Steve Kaplan

I stumbled upon this on Slashdot today. SGT David Coughanour (AHHC 1-110th Infantry) is a marine currently home on R&R from the war. David recently presented at Notacon 3. His presentation was entitled "HajjiNets: Running an ISP in a War Zone" and, as it sounds, is about running an ISP where troops are currently stationed.

More specifically, David is stationed in the Sunni Triangle. He and some of the other troops were getting fed up with the "standard issue" internet access provided by the DOD. As MattGWU commented on Slashdot:

Here's the best line: "And there are couple of reasons why we do it: The uh...the DoD gives us an MWR cafe, for every 1000 troops you get something like 6 to 12 computers. And that's great, except some of the grey-list sites are kind of blocked so basically you can't get porn off it, among other things."

Now although I admittedly don't know too much about networking, I was able to pick up a good amount of what David had to say (mirror here). It was amazing to hear how much logisitics and planning have gone into setting up this ISP at the base.

The network's setup is essentially at $15,000 satelite dish used to link up to a backend provider in the Ukraine. The hardware on the ground is a mash-up of stuff bought, owned and other stuff that "fell of the back of a truck." In all, it adds up to a quarter of a million dollars operation, all coming out of the troops' own pockets.

The guys weren't able to get CAT3 networking cable to build out the network so, instead, they have been using military-issued phone wire which isn't perfect but gets the job done.

Another issue ran into is the fact that FCC regulations don't exist in the Sunni Triangle. Because of this there is a bunch of government equipment that causes interference on the 2.4GHz frequency, crippling WiFi from time to time. If that weren't enough, David has discovered that rockets emit an EMP that fries all of their hardware ROMs, requiring a memory flash.

Even though the network was originally planned to have about 150 users, it has grown to 350 and this makes the cost per head to be $100 in setup costs with a $60 per month fee. All of this is non-profit and any extra money is committed to go back into the troops' pockets. David likes this setup because he essentially has no "customers" and, jokingly, can tell them to "go to hell."

At the end of the day, David sees this as an invaluable service to the troops in the field. He thinks it is a great morale booster and allows troops to stay connected to their families, friends and media at home. An extra bonus is that Amazon ships Spaghettios to the Sunni Triangle so many of these guys no longer have to eat the crappy dining-hall food all the time.

The video is about 51 minutes long, but definately worth a watch, mirror here (Latest Quicktime Required).

last updated 2 years ago comment