Elektra: Hello, everyone! Hallo! Ihr hört das Freifunkradio. You're listening to Freifunkradio.
Elektra: Now, today we're going to broadcast in English because this is a pre-production
Elektra: from the Wireless Community Weekend.
Elektra: And we have a guest from the United States, from New York City.
Elektra: Zach is with us, from New York City Wireless.
Zach: Hello, hello. Zach Giles from New York City.
Andi: New York City Mesh.
Elektra: Yeah, it's great to have you here and one of the rare opportunities to talk
Elektra: to someone from from over the ocean.
Elektra: And yes, maybe we mostly start when we're talking with communities.
Elektra: What's the state of your community? How many devices, routers,
Elektra: nodes do you have deployed and so on.
Andi: Yeah, our network is quite large now.
Zach: It covers a large portion of southern Manhattan, which is kind of the main island in New York City.
Zach: And then we cover, I don't know, maybe half of Brooklyn.
Zach: And we've also jumped up to the Upper West Side in New York City and all the way up to the Bronx.
Andi: And that's kind of important.
Zach: Because we've had a goal of getting to the Bronx for quite a while because it's
Zach: sort of much more low income and generally.
Zach: And it's generally kind of we want to be of use to people in the area.
Andi: So we're serving everybody.
Zach: You know, the rich and the poor, but we want to make sure that we also make
Zach: the network available in low-income areas.
Andi: So, yeah, we have maybe 3,000.
Zach: To 5,000 people using it daily.
Andi: We don't really know how.
Zach: Many people because we don't track the people. We push through maybe about 4
Zach: or 5 gigabits in the evening time continuously out of the network.
Andi: We're in about 800 buildings.
Zach: Which is pretty big, I think. And I don't know, a couple thousand.
Andi: We have about 2,600.
Zach: Routes in our routing table. So the route is roughly like a building or a router
Zach: that has a subnetwork on it.
Andi: So we probably have around 2,000.
Zach: Devices.
Andi: I don't really know at the moment how many, but we're in about 800 buildings.
Andi: Yeah, it's quite sizable.
Zach: We also have done fiber to some buildings. About...
Zach: Maybe six buildings, maybe five or six buildings have fiber to the premise and
Zach: up the riser and into people's apartments even, some apartments.
Andi: Some buildings have all apartments.
Zach: Some have some apartments.
Andi: But yeah, we're both wireless and wired.
Zach: It's all non-profit, donation-based still. So yeah, we're quite big at this point.
Elektra: So you expanded since we had one of you with us
Elektra: quite a while ago. I think at this point it was just in Manhattan.
Andi: Well, we were always in Brooklyn as well.
Zach: Our first super node was in Manhattan and our second super node was in Brooklyn.
Zach: Eventually that one went away and our third super node is also in Brooklyn.
Andi: So the bulk of our network is actually in Brooklyn.
Zach: Most of the high points and the different people who really want to be on the
Zach: network are in Brooklyn.
Andi: It kind of works out because Brooklyn has.
Zach: Generally shorter buildings
Andi: And it's kind of interesting if you think about It's like there's mountains and valleys.
Zach: Some of these networks have like something on a mountaintop when they shoot
Zach: signals down to a valley.
Andi: New York City.
Zach: Has mountains and valleys as well. The mountains are these high buildings and
Zach: the valleys are these neighborhoods. And so we're kind of limited on being able
Andi: To go too.
Zach: Far north without fiber because there's buildings that are in the way.
Zach: There's these giant mountains we can't cross. But in downtown, we can kind of be
Andi: On a few tall.
Zach: Ones and shoot down into the Brooklyn,
Andi: Use some of the.
Zach: Housing authority buildings to get up high again and shoot down again. Yeah.
Elektra: So you're allowed to build nodes on government or city buildings?
Andi: Yeah, so we've worked out a couple of ways to do it. In New York City, there's an agency.
Zach: Called the New York City Housing Authority, and they run kind of low-income
Zach: housing for rent. They're one of the biggest landlords in New York City,
Zach: and it's like a pseudo-government thing. And so
Andi: We made a.
Zach: Deal with them at some point that we could be uncertain of their buildings,
Zach: and we are. We're in about maybe five of their buildings.
Andi: Some of those buildings.
Zach: We also serve the residents down below. Other of the buildings,
Zach: we're not allowed to for whatever reason. And so we're in a number of their buildings.
Andi: We're also on Columbia University rooftop.
Zach: CCNY is like the New York State, one of the colleges.
Andi: We're on, we also have some deals where.
Zach: I say deals lightly, but we have some situations where there's some regulations that
Andi: Certain building types must provide internet for their residents.
Andi: They must make it available to the residents.
Andi: And so some of these buildings have asked us to be in the building. And so by doing that.
Zach: We get on the rooftop as well. And so those are some positive ones for us.
Elektra: Amazing. And how many volunteers are you?
Andi: A few hundred. A few hundred?
Zach: Down.
Andi: Yeah. Now on a daily basis, or on like a.
Zach: We have a weekly kind of,
Andi: Um, we have a weekly meetup, if you will. Um, we also have like an.
Zach: Office space that we've rented or kind of a workshop space. It's about the size of this room.
Andi: Um, and we, we meet up maybe 20 people per week.
Andi: Okay. Um, if we go on some journey, we'll probably have more people.
Zach: If we, uh,
Andi: Do like one of our monthly bigger meetings.
Zach: We'll probably have maybe 50.
Andi: Okay. But here and there is 200 ish going on.
Elektra: That's the big numbers. Amazing numbers.
Andi: I mean, it's not as much as it could be, but it's, you know.
Zach: I guess, if you think about one of the challenges of probably every community
Zach: network is participation, right?
Zach: You know, what percentage of the users are fully participating?
Zach: And, you know,
Andi: For us it's a very small percentage.
Zach: But it's still a good number of people.
Elektra: Yeah, and maybe speaking of
Elektra: technology, what kind of devices and firmwares do you use in your network?
Andi: So we used to use the LibreMesh type firmwares and devices.
Andi: We've since moved off of that, not because we don't want it,
Andi: but more because we thought about making a more standards-based approach.
Andi: So even though OLSR and Batman and BMX.
Zach: These are all very nice, well-developed protocols,
Andi: But it means that I can't use a.
Zach: Cisco switch or a Juniper switch if someone gives it to you.
Andi: And maybe that's good, maybe it's bad, I don't know.
Zach: So we've decided to go with OSPF.
Andi: And so we're using OSPF everywhere. There's another network in.
Zach: South Africa that
Andi: Also is using OSPF, and we kind of looked at them and saw how big their network
Andi: was and thought about it.
Zach: And there's some things we liked that they did and some things we didn't like that they did.
Andi: So we took that concept of OSPF.
Zach: And we've kind of tuned OSPF
Andi: And done some nice things with the.
Zach: Costing and the subnetting in order to make it so that it works in our environment.
Andi: So we use a lot of MicroTik, even though they're not open source.
Andi: One of the big reasons we use MicroTik is because,
Andi: It's very easy for people to understand how to do it. I can teach someone very
Andi: quickly how to build a node.
Andi: We have a configuration generator on our website. You can type in your node number.
Zach: We assign node numbers,
Andi: So we can talk about that too. You type in a node number and then the type of
Andi: hardware, the subcategory, the firmware style.
Zach: How you're going to deploy it,
Andi: And it will generate you a configuration which you just.
Zach: Send to the device.
Andi: There's even a UI to do that.
Zach: And you're done.
Andi: And so this is very helpful for engaging people, and it kind of jumps.
Zach: The hurdle of, you know, how do you do a sysimage? How do you do a firmware
Zach: update? You know, where do you click on all these different screens?
Andi: So MicroTik's not the only one.
Zach: We also use a lot of point-to-point antennas,
Andi: Including the 2 gigahertz, 5 gigahertz.
Zach: I mean, sorry, 2 gigabit, 5 gigabit, and 10 gigabit Ciclu antennas.
Zach: We're using Juniper switches, Cisco switches, Linux boxes. We're even using
Zach: VPP with FRR for edge routing.
Elektra: Okay, so it's a bit of a different approach. I don't know what OSPF means.
Elektra: Open shortest path first.
Andi: It's another routing protocol.
Zach: It's kind of
Andi: A standard one.
Zach: It's a corporate standard one.
Elektra: It's for wired networks, basically. So you don't have a radiometric.
Elektra: Or did you add a radiometric to OSPF?
Andi: We don't have a radiometric.
Zach: No. So what we did is we made a costing structure.
Andi: So good costs are for point-to-point links that are on a really high-quality
Andi: radio that we know is very unlikely to go down.
Andi: And then the next level is kind of like our point-to-multipoint,
Andi: maybe in the 200 cost range or something.
Andi: And then a poor cost is for the WDS.
Zach: Sort of 802.11s sort of thing.
Andi: And so we have, I can show you on the map various places, where we have nodes
Andi: that are with an omnidirectional antenna only, but they're on the network using
Andi: OSPF. So one thing you have to watch out.
Zach: Is with route flapping. It's probably the same in OLSR and other things,
Zach: you know, route flapping. And so we monitor for route flapping periodically and see,
Andi: You know, how many flaps per second are we getting, how many are per minute.
Zach: You know, and
Andi: We go and.
Zach: Fix those nodes.
Andi: So I think probably in any protocol, you can have some bad edge cases and it's just OSPF can also.
Zach: You know.
Elektra: So you're not necessarily doing any mesh networking, Okay, actually,
Elektra: you're setting up point-to-point or point-to-multipoint links.
Andi: No, we do with 802.11s, we do WDS, yeah.
Andi: Yeah, so we have many nodes that are within omnidirectional only,
Andi: and they see their neighbors around.
Elektra: And you're not using the radio-aware OSR part in 802.11s or the spanning tree
Elektra: implementation? No, turn it off.
Elektra: You just use it without the internal mesh routing.
Zach: That's right.
Andi: We use it as a broadcast domain only or like as a kind.
Zach: Of like a
Andi: Fake Ethernet cable, you know.
Zach: We do bridge filtering.
Andi: So we turn off all of the... You're not able to go from one node to another
Andi: node through the radio without going through the router.
Andi: So you have to jump node to node in order to get to the far side. Which means, of course.
Zach: It's not going to be very efficient to do the WDS, but it's better than nothing for many people.
Elektra: But my guess is that you don't have too much internal traffic.
Elektra: Most traffic is probably just going to the next gateway.
Zach: Unfortunately, yes.
Elektra: And you have many, many guideways.
Zach: Yeah, yeah.
Andi: Unfortunately.
Zach: As just, you know,
Andi: Over the years we had different internal services. Some went away,
Andi: some came back. We have a few now.
Zach: We have kind of databases, and we used to have a chat app inside and things
Zach: like this. And they come and go depending on what people want to do.
Elektra: Of course. Of course. What motivates the volunteers to run such a relatively
Elektra: big network and basically be just a free internet service provider, more or less?
Andi: Yeah, we don't like to say free.
Zach: We like to say donation-based because we don't want people to think that they can,
Andi: You know, if you give somebody something for free.
Zach: It has no value, right?
Andi: So we want them to value the network by, you know, wanting to be part of it.
Andi: They can pay nothing if they want to.
Zach: But, you know, we don't usually say free.
Andi: Uh, but anyway, um.
Zach: I don't mind if you say free,
Andi: You know, um, but it's just that, yeah, so we, we, what motivates them?
Andi: Um, you know, in New York city.
Zach: The ISPs used to be,
Andi: And sometimes are still very bad. And so kind of our original motivation was to bypass the ISPs.
Andi: Um, also, if you look into what has happened, there's many kiosks on the road
Andi: that have a wifi and, um, many different of the main ISPs have got purchased by other ISPs.
Andi: and they're all tracking everything.
Zach: They're all, you know,
Andi: We were even approached by some company that said they'll give us $1,000 a month
Andi: if we give them all of our DNS logs forever.
Andi: And we're like, no, we're not going to do that, you know. So, but they're all.
Zach: Doing that and they say they're doing it and it's kind of evil.
Andi: So we like it because it's kind of a clear network which you can have,
Andi: you know, you can have a public IP.
Zach: You can have bidirectional traffic. We're bypassing these
Andi: Poor quality ISPs in many cases where we're sort of better than many of them at different times.
Zach: In terms of availability.
Elektra: Sounds good like Berlin in the 2000s. Yeah, sounds like early Berlin.
Zach: Yeah, sure.
Elektra: How does it, why do they suck so badly? How do they mess it up?
Andi: So it's a good question, and the story has changed a little bit.
Zach: So I was kind of telling you more of the story of a handful of years ago.
Andi: It's still a story now.
Zach: Though.
Andi: Maybe if you look 10 years ago, a lot of people in three to six-floor buildings only had DSL.
Zach: Right? And the DSL in New York City is from cables that are from long ago.
Andi: It's not a current-maintained system. Verizon, the main telephone company,
Andi: since their early 2010s, had said they were going to run fiber to every building.
Zach: And they began running fiber to every building, they say.
Andi: But it meant that they were no longer going to put any more copper in the ground.
Andi: And so they basically abandoned the copper plant.
Zach: Even if people were still using it.
Andi: Meanwhile, the cable company, in the U.S..
Zach: You usually have two providers. You have the telephone company and the cable
Zach: company before Internet.
Andi: And now both can provide telephone and Internet.
Zach: And TV and everything, right? But still in the regulations, there's two main entities.
Andi: So the cable company in New York City has been purchased three times or more in the last 10 years.
Zach: It's gone bankrupt and got repurchased and bankrupt and repurchased.
Andi: The name keeps changing.
Zach: I think it's now called Spectrum. It used to be Time Warner. It used to be RCN. and um
Andi: In many areas the.
Zach: Cable infrastructure is very poor the cables are not dry they get wet coaxial
Zach: cable gets wet and water inside
Andi: People go outside and they kind of like jiggle the cables on.
Zach: The wall because they their tv is not working so the
Andi: Couplers are coming loose and.
Zach: You know many places i was in at least two or three places that i lived in i
Zach: think six or eight places in new york city uh in the last many years and a couple
Zach: of them the internet cable internet was down more often than it was up right
Andi: I had a friend that.
Zach: Had barely one megabit dsl and that was less than 10 years ago okay maybe it's about 10 years ago
Andi: So yeah it's not great the stories change a little bit.
Zach: Now because verizon does have fiber
Andi: In many buildings.
Zach: And so
Andi: You can get a high.
Zach: Quality fiber optic internet for a pretty
Andi: Good price um so in that sense then it's.
Zach: Not as well
Andi: Needed for for our network right.
Zach: But in many places it's still very poor
Elektra: So and your perspective if eventually the commercial isps uh get up their gear
Elektra: and put fiber everywhere what would that mean to your network
Andi: I don't know um you know on one angle we could.
Zach: Become more of a community is a community network community isp that just kind
Zach: of um is for fun you know, more of a real, true community, as opposed to,
Zach: you know, trying to serve people with something.
Andi: We could also be a participant in that. For example, many cities in the U.S.
Zach: Have tried to do kind of a municipal fiber idea, with Chattanooga,
Zach: Tennessee being like the number one successful option on that.
Zach: I think New York City is probably going to try to do that as well.
Zach: And if we could be one of the providers that is through that,
Zach: we might have an option for people besides, you know, the main telephone companies.
Andi: So that makes it a little bit different of a system than what we have.
Andi: But, you know, you really need to provide whatever that environment needs.
Zach: Whatever that area needs. It's a little bit different than, like,
Zach: in a jungle or something like that.
Elektra: But I guess the problem with families or people with low income still exists,
Elektra: and they maybe still can't afford Internet access, and that's where you will still be able to help.
Zach: Yeah, about 25% of households only have no Internet in them in New York City.
Zach: and maybe 15% are mobile only they only have a cell phone 25% 25-26% yeah
Elektra: Hard to believe. It's one of the main capitals of the planet.
Andi: Yeah, it's a problem of aging infrastructure combined with growth and regulation.
Andi: It's hard to provide new wires in the ground.
Zach: The underground cabling is owned by the telephone company, but it's a subsidiary and so on.
Zach: There's a lot of things that are very challenging with New York City,
Zach: which is why we kind of go over the top of it with wireless.
Elektra: So you're not putting wires into the ground?
Andi: We don't put wires in the ground. We have some fiber, but we lease fiber.
Zach: Dark fiber, from various friendly companies.
Elektra: Yeah, so you're releasing it. Okay, but so to the largest part, your wireless ISP?
Zach: Yes, all wireless.
Elektra: And where do you get your internet uplinks?
Andi: It's a good question. We don't pay for any internet.
Zach: Everything is donated.
Andi: We have a couple donated 40 gigabit links from a company called Pilot Fiber.
Andi: They're very nice to us. We also have some dark fiber from them.
Zach: But they don't charge us for the internet.
Andi: We also are on a couple of internet exchanges.
Zach: And we have some donated internet from other local companies.
Andi: So it's all donated. We have about, if you were to use it all at the same time.
Zach: About 120 gigabits of internet connectivity. And we don't think we can use it all at the moment,
Andi: But it's wired into our supernodes.
Elektra: Way cool it's really interesting to
Andi: Hear there's still a lot of work to do.
Zach: But we have a lot of resources that are working well and we found some favorable
Zach: kind of tier 2 ISPs that are very friendly to us because they're commercial
Zach: only and they don't need any home activity
Elektra: And maybe I think I won't travel to New York City the next 2.5, 3 years for reasons
Elektra: but after that can I see your SSID and just use it?
Andi: Yeah,
Andi: we have an open SSID with no password. This SSID restricts some control plane
Andi: access within our network so that you can't get on and then access some of the
Andi: internal control plane pages and such.
Andi: But there's another one that has a password which everybody knows,
Andi: and this is more open. So everybody can just use it.
Andi: And if you have a wire from the rooftop into your apartment,
Andi: you can have your own home network with your own whatever.
Zach: And it's not our problem. But yeah, you can just use it. There's many parks
Zach: you can just go into and use it.
Andi: Many of these grounds where we have fiber into the building,
Andi: we also light up the entire ground with access points.
Zach: Many of the buildings are kind of like in
Andi: A square block.
Zach: And a building is not a square. So there's many different pieces of green grass that people go to.
Zach: Yeah, so many parks were in a bunch of different parks and such.
Elektra: Did you have any legal issues?
Andi: Not really, no. We formed a proper non-profit.
Zach: So we have all of that. We have a board.
Andi: We accept donations legally and everything.
Zach: We file our non-profit disclosure every year. We do all the right things with that.
Andi: We're not registered as an ISP.
Zach: There's a form you put in the FCC. We're not an ISP, and so we're not subject
Zach: to any of those regulations.
Andi: Once in a while, the police will email us and say.
Zach: Can you tell us who this IP belongs to but we can't because it's all shared and so we reply
Andi: We're sorry we can't we're a shared.
Zach: Network and they say okay no problem
Elektra: And you're not logging
Zach: We don't log
Andi: We don't log anything.
Elektra: Okay,
Elektra: if I want to get part of your network, I should come to one of your meetings
Elektra: or can I just buy a router and install the firmware?
Andi: Yeah, so we very much support DIY. You can buy, you know, you can follow our documentation.
Zach: You know, you can buy the antenna from whoever you want.
Andi: You can buy whichever model you feel like and you can go and ask for a node
Andi: number. We are assigning no numbers. I can talk about why.
Andi: And then you just type it into the configuration generator.
Zach: You generate config. You put it on the device.
Andi: And if you are in range of another one that has the same class of antenna.
Zach: Then you're on.
Andi: You can even go point to multipoint with DIY.
Zach: You don't have to ask us.
Andi: But, you know, we welcome you to come to the meeting.
Zach: We encourage you to come to the meetings.
Andi: You know, we do volunteer-led installations as well.
Zach: So a team of a few people,
Andi: One of whom maybe knows more about how to do it and a couple who know less,
Andi: they go along and they install your rooftop with a new member.
Andi: And then the new member also learns how to do it.
Zach: And other people are learning how to do it as well.
Andi: And we have different skills, drilling in the wall.
Zach: Running the cable outside, clamping things to rooftops, all kinds of different things, right?
Andi: And so, yeah, you can do it yourself or you can come to a meeting.
Zach: Okay.
Elektra: So let's come back to the node number. as it was mentioned twice now.
Elektra: In my home community in Weimar, we also use a construct called node number, and
Elektra: the node number is the basis for calculating IP addresses and configuration and so on.
Elektra: And so maybe it's...
Andi: It's the same, yeah. We do that because we don't want to take up the entire
Andi: 10-slash-8 block and we also don't want, I mean,
Andi: It could be fine to do it, but we found some trouble with kind of using.
Zach: Like, the MAC address
Andi: And then just.
Zach: Using these couple hex digits and using that for deriving something.
Andi: It becomes very frustrating when you're trying to debug a medium-sized network
Andi: and you're like, well, where? Well, node FC7-2 over there.
Zach: Well, they replaced it with something else.
Andi: It's called something else.
Zach: You don't really know where it is anymore. And so we use these to generate the IP addresses and such.
Andi: It makes it very easy for.
Zach: Us to maintain nodes. There's
Andi: A lot of.
Zach: Very predictable numbering that we created within our network.
Andi: The node number is not a big deal.
Zach: It's very easy. There's a form you can fill out online. You push it and it just
Zach: gives you a number immediately. Or you can ask someone for one.
Elektra: So in order to join with their own nodes, people just provide an email address so you can contact them?
Andi: You can fill out the join form. We have a form on.
Zach: Our site and just put in your name and email. You don't have to put in,
Andi: You can put whatever you feel like.
Zach: You know, we'd like it to be something.
Andi: We can call you, you know, Bob or whatever, you know, something real.
Andi: And then, you know, because we're not like an anonymous community,
Andi: like, the activity on the network is anonymous.
Zach: But we want to know who, like, we want to meet everybody face to face and become friends, right?
Andi: But yeah, you can fill this out and then it'll give you a number and you're done.
Elektra: Sounds easy.
Andi: It should be easy, yeah. We have many DIY installations.
Elektra: You make it sound easy. I make it sound easy,
Andi: Yeah. We have many DIY installations.
Zach: It's okay to do that.
Andi: You can also use your own hardware. If you want to do OpenWRT with whatever
Andi: on GLI net and you feel like you can set up OSPF.
Zach: Get a node number,
Andi: Look at the calculation for how to generate an IP address.
Zach: Put the IPs in, and then go ahead and do it.
Elektra: And a Microsoft?
Elektra: Microtech? The Microtech gear, it has OSPF inside by default,
Elektra: so you just run the factory firmware.
Andi: We found bugs in it and we reported it to.
Zach: Them and they fixed them. We have many thousands of their devices.
Andi: I'm not sure that they know us very well, but we have a couple of thousand.
Andi: And they're from Latvia.
Zach: So they're a European company and they're producing things pretty well.
Andi: They're a pretty good product.
Zach: Everything works. It's very flexible. It's hard to break them.
Andi: And the nice thing we like is, you know, it'll sound funny to say,
Andi: but New York City is a bit of a harsh environment because we have a winter and
Andi: we have a summer and we have rain and we.
Zach: Have all these
Andi: Different situations. And sometimes the antennas are on a rooftop where there's.
Zach: People going there and
Andi: Doing different things to it. And maybe installations are done by somebody who didn't know.
Zach: What they were going to do.
Andi: So you know that we like these devices because we're not taking like a linksys
Andi: router and put it into a tupperware and glue it it's you know it's just working
Andi: we all did that i think in the past but it's not um you know that's not as as uh doable on the scale.
Zach: That we have and so
Andi: These devices.
Zach: Are kind of in like a nice plastic box it goes outside it already works
Andi: And you can give it a bad voltage.
Zach: And it will not break and you can give it a good voltage and it will has a with very
Andi: High range.
Zach: For voltages and things like that. So there's a lot of positives to it.
Zach: You can recover them if you brick them somehow, so yeah.
Elektra: The plastic doesn't turn brittle in the sun.
Zach: It doesn't, no, yeah.
Elektra: Unlike the Tupperware.
Zach: Exactly.
Elektra: Not recommended. Exactly.
Andi: Or even better, the Tupperware.
Zach: On top of the pole, right? Duct tape to the pole.
Elektra: I've seen nanostations operating the wrong way around and filling up with water.
Elektra: That could. Yeah.
Elektra: Happens.
Zach: So that's why we use a lot of Microtech devices.
Andi: It's easy. I have hope that maybe.
Zach: Someday more microtech devices could run OpenWRT or some other open variant.
Andi: I don't think it's impossible.
Zach: I just think it's not as easy.
Elektra: You can ask the people upstairs, there are some OpenWRT developers here.
Zach: Yes.
Elektra: Okay, do we still have time? Three and a half minutes. Three and a half minutes, okay.
Elektra: So do we have some real spectacular installations somewhere?
Elektra: Maybe on some real high towers or some telecommunication towers?
Andi: Yeah, we have a few. Our first Supernode is on an old Verizon building.
Zach: Which was bought by another company. It's not Verizon anymore.
Zach: It's, I think, 75 meters high, and there's a scaffolding on top of it.
Zach: I used to be the one that climbed the scaffolding.
Andi: Yeah it's exciting um you know we had i think maybe eight antennas there at some point and.
Zach: I can show you a picture later you can see
Andi: You know all of.
Zach: Manhattan it's a very spectacular building um so we you know that was one of
Zach: our first uh super nodes um
Zach: we ran some copper to the roof and then many years later we replaced it with
Zach: a fiber and dc power but now all of our super nodes and even our large hubs
Zach: which are not super but they're still you know whatever they're
Andi: They're very big hubs.
Zach: Use DC and fiber. So we have another one on top of a housing project.
Andi: I think it's probably 20 floors high.
Zach: It's called Vernon.
Andi: And that one has.
Zach: I don't know, maybe eight antennas, well, or something.
Andi: One of our.
Zach: Other buildings is called Grand Street.
Andi: It's for the housing project. We have fiber to the building.
Zach: And it's a 40 gigabit
Andi: Fiber from our data center.
Zach: With a juniper switch in the maintenance room downstairs. And then we serve,
Andi: We have an OLT serving around up to 600 apartments.
Zach: I think only maybe
Andi: 250 are active at the moment.
Zach: And also fiber to the roof.
Andi: This one serves many 10 gigabit links.
Zach: 5 gigabit and 10 gigabit links to other major hubs. And so this is kind of our
Zach: crown jewel is the Grand Street location. So we're very happy
Andi: To have a.
Zach: $1 lease there or something and enjoy the time on the rooftop there.
Zach: Yeah, so we go there all the time.
Elektra: Yeah, it sounds really interesting.
Elektra: Do you have local internal traffic in the network except like OSPF updates?
Andi: Those don't count. We don't have as much.
Zach: You know. You know,
Andi: Many of our.
Zach: Users are not as technically savvy. It's a, you know,
Andi: I think at some point.
Zach: How many technically savvy people can you have within your city?
Zach: you can have a large number, but if you want to serve even more people or you
Zach: want to find somebody to use your network, you can't serve an infinite number of technical people.
Zach: And so we have a lot of people. We have grandmas and Buddhist monks,
Zach: and we have families and schools and all kinds of people using the network.
Andi: There is some east-west traffic within the network. A lot of it goes back to
Andi: our super nodes, where we host our kind of common services within the data.
Zach: Center rack in our supernodes.
Andi: And so if there is east-west traffic.
Zach: It's often back to that.
Andi: So this is a thing we strive for.
Zach: Is to have more east-west traffic.
Elektra: That was our 30 minutes with Zach. Hey, thank you very much for giving us the
Elektra: opportunity to talk to you.
Andi: Sure, it was interesting.
Elektra: Maybe just send us some pictures, we include them in the show notes,
Elektra: and show the people what we were talking about.
Elektra: Okay, bye. Thank you, bye. That was the June episode. I suppose so.
Zach: Yeah.
Andi: There you go. Okay.
Zach: Thanks for doing it.