[Nottingham] Hosting your own domain/s?

[Robert Davies]

On Tuesday 08 Jul 2003 11:17, Alex Herington wrote:

> Maybe this is slightly off topic, but this is why I think projects like
> 'Naan' are so awesome :) If access to bandwidth was 'clustered'
> geographically, i.e. a wireless LAN in each city then maybe link the cities
> by fibre, and have maybe some web proxies per city (or WLAN), that'd be
> ideal. It'd even be viable to do this via the government and pay for it
> through a 'broadband tax' or something. I just think it's a waste when, if
> I want to access a website in Nottingham, it's likely I'll be routed via
> some backbone located in London (which is probably congested). It would be
> interesting to find out how much Internet traffic (for an average home or
> business user) is limited to one city as opposed to the rest of the country
> and international traffic. Just random thoughts :)

To do this effectively, you will need some Kick Ass routers, and unfortunately 
BGP relies on non-automatic Administrative policies, about where traffic goes 
so you end up needing some professional to keep an eye on them.

Some ppl like Webfusion are linked to various network access providers, they 
could route local area traffic between NTL and BT, but in practice there's no 
financial incentive to do so, and it's probably not worthwhile.  Most major 
sites are located at Network Access Centres, Nottingham companies may well 
host sites in London, or even in the US.

The web traffic you mentioned is alleviated by the transparent proxies, so 
disliked by many when they turn out not to be so invisible in the real world.  
It's one reason it's more efficient to use HTTP to provide file downloads 
than anon ftp, you get the benefit of proxy caching as well as a more 
lightweight protocol.

If those joining Naan Net show similar attitudes ie.  I pay for a peak 
bandwidth of 100KB/s, therefore it is my right to max that out 24/7 and have 
a 100% utilisation, then the project will collapse due to poor QoS.

Rob

PS.  As for a Broadband Tax, I fear this would soon be used by the treasury to 
fund less admirable projects, like flying bombing missions over some foreign 
country.