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I've always thought it would be fairly lucrative to offer to act as an isp (w/o lock in) for an apartment complex.

by foota 10y ago

TeMPOraL 10y ago
We had this idea with my co-worker the other day, about becoming an apartment complex ISP, getting a high-bandwidth connection to the whole building and wiring every apartment with fiber optic links. Then, we'd put a server farm in the basement and offer "Internet + compute services". Like VPSes for techies, and OnLive equivalent for gamers, except the roundtrip for the latter would be down to the basement and back up, instead of down to Australia, through China and back. The grander idea is to have apartment buildings with their own basement clouds, where tenants could off-load computational needs. Sounds like a much more energy-efficient solution than person having either an overpowered device or a low-power one in constant connection with clouds on the other side of the planet. Moreover, this idea was part of a general brainstorming about ways to dumb the cloud back down, so that it's distributed compute-on-demand infrastructure, and not the shitty third-party data silos it's now. After reading the comments here I realized that while my friend and I would have the best of intentions, if ISPs in general were to be allowed to do such a thing, they'd fuck it up exactly in the way they do in this case.
- foota 10y ago
  Building an admittedly really cool sounding highly distributed cloud platform hardly sounds like dumbing the cloud back down :p
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    "Dumbing down" in the sense like ISPs are supposed to be "dumb pipes". I'd like the cloud to be a dynamically allocated compute resource - i.e. the end-user rents out computing power and provides both the data and the code that runs against it (which may or may not be licensed from a third party). The goal is to separate out the code providers and compute providers, and to keep the user always in control of their data.

I've always thought it would be fairly lucrative to offer to act as an isp (w/o lock in) for an apartment complex.

by foota 10y ago

I've always thought it would be fairly lucrative to offer to act as an isp (w/o lock in) for an apartment complex.

We had this idea with my co-worker the other day, about becoming an apartment complex ISP, getting a high-bandwidth connection to the whole building and wiring every apartment with fiber optic links. Then, we'd put a server farm in the basement and offer "Internet + compute services". Like VPSes for techies, and OnLive equivalent for gamers, except the roundtrip for the latter would be down to the basement and back up, instead of down to Australia, through China and back. The grander idea is to have apartment buildings with their own basement clouds, where tenants could off-load computational needs. Sounds like a much more energy-efficient solution than person having either an overpowered device or a low-power one in constant connection with clouds on the other side of the planet. Moreover, this idea was part of a general brainstorming about ways to dumb the cloud back down, so that it's distributed compute-on-demand infrastructure, and not the shitty third-party data silos it's now. After reading the comments here I realized that while my friend and I would have the best of intentions, if ISPs in general were to be allowed to do such a thing, they'd fuck it up exactly in the way they do in this case.

foota 10y ago
Building an admittedly really cool sounding highly distributed cloud platform hardly sounds like dumbing the cloud back down :p
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  "Dumbing down" in the sense like ISPs are supposed to be "dumb pipes". I'd like the cloud to be a dynamically allocated compute resource - i.e. the end-user rents out computing power and provides both the data and the code that runs against it (which may or may not be licensed from a third party). The goal is to separate out the code providers and compute providers, and to keep the user always in control of their data.