Telepocalypse

ABC Conference Day 2 Session 2

Didn’t get to blog this in real time as it was standing room only. But some interesting stuff about the reality of building community networks.

Had presenters from a the co-operative society (large mutual society — read more here), satellite provider, local wireless operator, and mesh technology provider.

Take-aways:

- When all you had before is dial-up, you don’t complain about latency of megabit satellite connections.
- There’s a lot of detailed stuff to get right in rolling out community broadband. Naively throwing yourself into it is a recipe for pain and suffering. Local contacts and knowledge are key. Need to know community or church leaders, public servants (council, police, schools, etc.), geography, chamber of commerce members, neighbours.
- Small business users are less demanding than general consumers in terms of both bandwidth and support.
- Incremental approach is best.
- (From talk after the event.) BT is threatened by insurgence from the edge, and deployment of ADSL is used as a competitive weapon. Don’t want precedents set that make the plebs want to rebel against their BT indenture. BT can preempt community initiatives by pre-announcing ADSL availability (even if it is 1/10 the speed and twice the price of a community solution).