I'm trying to tell them bluntly about what sort of infrastructure their competitors operate so that they can get an idea of the actual capital expenditure requirements involved in architecting/engineering a MAN-scale, five nines ISP composed of point to point wireless links.
Once upon a time there was a company called Microsoft. They hated free software! It costs millions to write an OS! Why is it free?? They hated the free guys so much. Then the free software got better. It got so much better than what you would have to pay for from Microsoft! Eventually Microsoft said oh well, and built the free software into their product. They even contributed back to that free software and everyone learned that you can have free and paid and as long as we all contribute the world is a better place. Thank you.
Once upon a time there was a chipmaker named Intel. Sun decided to open source its SPARC architecture. Other folks tried to design their own FOSS CPU architectures. Intel still dominates.
FOSS zealots like to point to the success of Linux over Windows (which is restricted to the server market, I might add), but there's little evidence that the FOSS philosophy is effective when it comes to physical infrastructure. Software requires bytes and labor. Bytes are cheap and labor can be donated or paid for by companies. Hardware requires fabs and factories, which are expensive.
Hello from just across the Hudson River! Keep up the great work. You are finding a way, despite what doubters and naysayers think! You will know what is possible by trying.
You're wasting your own time and those of your "customers" unless you have at least $750,000 to establish a serious presence, in my opinion. Amateur-hour WISP stuff is fine in a rural area. You're pretending to be a highly reliable capable ISP, and will eventually either overextend yourselves, run out of rubes to fund you as a nonprofit, or once you reach a size much bigger than you are now, get stomped on and obliterated by a much larger competitor that overbuilds your entire network with carrier-grade infrastructure and takes all your revenue.
This thread has to be one of the most overtly hostile threads I've read on HN in a while. What is your concern here? Why do you seem to feel they shouldn't even be trying?
We bypass traditional ISPs by connecting directly at an internet exchange point (DE-CIX IXP) and peering with other networks. This is basically how the internet is formed, by networks peering with each other. We don't need this ISP layer.
I'm pretty sure the real secret is ensuring your customers have no alternatives. Spectrum may or may not have all of that gear and they still have given me outage and throttling issues for years. I don't want somebody to compete with the terrible ISPs out there today - they're fundamentally the wrong kind of organization. I'd rather have honestly crappy service than an opaque monopoly dictating my access.
Our uptime when connecting to supernode1 is significantly better than Time Warner Cable as many of our members have reported.
We are already established. This is something we have already done! It isn't impossible.
Our IXP is DE-CIX, the worlds biggest IXP. We are currently in one data-center/IXP and talking to a few more colocs.