Redbricks Intranet Collective (RIC)

As mentioned in the previous story, the people responsible  for network-wide connection problems have changed their settings.  If you are inadvertantly creating the problem, or you can help us track them down, please get in touch so we can help.  Thanks. 

There have been some problems all across the network, caused by two rogue wireless routers that people have had connected to the network.  We've sorted this for now, but if those people change their settings, the issues might arise again. When you check what wireless networks you can see, if you can see 'Breaking-RIC' or 'Breaking'RIC2' from your flat, please let us know.

For those who don't know the Redbricks Intranet Collective (RIC), we are a group of residents that come together to provide cheap access to broadband services for Redbricks residents. There has been an Intranet on the estate for 14 years now, previously operated by Redbricks On-Line (RBOL). We currently have 64 users and our meetings are open to anyone who wants to get involved (2nd Thursday of every month, 7pm, Tenants' office). No RIC volunteer personally profits from RIC, and we pay the same rate as all other RIC subscribers.

City South Manchester have agreed to rewire the whole estate, at the same time they replace windows and do stairwell rennovations, over the next year.   Finally our dream - and the dream of many who came before the current collective - will come true, of every flat on the estate being able to have a RIC connection - low-cost reliable internet access, on top of the community intranet.   More details to come. 

People relying on home wi-fi are getting significantly slower speeds than from their fixed broadband connection, research suggests...

http://www.epitiro.com/assets/files/secure/WiFi_In_The_Home_Epitiro_V2.pdf

Since 14th April 2009 internet access speed has been much improved. It is now possible at quiet times to get 6Mb/s (780kB/s) all for yourself. However it's more likely at other times for us to get 2Mb/s shared among a number of people. We've also altered the traffic shaping algorithm so with these things combined you'll find the speed available to each person is now far faster than it was previously. 2Mb/s still isn't fast enough so we continue to investigate.

On 5/4/9 we moved our Internet service provider from the Phone Co-op to Zen Internet, and the Internet access point from Humberstone Ave to Rockdove Ave.

Moving to Zen Internet should mean faster Internet access but that isn't yet happening - we're investigating. No change is required on your part other than if you used the Phone Co-op SMTP server to send email out through you'll need to change that to Zen Internet's mailhost.zen.co.uk.

Moving the access point to Rockdove means your computer using a different route across the estate to the Internet. No change is required on your part.

Internet access is now very slow at night so we're moving to a different provider to speed things up.

22/12/8
The captive portal, the system to allow only paid-up subscribers to login to use the Internet, has been changed so as to be more robust. You will now be asked to re-login once a week.

21/12/8
The bandwidth shaping we use to prevent those using peer2peer software from consuming too much of the Internet access, had been set to allow peer2peer a proportion of the 7Mb/s Internet bandwidth we used to have. But currently our Internet service provider is capping us at 1Mb/s. Thus the ratio we give to peer2peer has been set too high. It's now been lowered.