Re: Starting a greenfield carrier backbone network that can scale to national and international service. What would you do?

[Daniël W. Crompton <daniel.crompton () gmail com>]

I recently saw an interesting talk about this at 30c3, this is the way some
French ISPs are solving this:

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5391_-_en_-_saal_6_-_201312291130_-_y_u_no_isp_taking_back_the_net_-_taziden.html

D.


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On 4 April 2014 03:50, Brandon Ross <bross () pobox com> wrote:

> 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, charles () 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 (charles () 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:
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