CWX.NET Service Information


General Service Description
 Colorado Wireless Exchange (CWX.NET) is a member owned, member operated, nonprofit Colorado cooperative providing low-cost high speed wireless data connectivity and transport for business, government, and residential customers. By using a combination of mountain top, high ground, and high building "repeater" radios CWX.NET provides bi-directional high speed data connections between points where traditional copper and fiber point-to-point links are either not available or too expensive. The CWX.NET network provides a cost effective alternative to Satellite, ISDN and T-1 data services for business and residential internet customers.

Unlike dedicated point-to-point solutions like DSL, high speed wireless is a shared bandwidth network. Because of this certain applications that are not flow controlled or flood the network, are not compatable with a shared bandwidth wireless network. The most common appliations of this type are Peer-to-Peer file sharing and certain multiplayer first party shooter games with extensive realtime graphics. Many other multiplayer games do not flood the network, and are acceptable.

CWX.NET uses unlicensed public spectrum which is shared by the Front Range communities without fee. The FCC's only requirement for using this free unlicensed spectrum is that all users must accept any and all interference, even if it produces unreliable operation. CWX.NET used to regularly talk and meet with other wireless providers in the area to minimize interference for all our customers and members, until they refused to cooperate in spectrum sharing and forced CWX out of our initial service areas to the east of the foothills. Individual sites may experience excessive interference due to other wireless providers or home RF equipment near you, or down your line of sight to the mountain. We do our best to avoid this when possible by moving to other unlicensed channels.

To provide service to remote areas which have no other Broadband Internet access, CWX.NET uses high ground (mountain top) repeater sites. These sites have an excellent view and coverage area, but are also at higher risk of interference. In addition they are prone to "icing" caused by the wind driving moisture from clouds onto the radio, tower, and antennas. By evaporative cooling, the wind freezes significant amounts of ice to everything on the towers and hill top. It's not uncommon to have 6-18" of ice coating every surface and object on a tower after a several day freezing storm with moderate wind at the hill top. The hill tops get significantly more snow, and combined with very difficult conditions on north and east facing access roads, a failure may not be servicable for several days or more. In addition sites which are farther away from hill tops, near the maximim range of the technology, may see significantly degraded, or no, service from cloulds, rain, hail, snow or fog. It is strongly suggested that members which need internet access during these weather outages, maintain alternate internet access like a low cost or free dialup account.



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Availability
 Wireless service is delivered via microwave radio equipment. To be eligible for the service, a technician may have to visit your site, and evaluate the location to check that the site is suitable for radio communications, and to ensure that the equipment could operate properly in the planned environment. Most sites under 10 miles are easily supported as long as good RF line of sight is available and the Fresnel Zone is more than 80% clear. Link to FCC Exemption for Fixed Wireless Data Services is provided here for those concerned about restrictions by local regulations, rental agreements, and Home Owner Associations. Our standard antenna is less than the 1 meter size specified in the exemption.

Below is a general checklist which defines some important criteria which need to be present for a radio site installation :

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Equipment
 CWX.NET Canopy system uses Motorola Canopy radios with small dishes to narrow the beam to minimize interference problems for the system and members. Most of the canopy dishes are modified satelite TV dishes with the LNA horn removed and replaced with a Motorola canopy radio mount. This system is easly self installed by many members as the dish is easy to mount and aim. It must be grounded with at least #8 wire to meet state electrical code, and is connected to your home system with standard CAT-5 ethernet cable. Professional installation and site surveys with estimates are available for those not interested in self-installation (a site survey fee may be required by your installer). The coop can provide the equipment for a refundable $300 deposit, or you can purchase your own off eBay. Typical initial costs for a canopy self install are about $560 ($300 refundable deposit, $125 non-refundable CWX startup fee, and $135 first quarters service).

Because all connections are 24x7, we require members use a firewall solution. This can be either the Canopy built-in firewall, cable modem router/firewall product, or a Linux PC configured as a router, server, and firewall.

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Pricing
Service Type One time Setup Fee* Monthly Charge Quota Over Quota Rate
Canopy 512-768kbps $125 $45 3.5GB $5.00 per GByte
802.11B 256kbps ** $125 $40 3.5GB $5.00 per GByte


* Setup fees do not include radio/dish deposit, site survey or installation costs. ** 802.11b service is being phased out and may not be available in your area

Since we are a member owned, member operated cooperative, our policy is that each member pay their fair share of costs - we do not offer "Unlimited Use" rate plans. Members are encouraged to monitor their own bandwidth usage at their gateway/firewall/router machine.

Data transfered at or below 85kbps is not included in the quota. This allows up to about 27GB/mo outside your quota. This policy is to promote large bulk transfers at a rate which does not seriously impact the interactive performance for other coop members. Based on our 15:1 oversubscription guideline, this rate is substantially more than each members 1/15th share of the nominal 768kbps bandwidth. If you plan to do hugh transfers in the 10's of GB's, consider throttling back to 50kbps, and only use your fair share.

We do not invoice, but currently provide quarterly email statements around the middle of the first month of each quarter as a reminder to pay. We may drop that in favor of providing member passwds and access to their account status on the web site.

We expect members to pay their base service fee, in advance, at the beginning of each quarter. This amount is DUE on the 1st, and LATE if not received by the 10th. Over quota amounts are due on receipt of the monthly statement, and subject to late fees if not received by the 10th of the following month. The best way to avoid late fees is to get your payments in the mail on, or before, the first of each month. While most local mail seems to be getting delivered next day right now, we also frequently see it taking two or three business days. So waiting to mail your check on the 8th or 9th will risk a late fee at times.

A $10, or 10%, whichever is more late fee is applied for payments received after the 10th of each month. Accounts with two month delinquent balances are subject to a $35 disconnect/collection fee and will be sent a 10 day demand notice. If the account is not brought current within the 10 day period, the account will be disconnected and referred to small claims for collection.

Each member is expected to monitor their own usage and pay for all overquota fees. This is no different that metered billing by your water, gas, electric, phone, pay-per-view, or other usage based services. Our quotas are set three to six times most members normal usage, so "normal" use is very unlikely to trigger an overquota bill. Out of several thousand member month periods over the last six years, only a couple dozen overquota bills have been invoiced. Most of those are for several periodically very heavy users which needed the additional service capacity to support their home/office based businesses. Most of the rest are from minor children installing Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications like Bittorrent/Napster/Kazza file sharing servers which provide maximum bandwidth filesharing to the whole internet after the child downloads a few songs or movies.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is disruptive to all CWX.NET members due to these high volume servers seriously slowing all service down to a crawl, and is one reason these applications are restricted on CWX.NET. They also introduce excessive packet loss making VPN and VoIP services fail. We openly suggest that users needing Peer-to-Peer services like Bittorrent, seek a cable, DSL or other wireless provider for service.

We do not allow members to directly or indirectly resell services, including sharing a connection outside the member's home/business or commercial web/mail/ftp hosting.

CWX provides only basic ISP services: internet connectivity, DNS services, and routing for IP address blocks. We allow a members to run their own gateway/firewall/server system (typically Linux or NT) and host their own low volume mail, web, and ftp servers. We also allow members to host a very low volume charity web/ftp site for non-profit organizations like a local scout troup, hobby club, or church - just check with us first.

The wireless network is not a good fit for member end servers that have a signficant volume, non-flow controlled high rate streaming UDP protocols, or high rate applications which use small UDP packets. Reverse flow packets have a significant collision probability with increased load which significantly impairs overall network performance. The repeater radios have relatively small buffers and drop packets under high rate loads which significantly impairs performance for all members - this is seriously compounded by non-flowcontrolled UDP protocols. As a result certain applications are not suitable for use in the shared bandwidth wireless architecture used by CWX.NET because they may significantly impair all members internet access.

Our network is based on shared bandwidth using between 10:1 to 15:1 over subscription model. Because the network throughput is shared between members, we request that all members self-limit bandwidth under 56kbps for large bulk transfers. To promote this billing records under 56kbps are not counted toward the quota, and are not billed for when there is an overquota charge. This may be done using lftp, rsync, or similar client tools with bandwidth shaping options. This not only improves interactive performance for all members, but controls costs for the cooperative (and allows us to keep our rates down). CWX.NET may rate limit as needed to optimize network performance for all members, or control costs for both coop and/or individual members.

We maintain mirrors of certain archives which multiple members frequently access, which allows us to schedule updates of the mirrors to minimize costs. We do not charge members for accesses to our mirrors, but do request that transfers be rate limited to minimize the impact on other members. Currently most of the Debian tree is mirrored at ftp://ftp.cwx.net/pub/mirrors/debian and we frequently mirror portions of Redhat as needed under ftp://ftp.cwx.net/pub/mirrors/redhat depending on disk space. Please contact us if there is something large that you either frequently need, or would be of general interest to other members. It is frequently better for the coop to download very large distributions into the mirror at either a very high rate, or very slow rate with a lower priority.

The canopy radios contain a builtin NAT based firewall which provides basic protection for you home computers. The version of NAT on the radios only allows L2TP VPN traffic; it does not handle PPTP traffic. You will need your own cable/DSL router/firewall if you need PPTP VPN access.

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