There are two basic schools of thought with regard to Wide Area Network connectivity:
In this school of thought the copper pairs or fiber that cross the walls of your castle and connect you to the outside Internet are of a distinctly non-Ethernet nature, typically carrying some HDLC encapsulation such as PPP or Frame Relay over some form of synchronous serial bit stream, and a highly competent network administrator at your site chooses his own WAN router to connect to this WAN interface in its native non-Ethernet form.
This is the traditional school of thought for T1/E1 and DS3/E3 connections, and one proud accomplishment of our project is that we've been able to extend this model to business SDSL as well.
In the new school of thought that is adopted by most residential
broadband
Internet users and sadly by many business users too
the true non-Ethernet nature of WAN copper pairs or fiber is completely
hidden from the user by some black box
provided by the ISP.
That black box puts out an Ethernet interface, and the user never cares
about anything else.
This school of thought is used for most xDSL connections, by all cable modem services, and by the new-fangled stuff like FiOS.
If you adhere to the latter school of thought, this project is not for you — please look elsewhere.
The objective of our project is to provide FOSS (free / open source software) and more importantly Open Source Hardware solutions for those users who prefer the former school of thought.
Yes, we are primarily about hardware because that's what is needed in order to connect to various WAN media in their native non-Ethernet form.
In this project we have designed and built our own hardware gadget that acts as a CSU/DSU from SDSL to EIA-530, a V.35-like interface. It supports multiple flavors of SDSL, speeds ranging from 144 to 2320 kbps.
We are proud to say that we eat our own dog food: the ifctfvax.Harhan.ORG host that serves these web pages is itself located at a site connected to the outside world via an SDSL circuit served by an OSDCU.
Prior to building our own OSDCU hardware, we had experimented by running our own code on the controlling microprocessor of a certain simple SDSL/IDSL CPE device. The SDSL Hack-o-Rocket has been almost totally supplanted by the OSDCU, but the hack may still be useful for IDSL.
Now that we've built our own CSU/DSU, we are considering moving up a layer and building our own modular router/gateway platform as well.
There don't seem to be too many open source routers that support non-Ethernet WAN interfaces. There is a multitude of open source routers out there, but the vast majority of them are nothing more than Ethernet-to-Ethernet devices. If one wants a router with non-Ethernet WAN ports (V.35/EIA-530, T1/E1, DS3/E3, etc), the only practical option that is available today is to use commercial proprietary routers like Cisco. Although Cisco does make some good hardware, some of us prefer a solution that is 100% open source, both software and hardware.
Our HECGW project is intended to fill this need.
We are pleased to announce that we are now able to provide some end users (if you are in a very lucky geographic location, see below) with actual SDSL services involving V.35 hand-off and/or bonding of multiple loops to achieve multiple megabits of symmetric bandwidth. Please see this page for more information.
We are currently able to offer such services only via MegaPath and only in the very narrow geographic region covered by MegaPath's component that used to be DSL.net. The reason for this limitation is that the network in question is the last one remaining in North America (to our knowledge) that uses Copper Mountain DSLAMs; anywhere else in the country SDSL practically equals Covad.
If you are in Covad territory rather than Copper Mountain territory, we can still provide V.35 hand-off service at the lower speeds (192 or 384 kbps), but our OSDCU can't currently handle on-the-fly Layer 2 conversion at the higher speeds. Thus full 1.5 Mbps SDSL or multi-megabit bonded SDSL are currently only possible in the much smaller DSL.net footprint.
Our project has amassed a rather substantial knowledge base which constitutes the bulk of our web pages. We were Open SDSL Connectivity Project until we have just recently expanded to become Open WAN Connectivity Project, so most of our knowledge base is still primarily focused on SDSL.
There is a mailing list for this project.
To subscribe, send a message consisting of just the word subscribe
to
opensdsl-request@ifctfvax.Harhan.ORG.