Comment by manquer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manquer | Hacker News Reader

You mentioned a linux mirror,, A mirror is a just like CDN PoP . Assuming your neighbourhood is not full of linux enthusiasts , if you can run a actual CDN PoP it would be the highest impact for your neighbourhood.

Anything for specific providers like FB, Youtube, Netflix, Prime,Play Store, Apple , Disney + etc or general CDN providers like CloudFlare, MaxCDN etc can change end user experience enough for them to buy in.

It also has the added benefit of saving municipality upstream peering requirements and perhaps money.

Alternatively you can provide application services like OwnCloud, Jitsi for equivalent cloud products, it will be cheaper/faster etc. and target schools/community services, it may help them save on their IT bill as well.

Final idea discord, game servers, streaming servers etc can generate network effect driven interest. i.e. If i want to play with my school friends and few of them are on your servers on the municipal broadband already it is strong incentive for me to get one.

AFAIK you cannot self host a CDN node for any of the services mentioned above.

You might be able to self host an Apple cache.

Perhaps he can convince the municipality to host for the providers he cannot, it will still serve his objective.

You would be surprised on how small some PoPs around the world are. Providers usually come with their own boxes and have specific requirements on space/power/legal ownership etc.

I doubt the municipality will have much luck either.

CDN operators and OTT providers have fairly high traffic requirements before they will qualify you for an on-net appliance.

Netflix, for example, requires a minimum of 5 Gbps of traffic until they will even talk to you.

Perhaps thats is true for Content Providers like Netflix Youtube, for pure play CDN providers adding PoP in new areas bolsters their network and helps in sales a lot, it makes no sense for them to not talk to you at all.

From a security perspective, even assuming those operators already design to not trust the locations they're in, shipping servers to random end users seems like a bad idea.

Oh they don't trust the location at all, in some DCs, I have seen continuous camera feeds, actual cages which are locked etc. this is /was the case when you have to ship your equipment to a co-lo,

As far as "neighborhood full of Linux enthusiasts", the service area is the whole city, though buildout is still in its infancy. Population is ~170K.

Netflix does have a program where you can submit to get them to ship you a CDN box. I might submit that if I do this, but I doubt they want those in a residence, even if it is 10gig connected. Maybe for a year or two until the municipal provider gets their "data center" space up.

10 Gbps connectivity is on the smaller side for a Netflix appliance. They won’t even talk to you unless you are doing 5 Gbps of traffic from them.

A more realistic plan is to have the muni ISP peer with Netflix at the closest IX and take it from there after traffic levels rise over 5 Gbps.

That's probably the plan longer term, but the nearest IX is probably 60 miles of fiber away, and the muni is padding as fast as it can to just build the network.

While they don't have a data center, I presume they do have a place they could put a Netflix box. But that was the closest I know of for running a CDN node. As I said, seems unlikely...

60 miles isn't that far. If you can get some dark fiber you can go the full distance with one hop using off the shelf optics.

Not that you are particularly hard up for connectivity. Fort Collins is on the old Level3 network so you should have no problem getting transport, waves or dark fiber to the Denver IX. Or you could just buy IP transit at the local PoP.

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