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Make Your Own DSL
Logic Bomb writes: "Robert Cringley's latest is a striking set of instructions on how to create your own DSL service, or even your own "socialist Internet Service Provider". A cookie goes to whomever manages to implement this first! :-D" Cringley is on a roll.
Gives a new meaning to "Code Red"....
Je t'aime Stéphanie
For those of you who didn't know, a Westell (Infotel) Modem contains the Alcatel chipset, with two ARM processors, that are firmware upgradable. If anyone has WAP, or other cool firmware hacks, contact me.
The chips themselves are:
Virata Helium (VC8410-PQc 05)
Alcatel Dynamite (0023 SAMB ARM)
http://siokaos.org/
I'm hardly a neophyte when it comes to technical stuff, but a lot of this article went over my head. Am I alone here? Maybe I'm just tired right now.
You're kinda missing the whole if you think this article offers any useful information. Broadband without access to the internet is somewhat less than useful for the majority of people. And having DSL between me and Jimmy down the block doesn't do much good when it's just slamming into my 56k modem to get to the "internet".
What exactly is the technology being talked about in this article? Could anyone point me to more technical specification of this dry line technology and how it was used in the past or is still used in a commercial arena?
I tried to order one of these circuits about three months ago, and apparantly the telco's are on to this. I wanted to connect two buildings, so I tried ordering a "dry pair" from Verizon, and they said they didn't do those anymore.
I ended up ordering a PtP T1, which is only going to increase the cost of replacing the aging 56k circuit, now connecting the two buildings, by $110. Not bad considering the increase in bandwidth.
is pptp in mandrake 8.0 broken?
Anyone get Earthlink.net and a Fujitsu DSL modem work via PPTP in Mandrake 8.0?
www.linuxdsl.com would be a great resource if the webadmin there got some free time or passed on some privileges to a more devoted devoloper.
I know ppoe works in Linux, but PPTP is giving everyone problems; it is a microsoft protocol, Earthlink uses it everywhere. How can you start your own DSL service, notably a subnet, when you can't even connect to the mothership?
This does work. Use your head before you blindly go out and do it.
Alarm circuits are not rated for high frequency use, and are not provisioned as such.
Beware, if your alarm circuit T1 interferes with somebody else's paid for service, you will be in a world of grief. That t1 will start looking real cheap.
We did this at ICorp about three or four years ago using Paradyne equipment. Worked great when you could get BellSouth to install the lines correctly. The biggest problem with this idea is that the phone company does not make any guarntee as to what freq the line will be able to pass. We did have good luck with it, however.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
Makes sense to me. People in my area have been waiting in line for months to get DLS installed correctly.
Anyone that works at a phone company will tell you that's complete BS
I can't belive THIS guy can write stories and get PAID
Our company, Cadvision, has been doing exactally this for about 5 years now. We run old CAP based DSL equipment in near-locate naps to businesses all over the city. Nice article but it's old news.
-Misao Little Weasel Girl
I roll my own, too. But I don't call it DSL...
make-your-own DSL? pfft. when do we get the Big Boys? you know, "make-your-own Fiber Optics line"? =D now THAT i would do!
I think, therefore, I'm smarter than our president.
Yes, except that then you coulld say, start up a local internet co/op in your neighborhood/apartment/housing project. Offer service for 30 bucks a month and if you get enough takers (approx 17 subscribers) you can afford a REAL T1 line to the net. With only 20 or so subscribers, chances are good that when you load up a webpage youre the only one doing so at that time. As long as no one is hosting linux distros, youre golden (and of course you can have a clause in your service contract to charge for thruput). Everyone gets cheap high speed internet access, and you get to make some money on the side.
Now in addition to having non-technial amateurs running IIS servers on home DSL service, we'll having non-technical amateurs providing the service. Code Red IV will be disastrous. Maybe real ISPs can boycotting this trash on the backbone level.
--
I like to watch.
He's on here every damn week now. Why don't you
/.
just steal him from PBS? (insert Katz insult here)
Or a Cringely SlashBox?
Sheesh. Like I don't know how to use the internet except to find
-- Spankmeister General
I think his point is valid.
If I had a dry pair to your house, we could shuttle info back and forth very effectively, right? If we both had a 802.11b point, then so could our neighbors, for about a couple miles or whatever the range is. You now have 30, 40 people hooked up to each other.
If one other person in each of these clouds also had a dry pair to another house elsewhere, and their own bridge, they could connect pairs of clouds... linked dumbbells, as it were. Each point would link up 10 or so houses, until a grassroots net could spring up, catering exclusively to the town. All it would take is one individual, perhaps working collectively with 20 other people, to get a high bandwidth connection, say a T1, or whatever, even a 'normal' 2mb DSL line, and this gathering of clouds hooked up by dry lines would be connected to the larger 'net. He doesn't mention this in his article, but it's a reasonable next step.
It's about communal, grassroots, bottoms up, emergent behavior type internet, and not the traditional top down subscription based allocated and doled up bandwidth that is the norm.
GPL Deconstructed
OK, so you can rent a dry circuit between your house and the local CO for cheap. Big deal. As Cringley says, in order to turn that into an internet connection, you need to hook onto someone else's backbone. You need an IP address and (more importantly) have someone tell the upstream routers how to find it. And that is what's going to cost you. About the only way this could be made to work (cheaply) is if you know somone who'll let you hang a router off their backbone.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Cringely got it right, in my last business, the area was out of dedicated "Data Lines", so PB had to send out an install tech who really knew what he was doing, i was looking over his shoulder and noticed that he was using our alarm lines...the tech told me almost exactly the same story as Cringely, including that if you called PB and asked for a pair of "guard lines" you'd be told they didn't exist or that they were all assigned in your area.
SOME THINGS TO NOTE:
since this is a point-to-point connection, your throughput will vary with the quality of your wire pairs
you might also need to perform line balancing, as some of these wire have been in the ground/air for a LONG time
if you have big power transformers or other "leaky" devices near your wires, your S/N ratio could be terrible
AND, LAST BUT NOT LEAST, anyone can just simply t-splice your line to get 100% access to your communications, with maybe just having to perform a simple impedence adjustment...
BUT, still cool for all of that BTW, when "Boardwatch Magazine" still had Jack Richards they ran a very similar (but more detailed) piece on this about 3 years ago
Peace, Love to my Homies
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Yeah, that article was full of 'just do this' info for the masses that makes it sound easy, but for all intensive purposes, would take forever to actually accomplish. Sure it's a neat idea, but it's nothing like just changing the oil in your car. I say even Katz has much more valid social points to talk about than Cringley has technical ones to talk about.
Yup, even Slashdot has covered it before. I guess its novel 'cause Cringely's talking about it tho.
Somebody please, tell this machine I'm not a machine.
Work! Food! Bandwidth! Pr0n!
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
On hs page he has a link to the PairGain/ADC Megabit modems, but the link just returns a blank page. Is there a good link to these modems (or equivelent) somewhere?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
This is old news, I set up a 768kbps DSL link between my two company buildings in 1997. The cost? 2 DSL bridges and a $30/month "alarm circuit" from Verizon. As long as you're 18,000 feet, you win. The heavy lifting involves getting real Internet connectivity, where the article is short on details.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
He's just described an ISP and conviniently left out all the other services/equipment required.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
damn it. There is NO saying that goes "for all intensive purposes". It is "for all intents and purposes". You should sound like a moron when you say "intensive purposes"
-tm
Hey Neighbour!
From,
some guys on the 8th floor of the red brick building next to you.
A cookie goes to whomever manages to implement this first! :-D"
:-). (I thought I'd never see the day when I'd come across "whom" on Slashdot)
I don't have a cookie to give to him, but I'd like to grant an honorary cookie to Logic Bomb for correctly using who/whom
PS Through researching the link for who/whom, I came across this surprisingly interesting discussion on teaching non-native English speakers the finer points of how to use the phrase "the hell!".
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Hear hear! Thank god someone else recognizes this. I feeling like punching people in the face when they say "For all intensive purposes". IMNSHO, use of this phrase is the fastest way to being labelled an idiot.
Once that dry pair is connected to the Net, you can subscribe to an IP telephony service, and then you're only paying Ma Bell for the wire. Sweet!
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Assuming that DSL is not available in your area due to the distance to the central office, I don't see how this would help. The article says you need to share the same central office, where I assume the link is made from your place to your friend's. If this distance is too far for DSL in the first place, connecting to you friend won't help anyway. Am I wrong, or is there any other way that this could work if you are in the above situation?
% rm *
rm:
% ls
%
damn
The broadband/internet connection is really the most important part and is usually what you get charged an arm and a leg for. The wires for the T1 and the circuit cost usually run a couple hundred dollars depending on where you are... The bandwidth is what you get truly bent over for...
More details on that end strike me as more interesting than the ability to set up networking between places... since that's relatively easy. Hell run fiber... it's getting cheap.
Please note. My name is Cringely, not Cringley.
The former sounds like what people do when they read the alarmist drivel I write.
The latter sounds like a potato chip commercial.
Sincerely,
Robert X. Cringely
Perhaps /. should just make a Cringley slashbox in the default set and save everyone the trouble.
Of course, the same goes for the pattern of linux kernel articles. Download, compile, repeat...
Start Running Better Polls
Looks like it was more than a year ago based on the dates and his comment about being Slashdotted.
This isn't exactly a new idea. We have been running 2 MBit connections out to customers for a few years this way. Simply order an LDDS line from your local bell and you are set. The cab companies use them mostly for those little dialless phones you see at the grocery store etc. $12 gets you the line costs for more then a T1, add on whatever your bandwidth costs you and its all profit from there baby.
We did this a few years back with unbridged telco alarm lines. So I want some fucking cookies!
Local ISPs have been doing this trick for years. Watch out though, if whore-izon finds out you're using it for high-speed data, that's in breach of their terms and they will cut the circuit. Be warned.
He's shown us how to get a circuit established cheaply. Actually doing it may be made difficult by your phone company, but it shows how they are trying to rape data services for so much more money than than things like security systems.
The real problem is that you want connectivity to the internet. Even if you find someone who's willing to piggy back you on their circuit, chances are they're violating their terms of service by doing it. That may get them cut off if they're caught. If they're doing NAT it would be hard for their ISP to find out.
If you really want to offer legitament ISP services, then you'd get your circuit to another ISP, and you'd ask to buy transit rights. Unfortunetly, these don't come cheap. You have to pay them for allowing your data to cross their network, and they probably have to pay transit fees to another ISP which they'll pass along to you.
It's a great idea. I'd like to see lots of free bandwidth. There's just many many hands between you and the global internet and they all want their cut. By the time you're done it isn't cheap.
...run by just about anybody, is mostly a good thing, especially if several communities made local wireless intranets, connected them together, and so on...we could (potentially) have high-speed wireless access 'round the whole country. :-)
But the whole thing would just prompt the telecos to hire a $cr1p7 k1dd13 to make another "Code Red"-like virus, and bring the whole thing crashing down, 'cuz they want their profits.
--
Me: http://www.robertdhill.com/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The alarm line trick as been around for ages. Usually using the line to cross connect a CSU/DSU like it was a frame circuit. The problem isn't technology, it's quality. High speed datacomm expects certain line quality in order to do what it needs to do. Things like quality of the line, minium data throughput, etc are all defined in the tariff. Problem with these types of lines is that the tariff basically says the line should pass a simple continuity test and that's it. Afterall, that's all an alarm needs. So, if you get a real noisy line, you're sunk.
As an experiment that's fine, but don't let a business depend on this because you'll have no recourse with the Telco.
Code is planned out
coders hack away at it for months
-miracle happens here-
code works.
Ummm, could we talk about step three again? In a little more detail?
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
He doesn't point out that there is no (absolutle zero) guarantee of service over dry lines. They were only intended to be simple copper for ringing other lines etc. Running DSL over them *can* be extremely bad and getting any sort of technical support (more than "The circuit is complete") out of the telco is not going to happen.
So how much is it gonna cost to get that backbone connection at one end?
And if you stop to think about it, it kinda makes sense -- "intensive" purpose must be all the more than just a normal purpose.
All I am saying, is give the guy a break. It is an easy mistake to make. I just needed someone to point it out to me, and I corrected.
Now, if he says it again, he is fair game....
This is great! I live in an area in which DSL in not available, but a freidn of mine who lives jsut over a maile away can get it. We were considering a fewwireless solutions to get me connected to his network, but this seems much less expensive.
You can make your own DSL modem too!
:) and we did this all the time. This was 3 years ago and we discovered that the customer's location had to be within about 18,000 feet from our POP to make it work. This is because the circuit goes to the CO first then your POP. The whole length must be taken into account. In upstate NY the "Dry copper circuits" are reffered to as BANA lines. We made sure to specify that we were looking for an unloaded pair when ordering, and we wouldn't accept installation on a loaded pair. On the down side there are no SLAs on BANA circuits other than you can read open/short accross the circuit. An if there is any work being done in the area, BANAs are the first thing to get shuffled around. Cheap... yes, but flakey as hell. Many, many things can break this sort of setup, so I wouldn't recommend it just for "fun" unless you like driving around putting up loops, testing them with a multi-meter and begging bell, er verizon, techs to swap out pairs that were working before but suddenly stopped, which the telco insists is good... etc...etc...etc.. Make sure you bring a bottle of scotch and a carton of smokes to appease any bell, er verizon, tech nice enuff to do this for you. It kept our tech happy.
On a more serious note, I worked for a company (name with held to protect the guilty
Seriously... has anyone with a legal background thought about this?
Price gouging. Protectionism. Unethical quashing of the competition. These are *supposed* to be against the interests of a truly free market, and therefore illegal.
Most of those lines were laid out during the govt-sanctioned monopoly days, so an argument could be made that the taxpayers are entitled to use those lines however they see fit. Why should the telcos act entitled?
Perhaps if a large enough group of people threatened to sue the telcos for fraud under anti-trust or (much harder to prove but also more powerful) RICO laws, we could bring things back into check?
:M
Check it out here. It's known as CodeRed.d. Yes, I submitted it as an article, but it was rejected.
It's actually not that fascinating from a worm point of view, but the article hypothesizes that Code Red will never disappear. Wonderful...lazy and incompetent admins have given rise to a new form of life on the Internet.
I'm reasonably sure that it's the reverse of what you state- the T-1 interferes with the DSL. T-1 is "high power" - there's real voltage running down a T-1 pair, and if there's a T-1 circuit in a bundle, that renders that bundle unfit for DSL.
I have done this before. I work for Cisco.
If you can get a dry pair from the telco company you are in business. You need not be within 18000 feet but you will get less throughput if you can't find a way to put more voltage on the line.
Get you dry pair to where ever. If it goes to someone who has an internet connection assign youself an ip address of of their subnet and voila done.
WANT MORE ?
run a pair to your buddys house, either you or your buddy needs to get a cable modem. Put a NAT router on cable modem like a linksys, a netgear 311 or 314 or a cisco 806. Then attach the ethernet side of the dsl modem onto the switch/hub containing the connection from the router. Set the router up to do DHCP or do static assignments.
You can even set up ports to forward to internal servers and stuff like that so you can host game servers, mail, whatever.
DSL, SDSL, HDSL etcDSL are all layer two technologies. This means that it is pretty much like stringing a cable down to your buddies house.
The differences are:
1. The Data is slower than eithernet
2. The distance limitation of ethernet is removed.
Thats it.
You can also do this with dark fiber. You can get really huge, fast pipes on fiber.
You should always check the possibility of dark fiber or dry pairs when you provision bandwidth. Read the above sentence again. Otherwise you are just blithely going to the telco and wasting your money.
There's only a couple reasons why he would be able to get DSL and you can't.
#1, you're on different CO's
#2, you have lousy wiring into your neighborhood
#3, He's close enough to the CO, and you're not.
In the case of #1, you can't use an alarm circuit. In the case of #2, you won't have the quality to get a signal anyway, and in the case of #3, your line has to go from you, to the CO, and back to him. If you can't get DSL one way to the CO, you definitely can't do this in and back out again.
/me fires off a 21 Telebit Trailblazer salute
Thanks for the information on this. I'm a guilty party. You know, there are a few phrases like this that I don't know which way is correct. Wish there was a good place to look them up. I never could find one.
The companies can tell you they don't offer the service, but sometimes they will be lying (as Cringley notes).
Telcos are regulated. Unlike a regular corporation they can't just stop offering a service that they don't like. They can just neglect to train their staff in it and hope eveyone forgets about it.
But if you push them they have to comply. The services that Verison can offer in New York is specified by the tariff in that state, and it's state law. There are some really nit-picky regulations (down to standards for signal strengh and placement of network interfaces in apartment buildings). In exchange for all these budensome regulations Verison gets a monopoly on New York state phone service for all intents and purposes.
The Public Service Commission is the state body in New York that oversees this, using both carrot (deregulation) and stick (fines) to motivate Verison. In my experience, Verison-people CARE about getting in trouble with the PSC, and more people should know that. The evaluation of managers at all levels includes a measure of PSC complaints.
So if the phone company denies you your "burgler alarm" check with your state's equivalent regulatory body to see if you are being lied to. (You may also want to do research on the actual tariff itself to see if it's still on the books where you live.)
$300 here, $250 there, I'd rather just pay for Verizon DSL or a cable modem.
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
funded by tax dollars (no choice for you!)
operated by clueless and distant bureaucrats (no accountability, choice or competence for you!)
you would most likely be forced to use it, or other competition would be forced out of existence (no choice or quality for you!)
Since this must be enforced, anyone that wanted to live free and choose how, what, when and where they could access data, many would be beaten, stormed, shot while resisting arrest or defending their home and family, and demonized as enemies of the state/people/children.
I guess this goes back to those who erroneously label open source and free software as socialist or communist. After all, free and open is a choice. Well, it will be unless TRUE communists/tyrants/hypocrites/logically challenged soma sucking automatons got their way.
This guy is misinformed. In Massachusetts Verizon wanted to contro DSL. So what di they do? They decided to take dry copper pairs, mux them up
on fiber, and demux them on the other end. The end result is the a DSL modem can't get the bandwidth it requires to do the phase shift encoding and all that aother stuff. Verison says it's to get more
distance out of the alarm cables, they just want
to let anyone start thier own DSl business.
DSL has to run on twisted copper pairs. point to point. There are also distance restrictions.
I wanted to setup a school system on DSL. I ordered Dry wisted pair. When I did a test on the
twisted pair it failed. Later to find out the
"Dry" copper pair were being provided over fiber.
Now wireless on the other hand. I just bought
a linksys WAP so my kids computer on the second floor can access the home network and get out to the internet. My wife didn't want me to run Cat 5 up through the chimney in the basement to the
closet on the second floor and up to my kids room.
So I configured Wirless. 11MBS through the house and even o the extents of my yard (26k sq ft).
Later on I'm going around my street to see where I loose signal. if everyone was into building a free wireless network You'd probably need to use
just the wireless cards and have linux boxes act
as mobile routers. Having many WAPS won't cut it.
My company builds control systems for municipal pumping stations and treatment plants. ( http://www.bihlertech.com )
We have been using dry pairs with Netopia SDSL/IDSL routers and toshiba T2N PLC's ( http://www.tic.toshiba.com/plc/html/Products/ ) with ethernet ports to make city wide control networks.
Netopia used to support back to back DSL where 1 router is the clock signal and the other is a slave.
For some un-known reason Netopia has removed this from their FAQ and no says they no longer support it, however as far as i know it still works.
It would also work if for example some kid had cable and a bunch of the old NORTHPOINT routers (which all work back to back DSL ) to go into their own pirate DSL service
* Carthago Delenda Est *
That is quite true. A DSL company I worked through used some burgalar alarm circuits when it was starting out (before the glorious CLEC status), and sometimes we would get a noisy line. When we told the Telco to test it, they told us it passed continuity and where we could shove our data equipment.
:-)
We would either have to tell the customer "no luck" or order another circuit entirely. Sometimes, two or three circuit to the same place would be bad. And I worked in the NOC dealing with these customers. It was great fun.
However, the burgalar alarm circuits worked okay like 75% of the time, I would say. So it is worth a shot.
Well the US has municipal utilities right? Like water. Is this 'socialist'? A socialist utility on good honest American soil? It can't be
As California shows deregulation is a process new in the US.
This reminds me of a skit...
How to make a million dollars and not pay taxes.
First, get a million dollars...
The Other Nate
I remember reading an article about this very topic (actually a few) in Infoweek written by Bob Matcalfe (sp? -- the inventor of ethernet).
It sounds like a good idea, but the problem is you still need some sort of high speed connection to dump it all into.
If you do manage to get a line like this installed, how can you test the quality of it before you drop the cash for a Megabit Modem?
-prator
The problem is, Verizon lies to me. They say they won't support me, too far away, blah, blah, blah.
I had Northpoint for a couple of months (before they went tits up) and it worked fine. For whatever reason (cable modems not yet available in my neighborhood?) they won't service me.
FWIW, this is a great idea. I live in one of those community things with a neighborhood swimming pool, and crap like that. I may go to the next meeting, and propose that we do something like this. Having 'free' internet service (covered in your neighborhood association dues) would likely boost property values slightly. Let the server be at the neighborhood center, put up an antenna that covers the neighborhood.
Then, sell wireless cards to residents (record the MAC) and give them service. In addition, block people with 'wild' MACs, and if they don't pay the neighborhood fee, suspend access.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I ran a connection over a dry loop for a few years when I lived in student family housing at my school. At the time, the only connectivity choice was a 9600baud ISN (serial) connection. So, for $3 a month or something the University's telecom group connected a dry pair between my apartment and my office on campus.
I used a pair of short haul modems to run a 38400 SLIP connection over the dry loop. This is nothing compared to the speed of DSL technology, but at the time $150 an end was about all I could afford, and DSL stuff wasn't available at a consumer level.This setup worked great until bridge construction (the over a river type of bridge) caused the connection to be rerouted, and it never worked right again. A kind telecom employee took pity on me and I used an illicit second phone line to dial into my office for another year or so, until somebody noticed the connection on the switchboard. After that I was limited to dialing in on my main phone line and getting a cell phone for voice. (Paying the university for a second phone line was more expensive than getting a cell phone.)
Of course, now a few years later the apartments I lived in have 10/100 connections onto the University backbone.
BTW, if anybody is interested in buying some used short haul modems, let me know...
Almost forgot: partner with a local ISP for the connectivity. Or, partner with the local cable company. Let them run a big fat pipe to the neighborhood center, and let us take care of the last mile.
A bit of advertising (and income) for them. Hell, with a bit of money, we could run the mail servers and all of that crap (and obviously some sort of proxy).
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Dry lines used to only cost about $5 a month from the ILECs. Unfortunately about 5 years ago they realized that people could use these lines to undercut their ISDN pricing. Now, if your lucky, you can get one of these pairs for about $40 -$50 a month. I wasn't so lucky, BellSouth insisted that they no longer sold these lines. After asking them about a burglar alarm circuit, they finally admitted that they sold them but said I could not buy one because I wasn't a burglar alarm company or something like that. Any, with the current pricing, this is pointless if DSL is offered in your area. It also makes it impossible for any business to do this and offer competitive pricing.
Any one have an idea if signal bleed will be an issue? I read once that it could be a problem for other lines in the bundle when DSL was used at scale (>10 lines).
The main reason that you should go and do this is that, with the current situation, the Telco has no incentive to drive cheap and fast installs of DSL out to your area. They will not build new COs as a way to deny this, and require you to go T1/T3. They will claim "there's a line problem" on a fresh install in a new house when you can see the CO at the end of the block.
But, if enough people do this, they will have to react. Sure, they'll try to shut it down. Then you just get a Burglar Alarm business and buy em up that way. Eventually they'll get a clue stick and realize that they need to stop seeing those disappearing T1/T3 sales that stop them from driving out DSL quickly (they lose money), and see those disappearing DSL sales that at least they made some money on.
In the absence of regulatory push, sometimes you have to push it yourself. We are Americans - we deserve DSL to every building! Nothing less. Until they wise up and deliver it for less than $50 a month, we need to fight guerilla style, and grab all the high-speed access we can, at whatever the cost.
We shall fight them on the airwaves. We shall fight them at the COs. We shall fight them for every sliver of high-speed data access. We shall never surrender, for we are the wired age, and noone shall stand in our way!
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
A class action suit would be the last resort, first complain to the local utility board.
We did this at an ISP that I worked at previously. Bought a DSLAM and some CPE modems from Paradyne and started ordering alarm circuits from Ameritech. The Paradyne gear was pretty good, giving 768 Kbps full duplex if the line was really clean and automatically adjusting the bit rate downward if the line was not as clean. We could get synch between the DSLAM and the modem over as much as 18Kft of copper.
As Cringely described, Ameritech told us a lot of things about why we couldn't have alarm circuits, including the fact that alarm circuits weren't tariffed to carry data. We eventually discovered that there are a lot of places to order telco services from however. We had a lot of success faxing orders directly to Ameritech's order processing center, and we were also able to order through authorized Ameritech resellers without any problems. I'm assuming most of the other ILECs also have order processing centers and authorized resellers.
The biggest problem is that about half of the circuits Ameritech installed for us, especially the longer ones, would have load coils on them. These are on most longer copper runs to even out the change the impedance so the all of the lines coming into the switch look about the same. Unfortunately, nearly all data gear fails to operate over lines with load coils, and Ameritech wouldn't or couldn't tell us if a line had coil or not until it was installed. And of course they wouldn't remove the coil after it had been installed, because if we were really using it as an alarm circuit, there'd be no reason to.
I used to work for a local phone company (ILEC). We realized that one of the ISP's in town was ordering alarm circuits and using them for ADSL, effectively bypassing us. How did the phone company respond? By adding load coils to ALL alarm circuits. It still met the tariffs, and worked fine as alarm circuits, but no longer worked for ADSL at all. Sneaky, but effective.
On a separate note, I think phone companies charge far too much for T1 service (point-to-point), and there should be reasonable tariffs for dry copper lines. Phone companies don't want to lose their monopolies on high-speed data, though -- it's very profitable. Lobby your state's public utilities commission. They're the ones who ultimately decide these things...
My problem (which a roll-your-own DSL would solve, but with a cost I don't want to absorb) is how to do a wan over an area of about 3 miles radius, with at least one connection having to span 2.5 miles. The roll-your-own DSL would require too many connections, wireless won't broadcast over 1 mile (AFAIK) and everything else is a pain. I'll I'm looking for is something cheap, easily changed (moving nodes - wireless is preferred), and is capable of about 1 - 10 mbps.
Any ideas? I'm happy to fish ebay for parts to lower costs.
We've set this up defore between two of our sites.. If I'm understanding what he's saying anyway.. Pretty much we ordered a dry copper pair and a couple of PairGain DSL modems.. Verizon calls it a burglar alarm circuit. The only time you can get into trouble is if the circuit actually hits any repeaters between sites.. This works best for short distances.. 1mile or so.
B
Some of us only check /. to see when the next Sci-Fi convention is coming through...
Yet again we have an article that has already been covered.
Does anybody know the prices of satellite 2-way internet service?
science is a religion
"So now we have a two megabit circuit but no Internet. It's just like
buying a T-1 line (E-1, actually -- the European data standard that runs at
2.048 megabits-per-second) for, say $30. But to turn that into an Internet
connection, one end has to be plugged to an Internet backbone. There are
many ways to do this. Put one end of the circuit at your business. Put one
end at your school. Put one end in the machine room at a local ISP."
This is a very interesting concept...
Are you trying to say that there is an ISP anywhere in this country that
will just allow you to drop a circuit, dry or not, into the "machine room"
and allow you to leach bandwidth from them for free?
If there is one, please tell me where they are so that I can move there.
The premise of your article is completely off base. You start out by
telling people
that they can essentially become a "Broadband Tycoon" this way.. I am sorry
to break it to you this way Bob.. It ain't gonna happen.
Sure you may be able to get the entire neighborhood connected to your
wireless lan, but then you have that all important internet connection that
I assure you, you will not get cheap enough to make it even profitable for
a small time deal like you describe.
I speak here from a certain level of experience. I currently work in the
Network Operations department of a Major southeastern ISP. Before
this job I was one of the founding partners of a medium sized ISP in
South Florida.
Just to break even you are going to need thousands of paying customers.
Please try to use a little time to research your topic next time.
Dry pairs are few and far between now a day. Dry pairs are also available only within the same CO. No cross CO links.
hey neighbour!
wow.. small world...
-Misao Little Weasel Girl
What the easiest method to accomplish the follow line would be?
But to turn that into an Internet connection, one end has to be plugged to an Internet backbone. There are many ways to do this. Put one end of the circuit at your business. Put one end at your school. Put one end in the machine room at a local ISP.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
the internet is useful but dont underestimate the potential of having your own intranet. Its like a permanent LAN party, but instead of bringing all the computers to your friends houses you brings your friends houses to your computer.
Dont underestimate the dedicated gamers, if you have some friendly Quake players in your neighbourhood it would nearly be worth setting it up for the games alone. (Although gamers still are not "the majority of people")
Besides you would not let some one "slam into your 56k modem" you would set up a proxy server and only give them as much bandwidth as you are willing to spare.
Really email is what the majority of people most want the internet for anyway, and they dont need to check it every day. you could setup a cron job to collect email every night (or whenever you arent using the line) and maybe cache some webpages, and you probably would not even notice.
your article sucks, look at how bashed you're getting.
bear the cost of the T1 access point, and pass it to the neighbors monthly. I've had a dry pair connect going before to a friend the lives block or so away. A couple of guys in our local lan group are phone techs who set up the lines for us.
We had 10 people at my house and 8 at his connected to UT and TFC via the dry pair and both our cable/dsl connects. Worked nicely and made for an AWESOME lan party.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
indeed, it does..
wish i'd known about this before i ordered DSL..
Though seriously, they have a good point. and definitely, phone companies go to no lengths to help you.. my DSL kit from Bellsouth is late already.. grr
Insert mind here.
MAN I believe, as in Metropolitan Area Network. :)
Urban Area Network, might be closer but it is lacking as a name
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The article mentions Alice's Restaurant about 2/3rds of the way through, so I thought I'd explain the reference for some of the folks here who aren't familiar with the song.
,just
The bit he makes reference to is this:
"And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little
folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints.
only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know
somebody in a similar situation, or _you_ may be in a similar
situation,and if your in a situation like that there's only one thing
you can do and that's walk into the shrink whereever you are
walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's
restaurant.". And walk out. You know,if one person, just one person
does it they may think he's really sick and won't take him. And if
two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both
faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people , three
, can you imagine, three people walking in sing a bar of Alice's
Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And
can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking
in sing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they
may thinks it's a movement.
And that's what it is , the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre
Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it
come's around on the guitar."
I highly recommend that you read the full text (long)
It's essentially an anti-war song, but it's also DAMN FUNNY. Highly recommended if you've never heard it. The MP3 can probably also be found, and it is better to listen to the song than to read it.
Ratguy
A company called Aware produced ADSL modems that you could configure to talk over dry copper. My ISP had ADSL to local nearby businesses and still do to this day. Very old news.
-- Chris Martin, System Administrator
I thinking flaming people for grammar mistakes is lame. You stopping wasting our time.
This is the week I said we'd roll our own DSL. On the surface it looks like a daunting task, but it is actually not that hard at all -- if you can get past the many regulatory loopholes.
This is essentially the same as saying "It's not hard at all, if you can get past the problems that caused all of the companies who were far more experienced than you to go bankrupt." Or, "It's easy to get as much money as you want... if you can get past the problem of being able to get away with robbing a bank."
In short, yes, installing DSL isn't too tough. It certainly isn't magic. The primary reason Rhythms and Northpoint went out of business was because of the problems that they had to deal with at the telcos, not because they didn't understand the technology.
Cringely ultimately suggests "running down the list" of dry pair circuits until the phone company says "yes." However, what he doesn't say is that they probably won't say yes. And even if they do say yes, in the tariffs for those services, there is usually a clause indicating that the phone company does not have to install the dry pair for really any reason that comes up. You can submit the order to the phone company, and they'll say that there aren't any facilities. Or that there aren't any compatible lines. Or that they simply won't support it at your location.
To make matters worse, in most tariffs for the type of pair Cringely mentions, the phone company can disconnect the circuit FOR ANY REASON with just a month's notice.
And it's only then, when you have the circuit (which is unlikely at best), you'll have to deal with the distance issue. With any problems on the circuit. With telco installation issues. Before you can even send data through the pipe. These are the types of issues nearly all CLEC customers of DSL had to put up with from the phone companies, and that was with a service with far more strict tariffs!
Still sound "not that hard at all?" It's so hard that there isn't a single company that's done it successfully. Sure, there are some people who have been able to weasel a line out of the ILEC and get this working -- but that number is small. To say that Cringely is being overoptimistic is an understatement. The fact is that the phone company doesn't typically have to sell you a dry, DSL-capable pair, and they typically won't sell you a dry, DSL-capable pair.
Eschatfische.
When you lease a dry alarm grade pair from a telco they aren't (generally) required to condition it e.g. make sure it's electrically clean with no bridge taps, load coils, high resistance shorts or grounds etc. These things don't make any difference for the rather crude requirements of an alarm circuit but they play Hell with DSL. You could find your "high speed" connection operating at 300bps. Still, I love the idea.
A man without a God is like a fish without a bicycle.
Who are you, "I. R. Babboon"?!!!
I think flaming people for grammar mistakes is lame. You should stop wasting our time.
Troll, troll, troll your post, gentle down slashdot...
Has anyone successfully convinced their ISP to provide internet access for them this way - i.e. to order that "alarm circuit" from your house to the ISP and have a DSL model located at the ISP to which they give you a net connection? If so, then how did they handle support (say you want to reset the DSL model at their end)?
Maybe I'm a bit cynical, but I find it hard to see an ISP offering this personalized level of service...
I imagine that the best way to get one end hooked to a fast internet connection is to rent space/bandwidth at an ISP for your own server. I've seen ISPs offer the ability to pay a monthly fee to let your own computer sit at the ISP and be connected to their backbone with the purpose of hosting web pages. Couldn't you do this, and then have the server run NAT while also being hooked up to a dry line going to your house?
Put one end of the circuit at your business. Put one end at your school. Put one end in the machine room at a local ISP.
But the connection only has two ends...? Where's the one for my house?
Lets take a look at the numbers. There were 3,437 posts about llamas on BITNET last month. In the same time period, there were 57 posts about administrating UUCP. As we all know, llamas are less popular than dogs, which in turn are less popular than cats. Of course, you have to factor in the "crazy cat lady" factor, that is, there is a significant small number of cat owners that own 20 or more cats, thereby skewing the demographic. So, adjusting for that fact, we find that cats are popular with llamas. So this clearly shows that UUCP is dying.
Cadvision is a great example of this. Too bad they sold out to the man ;)
I've also done this completely home-brew several years ago. It's nothing 'new' or 'revealing'... people just don't bother to look beyond the buzzword.
The whole point of ADSL was that it worked over standard copper pairs...
Also.. for those trying to order a 'dry pair' and being told it can't be done.. check regulations, or try asking for an 'alarm circuit'. I believe most phone companies are obliged to sell such a service.
We use the megabit modems extensively for our business DSL deployment (no DSL offered from the telco, so we do it the hard way). When we started we couldn't justify buying a DSLAM so we just hooked them up back-to-back as described in Cringely's article and as long as you have the rate set the same on both ends, they just work. No, they're not RADSL and personally, I prefer that.
We've had zero trouble with these units, having installed about a dozen or so over the past 3 years. Great for businesses who KNOW they want on the 'net at high speed, but for a personal connection or as a trial they're a bit pricey. That's why I've been working on some alternatives.
I've just purchased a pair of Efficient Networks 5250 SDSL bridges. They don't specifically state that they'll work back-to-back but after some research and initial legwork I think they'll work just fine as a cheap alternative. They can be had for USD$50 from Ebay.
Pairgain stuff has the longest "reach" of all the DSL equipment we've investigated but they are also one of the more expensive ones out there. I suppose you get what you pay for. :-)
He really doesn't like the phone company, does he...
AND, LAST BUT NOT LEAST, anyone can just simply t-splice your line to get 100% access to your communications, with maybe just having to perform a simple impedence adjustment...
Would you like to explain to me how you can t-splice a PtP circuit?
/j0uSt
-- j0uSt
SBC/PacBell are liers,verizons going belly up
AOHell DSL is run by people unwilling and or unable to provide ATLEAST a macOSclient
Me thinks if pirate DSL is cheap, go for it
especialy if in the long run all sorts of these rough stations help "the last mile" crap (proof of it being crap you can establish semi stable vertual bubles far longer in diamater than they say you can. ie about 2.5-3 miles from the main office)
mabie NetZero will provide free dsl then.
or mabie not.
...but couldn't get the phone company to give me &@#*# the line. My local provider was willing to put it in and have one of the early Ascend DSL modems (they had a deal - 2 for $1700 :-)) so at least I could get a fast line to *him*, then get to the net via his T1s. The only connection I could get in the apt. I was in was ISDN. The phone company techs laughed when I asked about a T1 because Verizon wouldn't upgrade the lines into my "low rent" neighborhood. Woof.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
I actually tried to do just everything that artical just explained with these expensive 'LAN connector modems' back in like '95 that varied between 1-7Mbit depending on distance.
From where I lived, I was on the same CO as a business that I worked with that had a real T1 (which at the time was more insain speeds then as recongized now).
I tryed to get a 'dry copper pair' from us-west (now qwest as everyone knows), but they refused saying they were all out. I tryed to pull a few different ends of people I knew but to no avial, to this day I know that they had plenty of dry copper laying around in the ground...still pisses me off to this day.
I'm hardly a neophyte when it comes to technical stuff, but a lot of this article went over my head. Am I alone here? Maybe I'm just tired right now.
It's really that easy.
All you're ordering from the phone company is a pair of copper wires going from point A to point B. The names differ depending on the phone company, but that's all it is. Two pieces of copper wire, which go from your house to your friend's house.
Now, within reason, you can pump anything you want across that wire. Voice, ordinary modem data, etc.
DSL is simply a special kind of 56k modem. It carries the data exactly the same way as an ordinary modem, but it uses a few tricks so that you can use the telephone line at the same time. For one thing, it carries the data at higher frequencies than voice communications - that's how it doesn't interfere with voice. The next thing is that it doesn't load down the telephone line enough for the telephone company's equipment to detect that a phone is off-hook. But aside from that, it's just a 56k modem.
An ordinary modem is restricted to run no higher than about 3kHz, leaving a small pipe to carry the data. On the other hand, DSL typically starts at about 5kHz, and depending on circuit (line) quality, can go up to about 256kHz. That's a lot more bandwidth than a 56k modem has available; as a result, using 56k modem modulation techniques (QUAM, it's called, "QUadrature Amplitude Modulation"), you can carry a lot more data.
If you connect two DSL modems to the copper pair that you get from the telephone company, they should connect and communicate, just like two 56k modems on the same line. (Hell, you could even do it simultaneously!) That's all there is to it.
An established ISP merely has the telephone company connect a modem at the phone company's central office. Today, they're usually built into your "loop card", which is the device that connects your telephone line to the switching system.
Problems with a do-it-yourself copper line from the phone company could arise with distance (since the dry pair will probably go to the phone company and will be manually patched on the other customer's dry pair) and with EMI line coils. (Telephone companies will often put inductors across the line to help with stability for voice communications; often, these interfere with the high frequency DSL signal.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The dis org crew have mapped out all kinds of open 802.11b networks in San Francisco, and as part of the demonstrations of how bad this practice can be, actully logged into these networks from a point accross the bay in the Berkeley hills. That's a distance of 10-12 miles, and as I recall they were using only about $100 worth of special antennas and adapters into a standard wavelan card on a FreeBSD laptop. So, if you have line of sight, you can obviously go more than your 2.5 miles with some inexpensive antennas. There's also a bunch of folks doing that down in Australia with old DBS type dishes from a sat tv outfit that went out of business-clearly 802.11 will meet your distance needs assuming line of sight. Here's a site I found with some FAQs about antennas and such. Good luck.
ehintz
If you haven't read Cringley before, he's in an area where he can't get DSL access. However, if you can talk a business (who has a T-1 or better) or a local ISP to let you set one end of your connection there, then you're in business.
And just think, you'd have your own DSL, on your own private loop, *without PPPoE*!
While Roaring Penguin's PPPoE kicks butt, PPPoE is still a messy kludge, and being able to get away from it is reason enough to attempt something like this.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They also claimed to not know what dark fiber was (the same as dry-copper but in fiber-optic cable).
That article was worthless. He almost even seems to suggest vampiring net badwidth off of a large supplier without their consent. (At least he doesn't mention actually paying for it). The line cost itself seems to be about equal to or slightly less than DSL. All in all it was a waste of bytes. (Much like this reply which would not be necessary if the article had not been posted) :)
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
It is true that connecting two homes this way is utterly useless if users on both ends are interested entirely in consuming content, but is providing no content that the other user is interested in.
Are there really that few productive net users these days? To me and many of my friends, making useful (or simply interesting) services is at least as much part of using the internet as consuming other people's content/services. It seems to me that there would not need to be many "providers" on a neighborhood network to make that network worth being a part of. If one or more individuals had most or all of the following services on their home linux/apache box:
* a chat server (icb, irc, et al)
* an smtp/imap server (just for neighborhood network users)
* a dns server
* an mtrek (or similar) server
* a pr0n ftp site (say, that crawled + mirrored TheHun.net)
* a few web site mirrors (slashdot, CNN, flemcomics.com, etc)
.. then many people might think it worth the $100 + $20/month or so to join the local network, just for 2Mbps access to these services. The providers of the web/ftp mirrors would have to have an internet connection to refresh their site's content, but that would only take a couple of hours' bandwidth a day, and then everyone else could get blinding-fast pr0n on demand all day long, instead of having to overload their poor little 56Kbps connections with it. Also, some services like the DNS server would enhance their existing internet connection (if any). It
could also open up new business opportunities for local companies which would be able to provide services, like video-on-demand, which are simply not practical to provide on the "real" (real slow, real overloaded, real abused, real mismanaged) internet.
-- Guges --
It sounds like a great idea - But the phone company will eventually catch on. What happens to your business (and all your capitol costs) when the phone company calls you up and says you can't use those pairs anymore?
And if you're going to do it, use fiber (duh).
science is a religion
Of course, just try getting a "real" T-1 anymore (at least in PacBell or Verizon territories). What they give you is HDSL with T-1 emulation at the NIU.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
As a city dweller, this sounds like it would have hack value, but little more for wiring up my house.
However, some of my family lives out in rural Washington State. The nearest telco exchange (and the only ISP) is 10 miles away, and the terrain is so hilly that 802.11 is absolutely impossible.
The way I read this, one would be able to set up a broadband connection to Stixtown with four segments of copper and a few DSL modems set up as bridges.
8 Cisco 675s @ $80/each off Ebay = $640 in upfront
costs.
4 Segments of wire @ (hypothetically) $30/month = $120/month + bandwidth charges.
If a sharing arrangment (via 802.11b?) could be set up with the nine or so houses which are line-of-sight from Stixville Farms, it might even make financial sense.
Did I miss anything, or can a DSL maven see a problem with my plans?
j.
I just spent some time talking to a friend about this article who is a telecom engineer, and he told me some interesting things about the dry-pair concept:
Folks have used dry pairs for a long time to get cheap premise-to-premise extension service, always-on for dummy terminal, and low-ball PBX to offices in the same CO serving area. Compared to a full T1, this can save you a lot of money, especially compared to what it can cost for a conditioned T1.
However, an important caveat to keep in mind is that nothing at all has been done to condition the pair for higher data rates, since all that dry-pair is rated for is low-quality voice or very slow data (300 bps). In theory, new telephone twisted pair is designed for about 2 MHz bandwidth. If we assume a new dry pair in excellent condition, and you apply the bandwidth formula which includes distance, you can exceed 50 Mbps under 2,000 feet. At 20,000 feet, you can reach 1.6 Mbps. Note these are maximums and do not assume significant disturbers, such as existence of ISDN pairs, other T1 pairs, or nearby RF interference. Typically, only one traditional data pair is allowed per binder group due to the crosstalk artifacts, as the data transmission is symmetrical.
Anyway, the killer is that the line is unconditioned, and it can be awesome, or it can really suck. We have two runs through the local school board of unconditioned twisted pair, and one gets 1.1Mbps, and the other gets 56K, so it's pretty much a crap shoot every time as to whether you're going to get a good line, or a crappy one.
What does it mean to wake out of a dream
and be wearing someone else's shorts?
BNL, Born on a Pirate Ship (1998)
i'd better create my own anarchist ISP!!!
Would that be "Dyslexic Line Service"?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
OK, I haven't the patience to read ALL of the comments on this article, because many of you are posting complete crap.
First, this is NOT BS. It MAY really work (see below). Second, if this is over your head, go read MSNBC or shut up. Slashdot is techie oriented and you either enjoy, ignore, or go elsewhere.
Third, this has been done before. However, ILECs (big, bad old Bells and their similars) heard about this and decided that an alarm circuit was NOT the same as a dry pair - they started putting filters on them so people couldn't run them as T1 circuits. This is what I heard several years ago before DSL became popular - and this may not be entirely true. I heard this from a Bell guy and they routinely lie, out of habit. So Crigley is not inventing anything new here, but is merely popularizing it. And I see nothing wrong with that, except:
Fourth: On a mailing list I am on, this URL was posted. A Cisco Jock, with many years of ISP/NSP experience, said that anyone doing this could get into big trouble if this 'alarm circuit' was causing trouble as it was being used inappropriately, and could be socked with $10K in costs and lose the line. I noticed an anonymous coward posting something similar, above, I wonder if it was the same guy -- anyone with specifics please respond.
So, if in spite of all this, you want to proceed, let me give you more info (and enough rope to hang yourself with, perhaps): ILECs are required by tariffs to offer certain services at certain prices. Some of these, they don't want to offer but have to, if the customer asks. However, customer service representatives seem to be trained NOT to help you if you don't know EXACTLY what the OFFICIAL name of the service is. These are called "non-marketed services". You must know the proper name, which varies from state to state. For instance, most people don't know about call-forward-busy available in massachusetts for only $1/mo -- because it isn't marketed (also note that you have to pay a service charge each time you want to change the number forwarded too!). If you're really interested, go get a copy of the ILEC's tarriff from the appropriate state agency. I keep on meaning to, but have never got around to it.
If it wasn't for the caveats mentioned above, this would be a great idea. I have been playing with the radio based wireless stuff for a long time now (guerrilla.net) and I know that it's not reliable, high speed, and over a decent distance all at the same time (I'd say "pick two", but you might not even get 2 of 3!). But until we have addressed the issues mentioned above, this may not be a good idea.
Look for a future article on guerrilla.net on this, once we have sorted the facts out and investigated urban myths.
i used to work at an isp where dsl was no where in the near future for our customers, only because of the practices of the local phone company (read baby bell). anyway... you may also want to check in what is sometimes refered to as a BANE circuit (i believe) as this is another name for the alarm circuits.
;) ) basically hdsl over a single pair, with increased distances.
one last thing to keep in mind: if the phone company has a load coil on that pair that you plan on using, your dreams have just been killed. sorry.
either way, some new equipment is starting to surface which brings some new ideas to the table for lines like this such as hdsl2 (search on google, you'll like it
i have to say tho, the idea of moving into the old alarm company's building is a good one, too bad there weren't any around really where we were looking to do this.
"Here's 50 bucks, take this in case I get drunk and call you a bitch later." - Ricky (Vince Vaughn)Made (2001)
What do you think happens when you order a T1 from an ISP? The telco drops a circuit into their networking room, and then you pay the ISP for some amount of bandwidth.
No, not for free.
Yu have to distinguish between the pipe that carries the bandwidth (T1, DSL, modem, cable, microwave wireless, etc), and the bandwidth itself.
Its mainly the ISP's that are frustrated. They WANT to sell you bandwidth, but in order for them to do so, they also have to tell you to pay at least as much to telco for the pipe to get it to you.
And at least in West Michigan, its all but impossible to actually GET a dry pair, to anywhere..
This article is a bit dated. This is what DSL was originally supposed to be, until someone got the bright idea to make DSLAMS with thousands of ports.
I remember trying to get an alarm circuit from telco over three years ago. (I work for an ISP, and would have just connected it to our network from my home)
What would make for a much more usefull article, would be tips on how to actually get point-to-point dry lines from various telcos.
The distance from the CO being something like 5 miles maximum for a DSL connection to work; this is a signal limitation due to attenuation from the DSL equipment at the CO to the Cisco 678 (or whatever brand you use) sitting on the floor in your room. Doesn't hooking up two dry pairs together basically just create a loop? If so, it would seem that the maximum distance either modem could be from the CO would be 2.5 miles...or if one person is only 1 mile from the CO, the other would have to be within 4 miles, etc.
Someone please correct me if I am wrong.
But there are a few requirements to be met....
First, the pairs must be unloaded. Long telco pairs suffer from frequency response degradation due to the capicitance between the two twisted wires. These in essense form a long, distributed capacitor. On runs over a couple of miles, telcos routinely put small inductors (called load coils) in series with the line about every half mile or so. These make the response of the lines better at voice frequencies (300-3000 hz) but much worse at frequencies above these.
Secondly, the pairs must not have what's called bridge taps on them. A bridge tap usually occurs at a junction point (at an intersection of two streets, for example). The pair might have another set of lines bridged across it that run down the other street. This line is open ended so it does not appear as a resistor, but it does cause capacitance to be shunted across the line.
The wire guage of the pair can have a great bearing upon it's suitability for high speed data transmission. Ironically, older cables frequently have thicker wire in them. Most telco cables installed in the last 20 years or so are 26 guage or smaller.
Finally, the pair must be balanced to ground. Many pairs have leakage to ground that can vary from a few hundred ohms to a megohm or more. The reason for this it that for lightning and other forms of overvoltage protection (such as a car knocking down a pole and having the power wires touch the phone wires) telcos put carbon protectors from each side of the line to ground.
Moisture, surges and plain pollution can cause these carbons to become unequal in value, causing the common mode rejection of the line to degrade. This can cause hum, crosstalk, static clicks and all kinds of other nasties that will ruin the line for data transmission.
For years, telcos have been running/trying to run high bandwith over twisted pairs with varying degrees of success. A good example of this is the hi-fi (20-15,000 hz) program circuits used by radio stations to link their studios and transmitters. These lines typically have response from 20 hz-15 khz +/- a half decibel, and noise
(hum crosstalk, etc.) running at 30 DBRN or better (telcos have always used the term DBRN to measure noise; 0 DBRN being -90 Dbm. I guess they assume that that's about as good as a twisted pair will ever be). 30 DBRN equates to a noise level of -60 Dbm. I've even heard of a telco successfully sending analog video over twisted pairs a few years ago. They were able to get a VHS quality picture (about 1.5 Mhz of bandwith)over about 4 miles (approx 21,000 feet) of twisted pair. The fact that DSL runs at all is amazing, and a testament to solid engineering techniques.
I hope this has been helpful.....
That form a 115 Kilobaud bidirectional serial data link that's 28+ miles long. They work using spread spectrum in the 902-928 mhz Part 15 (unlicensed) band and put out almost a watt.
I have 100 feet of coax and a five element yagi antenna on each end of the link. I've heard of others successfully using these mountaintop to mountaintop over distances approaching 100 miles. They are small units and cost about 1500 bucks for the pair. There's no special stuff needed; the system looks just like a null modem cable to the computers. Why spend all this $$ for DSL stuff when you can get wireless for the same cost?
Something I dont get, this probaly sounds really stupid, but can u use normal DSL modems or do u need special DSL bridges or something.?
For example, can u get 2 of my mates dsl modem, get a bit of cat 5, and connect em together and they will work?
Im in australia, so i dont really see some places to get these modems...
And if u do need these different bridges, exactly how do they differ to normal DSL modems?
Cheers
Luke
Ive done it at work a year ago... But in Argentina you have some few differences:
- The dry lines cost 3000 dollars to install. (the monthly fee es about $50)
- Telefonica will give you the POORER lines they can get, because they dont want you to use them for anything useful.
Ive tried HDSL but it didt even got the out-of-band management channel.
When I got tired of trying and shouting to the telco people, I throwed a pair of 33,6Kbps US Robotics
FUCK Telefonica
yadda yadda
You still have to pay for the internet link. Where is this giving yourself DSL? Pfft.
Pay for the DSL or fractional T1, and shaddup.
Derek
although he was his own ISP so I dont know if that counts :/
Anyway, here's the link
Cookie anyone?
And then there's this whole "copper" thing...
The only copper we have into our datacenter from the outside world is provisioned for three-phase AC. Everything else is fiber, because everything we do can easily be spat over fiber -- ATM for DSL, channelized DS3 for T1's and frac T1's/56k lines, full-rate DS3's for backbone, etc.
An ADSL connection is cheaper than a dry pair here, and we would charge much less (ADSL == dialup pricing, SDSL == serious cappuccinos).
Problem is, once you've done that, you're going to need lots of customers. And once the telco finds out you have lots of customers, they'll put load coils on your "alarm circuits".
Read the post he replied to, moron.
Wow! Cool! How 1337! Impressive! Free cookie to whoever does this first! DSL! Dribbly willie!
/. before, it's still a stupid idea because you have to at the very least get equipment and an internet connection. If you can get both for $40 a month without paying for a dry pair and you'd prefer to roll your own, congratulations! you're stupid! Put a big chalkmark on your back, I have a kit for you to turn a Tivo into a Linux box without a keyboard or network interface when I meet you! Only $200!
Oh, but wait, everybody has known you can do this for years, it's even been mentioned on
Telcos that sell unprovisioned lines sell them with basically a gaurantee of continuty. You see, kids, the way some alarms work is something triggers it, and it completes a CIRCUIT to a central station, hence the term ALARM CIRCUIT. Circuit, like circular, like the file this article belongs in. Any signaling, *DSL, ISDN, touch tones, morse code or smoke signals that happen to work are a bonus. If they feel like putting a bandpass filter on your unprovisioned line, they'll do so, and your only real recourse is to stop paying for the line.
If you're calling your RBOC as Alarms Inc. and appear legit, you can buy dry pairs until you're bankrupt. Keep in mind that years ago businesses replaced their many strands of analog and low-bandwidth copper with fewer strands of digial and high-bandwidth fiber and copper, and all that telco copper doesn't just disappear, it degrades, slowly. Furthermore, they'll string twine and tin cans for you if you're willing to pay for it, the idea of the telco being "out" of anything is pretty absurd. Anyway, if you're calling as Joe Retard dba BlockStackers Intergastric and you've never dealt with the business office before you'll get "we're sold out of copper wires" and "we don't make those anymore" which if you believe makes you as big a mark as michael. If you start reading off a script ("duh, do youse have dry pairs? alarm circuits? local data lines?") you'll get more responses you deserve ("naw, all our pairs are wet. alarm circuits? what alarm circuits? we're out of local data lines, all we have left are long distance analog lines")
So to summarize, the article is stupid, about a concept that is old and stupid. Kudos, michael the slashdot editor.
What might be cool, or at least cooler, is if some enterprising souls cut the telco out of the loop completely, stringing wire house to house and using their DSL and 802.11 equipment to form a neighborhood network that could share an internet connection or two with NAT of some flavor. You could tack some functionality onto a dhcp server so you get assigned forwarded ports based on your assigned IP so everybody can still use their real/windows media players and set up Q3 servers. You could apply traffic shaping so bandwidth is efficiently distributed. Then, you could give it a clever name, like Dorknet or iTimewaste. Then, you could set up voice over IP so people wouldn't have to rely on local telco for telephony. Then, you could offer emergency services on the REAL number, 912.
912 operator: Dorknet 912, please state the nature of the emergency.
Ron Schlub: My house is on fire!
912 operator: Oh. Make sure you get your DSL and 802.11 equipment out of the house, we need it back if you're not using it.
...and...
912 operator: Dorknet 912, please state the nature of the emergency.
Joe Schmoe: I've cut my hand, I'm bleeding all over the place!
912 operator: Yeah, try not to bleed near the phone, those VoIP bridges are expensive.
So thanks again, michael. I'm looking forward to you posting two articles I'm working on: "Null Modem Networking" about using PPPD to connect two LINUX COMPUTERS without using ETHERNET! (from the creative-uses-for-db9-connectors dept) and "Look Ma, No Power Supply!" about using BATTERIES to power COMPUTERS without using power from an outlet. (from the no-more-alternating-current-for-me-thanks dept.) Oooh! Cookie for whoever figures out those posers first! Put on your thinking caps, you're in for some brain busting tonight!
AC's cheerfully ignored
Yes, there are snags -- and tricks to getting around them -- but in almost all cases it's possible to set up high quality network connections throughout a community. LARIAT, the group mentioned in the article, connects schools, community organizations, families, and individuals as well as for for-profit businesses.
At the moment, LARIAT is organized as a 501(c)(12) non-profit mutual benefit society.
Note the words "mutual benefit." This means that while it is non-profit, the group is not a charity. It's motivated by enlightened self interest. By pooling their money and putting their heads together, all members of the group (and the group is only allowed to do things which are in its members' interests) are able to get things which would be unobtainable or prohibitively expensive otherwise.
Some of LARIAT's members are non-profits, such as schools and community organizations. (We're glad to offer them an economical way to get onto the Net in a city where good net access is expensive if you go it alone.) Others are for-profit businesses. (We've had some real success stories in which small businesses grew and blossomed when we got them on the Net.) Other members are simply families and individuals who find it beneficial to participate in a users' group and community Internet. Anyone in the community is welcome.
It's important to remember that a community network does not have to be a non-profit. In fact, there are advantages to making it "not-for-profit" or even for-profit. No one can hold a personal stake in a non-profit, and non-profits generally cannot borrow money from a bank (though they occasionally get government loans). So, it's much harder for a non-profit group to get capital to deploy equipment. If you're not a non-profit, you can have investors -- particularly local businesses -- who are willing to accept a low rate of return or even no on their investments,knowing that their businesses will benefit greatly from good connectivity.
So, being a non-profit isn't a necessary condition. It's just the way we've set things up for now. In fact, our Board has considered that it might one day best serve the members' interests (again, the group can only do what's best for its members!) if the group relinquished its non-profit status and became a "private club." If we decide to do a big wireless build-out that requires lots of capital equipment, this will probably happen.
--Brett Glass
Burk BDT-115 RF data links.
Check them out at www.burk.com
Would you call it ... MyDSL?
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT