4 Jul 2003 (updated 4 Jul 2003 at 03:02 UTC)
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Greetings from Juneau, Alaska, where the 4th of July fireworks will begin in a few hours.
Juneau is the biggest small town I’ve ever seen. My cab drove from the international airport on an impeccable four-lane highway that had plenty of room for six lanes. It had some traffic, too, which is pretty impressive if you consider that Juneau has no road connection to anywhere. I guess these folks wouldn’t feel American enough without their trucks and SUVs!
There are some huge government buildings as well, and, thanks to the US system of network television, a couple of local TV channels. 200-meter cruise ships line the shore. There are so many that some have to anchor farther away on the bay. There are tons of bars, and from what I saw of the night life yesterday, it doesn’t disappoint.
So what’s the population? 29,755.
I’m staying at the Westmark Baranof, which apparently is the choice of Beltway drones and the oil or mining experts who have business in the state capital. That explains why the hotel has high speed Internet access—something that hotels in the much bigger Anchorage don’t necessarily have. The implementation is a bit peculiar, though, since it works with cable modems straight off the local cable company’s network. It’s plenty fast; the only fly in the ointment is that the cable modem channels overlap with the hotel’s pay-tv system. After 4 PM, the porn channels take precedence and the management doesn’t guarantee a working Internet connection.
Oh well, I guess it would’ve been redundant anyway.
I actually figured out what it would take to wire all of the 196 rooms here with Ethernet to overcome this problem. What you want to do is reuse the phone lines to each room—physically rewiring 196 rooms with CAT 5 would be insanely expensive. The product of choice in a scenario like this is Cisco’s Long Range Ethernet, which I’m told can get a 15Mbps full-duplex connection over barbed wire of all things. At least the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco seems to be happy with LRE over decades-old phone lines.
Here’s how it works: First you buy as many 24-port LRE versions of Catalyst 2950 switches as you need. Here you’d need eight to cover 192 rooms. Then you link the Catalysts’ Gigabit Ethernet uplink ports to a central switch. I would choose the Catalyst 4908G-L3. It’s very fast, relatively inexpensive, and the L3 features will be the foundation of your billing system (you can easily get people to pay $14.95 per night for Internet access). Then, you need four 48-port POTS splitters. They allow you to run the regular phone lines on the same cables as your Ethernet. Finally, you install $120 Cisco 575 boxes in each room. They have two RJ11 connectors (one for the uplink and one for the phone) and a single RJ45 for the Ethernet. Total cost, with installation, would probably be in the ballpark of $350 per room.
You have some choice regarding the billing mechanism, but most people would redirect all traffic to a web site where the user agrees to be billed. The site would then alter the ACL on the central switch via SNMP to remove the redirect and open up internet access for the user’s switch port. Additionally, you should probably block IP traffic with addresses outside your netblock. At the Starwood properties I’ve stayed at in the past weeks, someone would always have Internet Connection Sharing on, messing up things. In the best case, they would allow other people to piggyback on their connection, separating you from that revenue. In the worst case, their DHCP servers would conflict with the real one in interesting ways, preventing people from connecting at all and causing you a support nightmare.