Best Buy / Speakeasy service suspension - advice requested
Stephen Ronan <[email protected]> Fri, 31 Aug 2007 23:32:12 -0400
| Newsgroups | gmane.network.wireless.seattle.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hi I wondered whether any of you have experience/advice re:Best Buy / Speakeasy given our situation here. As a volunteer in Boston I helped a tenants organization set up a wireless mesh network in a low-income housing project. It uses open source MIT Roofnet software running on Netgear WGT634u routers. For the past 1.5+ years, the tenants organization at the site has been paying about $230/month for two 6 megabit by 768 kbps business class DSL lines from Speakeasy, which at some point in there was acquired by Best Buy. There's additional bandwidth donated to the project by a neighboring Institute of Technology (heaviest usage at the housing development is in afterschool, evening hours when the Institute sees little activity and presumably Speakeasy business customers are also reduced in activity). A year or so ago, we blocked almost all ports via m0n0wall firewalls so that since then almost all traffic is via port 80. Given the Roofnet LAN within a LAN architecture and the fact that none of us involved in the project are extremely technically sophisticated it hasn't been possible to limit or even determine bandwidth usage per user. And usage has been quite high, apparently as much as 63 GB on one line during a week (although that's less than 1 megabit on average of the 6 megabit line, it's understandably more than Best Buy can readily profit from). And as a result Best Buy/Speakeasy just today suspended service on that line asserting that we were using too much capacity. So I'd be grateful for suggestions either in regard to attempting to better understand individual usage patterns, given the difficulties of the network architecture we're working with or in regard to encouraging Best Buy/Speakeasy to invest a little philanthropic capital in allowing the community network to continue. Unfortunately, the tenants organization is strapped for cash so adding additional DSL lines probably isn't an option and nor is swapping out the Netgears for the newer Meraki devices, which have a great deal more capacity to allow monitoring of individual and collective bandwidth usage. Thanks, Stephen Ronan _______________________________________________ Talk mailing list [email protected] http://seattlewireless.net/mailman/listinfo/talk