[SLL] Seattle to get its Click! ?

[Ken Meyer]

What makes you think you're ahead, Glenn :-)

Very astute though; I do live up here, in the land of umpteen bazillion
little evergreen needle antennae waiting to listen in on and sop-up your
wireless signal.

I don't have any sight line to the north, but anyway, I think Creed must be
living in a storage unit, or maybe under a blackjack table at Goldie's.

Shoreline is a "wonderful" place that has shed all of the onerous social and
other crushing big-city-type obligations of Seattle while maintaining
adjacent proximity to take advantages of all the benefits that such a
population center offers.  The poo-bahs of Shoreline still think that tin
cans and string are the order of the day for communications, just as long as
they can spend $40 Mil for a mile and a half of Aurora Ave. asphalt ego trip
with two $1 Mil pedestrian bridges over it.  This esthetic miracle is
trumpeted right next to the article bemoaning shortfall in the schools
budget.  Then they rail hypocritically against the evils of the casinos, but
don't touch them, because they represent a very substantial fraction of the
city's tax base.

As for Wi-Fi distance, the guys at SeattleWireless.NET once sent a signal
from a surplus microwave tower in Enumclaw back to Seattle somewhat
successfully -- that's 40 miles or so.

The Seattle FTTH proposal has targeted 25 Mpbs down AND up for openers.
They are still juggling the business model from: city builds and operates,
to city provides its fiber and access to the planting strips and lets
another enterprise build and operate the system (with payment to the city),
with all the variant perturbations of the division of responsibility between
city and commercial participants in between seemingly still on the table.

As I think I said here (or somewhere else), the consultants' estimate is
$250 M to pass all the homes, businesses and schools in the area and another
$250 M to hook-up the premises.  Much better investment, IMHO, than building
a stadium and, for perspective, only one-third of the MARGINAL cost of
putting the new viaduct underground.

Talking to Bill Schrier, CTO of Seattle on Tuesday, he estimated 6 - 8 weeks
before something official might surface, at least to begin the debate.

Ken M.


-----Original Message-----

From: linux-list-bounces at ssc.com [mailto:linux-list-bounces at ssc.com]On
Behalf Of Glenn Stone
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2007 9:43 PM
To: linux-list at ssc.com

Subject: Re: [SLL] Seattle to get its Click! ?

On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 08:29:17PM -0700, Creede Lambard wrote:

>Dang, and I just signed a lease for a house 1/4 mile north of the city
>limits. I wonder if I can run a fiber optic cable under 145th from Las
>Margaritas.

Oh, come on.  1/4 mile is a chip shot for a Pringles can on the end of a
hacked WRT54GL.  You just have to find the right neighbor.  :)

I seriously contemplated firing 802.11b from the top of the Columbia Center
tower down to a facility just the backside of the Duwamish in Tukwila, but a
line of alders and the curvature of the earth got in the way... if I could
have stuck a 100' tower on the top of the lower building, I'd have been in
like Flynn, but it wasn't to be.  I looked up the specs, somebody had done
it over ten miles; eight and a half would've been a little tricky but
doable.  Five blocks should be child's play.

A pair of WRT54GL's, a pair of Pringles can antennas (you can probably
get'em commercially if you're lazy), and the willingness to risk bricking
at least one of the routers (I dunno if it works better if you hack the
other one or not; I never got that far).  Total investment, $200, wot?  Oh,
and maybe some suitable inducement for the neighbor to share....

Hey, doesn't Ken live up that way?  hmmmm... :)

Of course, the city may take a dim view of that, but hey, we're talking an
11-megabit link... if it's actually *fiber* to the doorstep, that's only ten
percent of the bitpipe.  And if the sharing customer in question has his own
appetite for ISO's and the like... who'd notice?  Besides, if you wanted to
get really fancy you could run squid, and assuming tastes were similar...

Yaknow, I'm beginning to scare myself here...

at this point Glenn, quitting while he's ahead...