The BSD ISP
Channel: Andrea Ross
Date: 02/06/2013

Serving data and video solely using BSD


Running an ISP can be a tedious task of putting different pieces of boxed hardware together to make the network work, but can also be a fun and entertaining work of research on the right solution to accommodate your customer's needs. The market is full of vendors, big and small, ready to sell you a pre-packaged solution for your (supposed) needs, but what if you'd like to use BSD to serve your customers ?

This talk will show how we are running a full ISP on solutions brought out using facilities and software easily built on top of BSD systems, and will delve into the challenges we have faced in the set up of the distributed architecture, with POPs in different european countries. Along with this, we are carrying out an analysis and comparison of costs and features between commercial and open source solutions, characterizing the decisions we made and the results we carried out.

As an ISP, we not only offer access service, but we also deliver streaming services through a distributed CDN, also built on top of BSD. This will be a chance to delve into the different pieces of software used for encoding, distributing and streaming videos over the BSDs, and the technologies we used to interact with the underlying network.

While being a non highly technical talk, the goal is to show the audience that using BSD in an ISP and content distributor environment is perfectly possible and will deliver the same quality of service of the packaged solutions, yet keeping your costs under control and allowing you a high degree of customization. This will be carried on showing - as already stated - a real world example of our project running solely with the power of BSD.