On 9/12/2010 4:55 AM, Ilya Chernykh wrote:
On Sunday 12 September 2010 11:39:43 Per Jessen wrote:
Wow, very modern - Ethernet-To-The-Home.
This is common here, nobody uses xDSL. I have Ethernet here from 2007.
I guess you (i.e. your city) was able to skip DSL altogether because the infra-structure was late in coming?
First Ethernet-based nets appeared here in the mid-90s when people just bought first Ethernet cards (then with throughput of 10 Mbit/s) and connected to their neighbors to exchange files and play LAN games. Some of such games included only 2-3 computers and some spanned several buildings to include tens and hundreds. The people themselves negotiated with local officials, utility services for unofficial permissions to lay the cable, for access to collectors, attics etc.
Then people from some nets decided that they can collect money to buy Internet access wholesale from the provider to have much lower prices and higher speed than on dial-up. From this time on some people connected to the local networks just to have cheap Internet. Some nets were organized with this purpose in mind.
Over time the largest nets officially registered as "Local network of district XXX" to be able to officially collect money and negotiate with the officials for cable placement.
Then there appeared some professional providers who decided to use the same technology. They either competed or bought small local providers. This day I would say that most of smaller providers already incorporated in 2-3 largest and ad-hoc nets were disbanded due to unnecessity.
I LOVE THIS! I wish we had done that. For all it's glory, in many ways the US really sucks. Our culture basically prevents good things like that from happening. Most I ever hear of like this is a few neighbors in a single building sharing one cable modem, but that's actually technically forbidden although almost impossible to enforce. In the US we are just too look-out-for-myself to cooperate on things like that. When some of us try, it just dissolves under "That jerk is using all the resources we I'm paying for, we should make him pay more or exclude him." and "I'm not paying for someone else." and "I'm not going to risk getting sued or arrested for whatever bad stuff those other guys do." Selfish and litigous, and so we are relegated to the "3rd world of the internet". We pay the most and get the least. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org