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Last updated: October 3, 2001

Welcome to the page where I will present the Real High Speed network we installed here in my neighbourhood in Umea in Northern Sweden in March 2000.

Everyone knows how the Internet has influenced us all by allowing us to find information about almost anything, keep in contact with friends in distant places and share documents and files with each other.

In my family we have used computers since 1983 when we bought our first computer, a Texas Instruments 99/4A with TI-Basic and games on cartridges. We have had everything from Commodore 64/128's, Amiga 500, 3000, 4000, IBM PC's ranging from 80386@16 MHz to the current Pentium-IIIs and AMD Thunderbirds at 1400+ MHz (overclocked, of course).

I got my Master of Science degree in Computer Science at Umeå University in February 2001, where I began my studies in 1993.

In my spare time I run Björnerbäck Konsult with my father and my brother. We do both economical and computer-related consulting and we sell computers that we assemble from high quality parts.

Between 1997-1999, my dad was involved in a group that was trying to get our neighbourhood into a sponsored evaluation project about fiber-connection to bungalows, but they missed that opportunity so they decided to examine the market themselves. Several companies were interrested in building our network. 

It was at this point I got involved - when I heard what was about to happen and I heard words like "copper", "amplifiers", "bus-network". I wasn't very satisfied with this and I told them there is only one way to go - a 100 Mbps fiber network in a Star coupling - everything else would fast become outdated and need replacement. My only concern was what to do when the 100 Mbps would be too slow - because it is just a matter of time before it is, when HDTV and other high-capacity broadcasts become a reality! 

The specifications changed a bit during the initial phase of the negotiations. More later on what we installed - we really wanted to be compatible with the FUTURE!

All companies with which we negotiated kept saying that they would base their calculations on just 40% coverage of the houses as interested in connecting to our soon-to-be-network. We kept telling them to base their calculations on 95-100% coverage, because we somehow knew it was possible to get there -- and only then the price would be reasonable for us. We also knew that all other methods of connecting to the Internet are at best rotten compared to our fiber network, so we put our trust in our neighbours understanding of what is needed to get a really good network.

After long negotiations we decided to get into business with Bonet who offered the best deal for us. Now when we had the price for 95-100% coverage, the really exciting part began - getting all our neighbours to join our project! My father did a marvelous job on this part! He went from house to house with papers describing the project and the price. About 70% said yes immediately, because they saw it was 'The Future' standing on their doorstep.

After a few evenings 60 of 62 possible houses had joined! (I won't bore you with the stories about the block next to ours that after a long time decided to get a 1 Mbps Cable connection instead, because they thought it was too expensive and dangerous to join our project - boy, do the kids in that block regret that :) ). 

We have 4 networks between the houses, but only two of them are currently in use, the others are "for future use".

• A full star of multi mode fiber cables from 3Ms Volition-series. 
• They are used for 10 and 100 Mbps to the houses in the block (it was about $300 cheaper for those who took 10 Mbps instead of 100 Mbps).
• A full star of single mode fiber cables from 3Ms Volition-series.
• They are for future use. Perhaps TV-via-fiber? The lifespan is about 30 years and we believe they will be needed within 5-10 years.
• A high-performance CATV-network (Cable-TV) with state-of-the-art amplifiers and cables.
• This network is currently in use, but it is not perfectly balanced yet, so a couple of houses receive poor-quality signals. Perhaps the gain is too high on a few amplifiers?
• A full star of ordinary twisted-pair copper cables. 4 pairs per house, but only 2 pairs per house are connected.
• They are not in use. They are intended for house-automation-devices, such as burglar-alarms, water-alarm, remote-steering of the heat etc. It was practically free to install these cables.
• All cables run in PVC-tubes about 50 cm below ground. A few main-tubes are absolutely full with cables, so unfortunately it isn't possible to install more cables in them, but hopefully it won't be necessary.

We had three levels to choose from: 

• Prepare the connection, but not connect to the network. I think the only one still at this level is a person who hasn't built a house here yet - there are only big trees on his yard. The cost is approximately US$ 1100, without Cable-TV.
• Connect with 10 Mbps to the network. This was chosen by about 35 houses. The cost is approximately US$ 1650 including access to the standard Cable-TV channels.
• Connect with full 100 Mbps to the network. This was about $300 more expensive than the 10 Mbps-alternative. About $2000 per house was the total cost at this level including Cable-TV.

Access to the Cable-TV network was about US$ 200.

The monthly fee is about $10 per house for the running costs of the permanent connection. More about what is included in that later.

Most of us chose to finance the project by increasing the loan on our houses, because of the relatively large investment and the small addition to the mortgages.

In October/November the neighbourhood looked like a big ditch with a myriad of dirt piles and small special-purpose machines everywhere. (Click on the pictures for full size). The exitement was total and the winter with 60 cm (2 feet) snow and frozen ground was closing in on us.

We had lots of luck - the winter came one month later than usual!

This ditch I dug by hand to speed up the process. Winter was closing in fast! It is about 50 cm deep.	This is one of the ditches from the houses to the central.	This is one of the two small excavators that made our high speed Internet connection a reality! They are very kind to the lawns since they are fairly light and have rubber tracks.
Water is always present in the ground here in Northern Sweden. The cables are protected in thick PVC-tubes (d=10cm) and the cables are insulated to withstand the water.	Everyone was very understanding and didn't make a big fuss about the lawns being temporary destroyed.	Now, a year later, there aren't any visible tracks of this mayhem.
-What is a nice lawn worth compared to Internet access? -Nothing! :)	To the left is the "bomb shelter" (no, we're not afraid of invasion...) in our block. We have a 100 Mbps-outlet there and the kids gather there with their computers and play online-games during weekends.	To the left is the room where all switches are (behind a heavy duty-door, mind you!).

The heart of the entire system is a small room where the 100 Mbps single mode fiber connection to the rest of the world (I will describe the "upstream" later on) is connected to our three 3M fiber switches, and the incoming Cable-TV coaxial cable is coming from Telia, who supplies us with both standard analog TV-channels as well as digital-TV for those who buy a digital box from them.

Our luck and timing was almost total, because just when we needed it, 3M released their Volition-series of switches with fiber connections. In the beginning of the project we planned to have a bunch of Copper-to-fiber converters and regular Cisco-switches, but that was both more expensive and less flexible, not to mention not as COOL! :)

This is the entire *power*-central. The four white boxes are "patch-panels" with fibers out to all houses on the backside and short patch cables down to the switches on the front.  This is a normal setup, except that everything are fiber cables instead of TP-copper cables. The two upper dark boxes are 24-port 10 Mbps fiber switches (Volition 0215) and the dark box at the bottom is a modular Volition 4000-box with four Vol-4008 modules (8-port, 100 Mbps fiber modules).	The small gray box with "Bonet" written on it is a 100 Mbps single mode-to-copper converter. The single mode fiber is connected to our ISP Norrnod via Bonets network that they rent from Umeå Energi. The 3 feet cable from that box to the switch is the only (but what a shame!) copper in our central. It doesn't limit the speed, though. I have no problem running 70 to 80 Mbps through it.	The cable to the left is the 3 feet cable from the single mode converter. It is connected in the 10/100-slot in one of the two 10 Mbps switches. The cable to the right is the 100 Mbps fiber uplink to the Vol-4000 and from the Vol-4000 is another uplink to the other 10 Mbps Vol-0215.
Here you can see all switches in all of their glory! It is a really neat system!	A close-up on the 10 Mbps switches.	These colorful cables are connected to the houses in our block.
This is one of the CATV-boards with amplifiers from Cathrein.	I borrowed a picture from the sky over our block from Lantmateriet.com. As you can see all houses are separated by a distance of about 10 to 40 meters.	This birdhouse isn't connected to the 'net, but who knows what will happen in the future? :)

Most of the families have more than one computer, so we made sure we would get more than one IP number per family from our ISP. We range from 2 to 7 IPs per family right now, even if quite a lot are unused - we have reserved one extra IP number per family for IP-Telephony (just in case...).

This is the incoming fiber outlet at home. Inside the white box are two connected multi mode-fibers (it is Full Duplex, you know!) and two unconnected single mode-fibers - they are just awaiting the future... There is a 2 feet patch-cable from the left of the box (to the converter on next picture). At the very bottom of the picture is the CATV-outlet.	Here is our central at home. The black box in the upper right is the 100 Mbps fiber-to-copper converter. The two (gray&white) fibers enter the box on the left side and a 2 feet patch TP-cable is connected to our 5-port switch to the left of the converter. Those who have 100 Mbps converters need to use switches, because a HUB can't work in Full Duplex on the uplink. Only switches and switching hubs will do the job! Below the switch and the converter is a regular 8-port 10/100 hub. We have 6 computers connected right now, but it varies from day to day.	This is an old picture of my Surfboard. Nowadays the monitor is inhabited by an orange 76 ball from my trip to Western USA in 2001, longhorns and a Bald Eagle, both from my trip to Texas in 1999. The Mickey & Minnie-socks are from a trip to Walt Disney World, Florida, in 1997. I have a much nicer chair, too, because I spend 15-16 hours per day in it...

- That was a nice network, but is it worth the effort to build such a network if you only connect it to some slow ISP?

- We have a really lovely ISP in our city Umeå. They are called Norrnod and they have an excellent concept - they have a large DMZ (click on it to see a schematic of the entire DMZ with speeds between parts of it and all!) to which lots of companies connect and all traffic within the DMZ is absolutely for free and of extremely high speed - 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps!

Sunet is also within the DMZ so all cities with Universities in Sweden are within our area of free traffic - currently at 622 Mbps!

Sunet is currently expanding their nationwide network - by the end of 2001, Umeå will be connected with a 10 Gbps network to several other cities!

Traffic that need to leave the DMZ passes through a special gateway (Betala-GW) and the average capacity through that gateway renders a monthly fee - in our case about US$ 8 per family. We have no limit in speed through that gateway (well, it is a 75 Mbps-link going south and that is the limit), but if we use more than the 1200 MB/24 hours on average over a month, we're supposed to pay a bigger monthly fee.

We have noticed that 1200 MB/24 hrs is a bit little, but we can easily manage if all online game players stick to servers within the DMZ (which is fairly large - and growing fast).

- How fast is your network?
- It is faster than most hard disks! Traffic within our own network is true 100 Mbps full-duplex and it is actually faster than normal hard disks!
 

• Traffic within our system
• I experimented by carrying a prepared computer to a neighbour. It had 384 MB RAM and a program called "vRAMdir" that caches an entire directory on the hard disk to RAM (because I soon found out that a normal hard disk isn't faster than about 30-40 Mbps, even though it is connected with U-DMA-66 etc. Try yourself to transfer files between two harddrives and divide the amount of data in megabits with the time in seconds!)

I saved the file to two IBM 7200 rpm IDE-drives connected via a RAID-card (FastTrak66) from Promise. and they reached their limit at writing data from the prepared computer at about 70-75 Mbps. (Reading from the disks gives about 200 Mbps in best-case-scenarios). 
Below is a snapshot of CuteFTP's statusbar during a transfer with internal traffic.

• Traffic across the city is mostly limited by the other party just having 1 Mbps or 10 Mbps, but a few have 100 Mbps-connections and 25-40 Mbps is possible most of the time - that means it is their single hard disk limiting the speed!
• Traffic within Sunet is ranging between 3 and 20 Mbps, depending on how much other traffic on that network we have to share bandwidth with.
• Traffic to the rest of the Internet is as always depending on distance and traffic-patterns between us and the other party.

Special thanks goes to
 

• Torgils Toral
• Torgils has been an important person in this project. He has contributed with extremely high skills in the art of negotiations, contract-writing, systematization and double-checking all facts and papers. Torgils is the treasurer in Måttgränds IT-förening - the economic association in our block that we created to be able to deal with the project. Torgils have spent lots and lots of hours to make the project possible.
• Lars Björnerbäck
• Without Lars and Torgils, we would still be using slow modems here on Måttgränd, or even worse - ASDL from Telia. Lars has spent uncountable hours in negotiating, getting permits from different authorities (e.g. permit to dig on neighbouring land, permit to press the cables under the roads), helping the entrepreneurs with lots and lots of problems they ran into and thereby speeding up the project. Examples are too many to list, but they range from communication-problems, such as what can be done by whom, to everyday contact with the entrepreneurs and follow-ups on the project. He is the chairman of Måttgränds IT-förening.
• Carl-Arne Nyström
• Carl-Arne has been active on most of the meetings and helped by, with enthusiasm, convincing our neighbours to join the project. He is secretary in Måttgränds IT-förening.
• Roland Johansson, Anette Sundbom and Christoffer Toral
• They have been helpful and contributed with many great ideas and inspiration during the project.
• Lasse Öhman from Optocomm
• Lasse has been the head of the on-site personnel and he has been a wonderful and skilled craftsman who have done his best and really succeeded in creating an excellent network.
• Bonet AB, Optocomm AB, 
• They are the companies who have constructed and built our network.
• All neighbours on Måttgränd
• If not all of us had joined the project, nothing could have been constructed. Perhaps a few of us would have shared a radio-LAN, but nothing like this!