Slashdot Mirror
Mobile Internet Down Under
Anonymous Coward writes "A truck, a sat dish and a sunburnt country. When you absolutely positively need to connect to the Internet, why not carry your own broadband connection with you? One Aussie guy and his wife are doing just that -- packed up the lot and have gone on the road, so far roughly 3000km. He says 'Of course nothing is simple. The salespeople were convinced that I couldn't line up the dish -- it took me about an hour to figure out and now roughly takes about ten minutes each time I set up. They told me that the wireless gear wouldn't talk to the modem, they told me that my Debian workstation wouldn't be supported, they told me that the BOC wouldn't talk to me, they told me that I needed training, they told me that it wasn't done and it wouldn't work, they told me that I'd void my warranty, they told me so many stories..'"
I don't know how powerful two-way telstra satellite is, but I know that satellite uplink stations are supposed to be taken very seriously. There are restrictions on power levels, aiming accuracy, signal polarisation, etc. It's my understanding that you only have to be out by 1 degree and you could really piss off some satellite company by interfering with their own uplinks.
Perhaps Telstra 2way is weak enough that no-one really cares...
Whenever you have a huge subscriber base, you can bet your life that most of them will say stupid shit all the time, will expect you to support all the software they have, and try to get you to support their printer and scanner, for example:
"I can't use email, it's not working",
"Well - let me see... your POP mailbox is OK, that means I can see your email box is OK from here",
"No, I can't send...",
"Euh... OK our network monitor doesn't show any problems"
"Well when I hit send and receive it takes forever,"
"Is the bar moving?"
"Yes, but really slowly, your server is so slow,"
It starts to dawn on you
"Umm... is it a large email?"
"Just a photo I scanned..."
"What format did you use?"
"The default, TIFF"
"OK... sorry... you need to use smaller files"
Follows the client desperately trying to get you to tell them how to reduce images, how to scan, because they can only ever send the whole scan platter even if it's just a small photo because the autosizing got switched off.
This is just one example among many. Therefore, monkeys with scripts do tend to end up in support. Those "in the know" just never take calls, and support will not help with weird configs because they can't. Jeez, I'm not even sure some ISPs have competent techs. Certainly not in my experience. The good techs all go work as network managers in big companies, stuff like that. ISPs are no longer the artisans they once were, it's all industrialised bullshit. The killer is that most don't even maintain FAQs properly.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I'm sitting in the Scottish Highlands with a 2-way connection to Hughes Europe provided by Bridge Broadband (just a reseller - www.bridgebroadband.co.uk). They do 2-way for 99 per month and are pretty good about non-standard setups - seem to take a line something like while they won't guarentee to keep you running if your not using their specified configuration they'll have a damm good shot at trying :-). As a reseller I suspect they're the size of three men and a dog - but there is definate advantages to having what is effectively a 'mon & pop' satellite ISP.
Apparantly there's now a fair sized market for this sort of thing in northern scotland - for example many rural post offices have satellite connections to link into the post office's IT systems.
Don't know about roaming per se, but what I think is their main salesman makes a great point of demo'ing satellite broadband by turning up at a seminar/demo, setting up his portable dish outside the venue and having the whole caboodle running in about 10 or 15 minutes. Again I doubt they would officially support it, but they'd probably smile benignly on one's attempts. Anyway take home message must be that aligning the dish really cannot be that hard given the right equipment.
As the guy who is doing the travelling, I figured, what better time to do some karma-whoring than when the story is about you:-)
:-)
:-(
While it took us a long time to get it all working, the payoff in life-style change was well worth the effort. I just fielded a phone call from a guy in Sydney who couldn't believe that I really existed, that I was in Australia and that he could phone me.
Next I'll be famous
I've gotta admit that my web-site is pretty bare at the moment, you can slashdot it if you like, because it's safely on the wired end of the net - but there is only a placeholder because I keep being asked to explain what it is I did.
You'll notice from the photos that the dish sits on a pretty big frame. That takes about an hour to bolt together - if I do it on my own, all in all 18 bolts, then I get some beefy guys to help me lift the dish on, then plug in all the bits, power it up and on average 10 minutes later I connect - that is if Optus hasn't changed satellites or frequencies without sending me an update first
Over the solar-car challenge during October 18-28, we'll travel down the middle of Australia and the Sungroper team will help me setup the dish every night.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email me, or post here, onno at itmaze dot com dot au.
--
|>>?
Optus requires that everytime I setup the dish a polarisation check is completed. They can only do that from the BOC. I basically setup the dish, use the polarisation map they provide, get online and send them an email.
:-)
:-)
So-far I've setup the dish eight times in vastly different locations and not had any polarisation errors.
The only thing they told me is not to put my head between the transmitter and the dish
They tell me that they'll send me an installer certificate, because I seem to know what I'm doing , but I'm not holding my breath
|>>?
This made us laugh out loud.
:-)
:-)
:-)
My wife was sitting next to me and reading over my shoulder at the time
It all started the other way around. I asked her if she'd like to see Australia and she said "yes". Then I had to figure out how to pay for it
*That's* where the dish came in
|>>?
ROTFL
:-)
I'm safely behind an Optus firewall and my IP is private. Not because I don't want people to ping me, but because I'd rather not deal with SoBIG and other rubbish over my paid link...
Satellite internet is wonderful, but I'm really glad I'm on a private network away from the rough and tumble of the 'net
|>>?
Back braking is the word.
:-)
I left a crane behind in Perth that was capable of lifting the dish from the van because it was too heavy - and I'm looking at alternatives at the moment.
That's why I currently need two guys to lift the dish from the van.
The line-up isn't really worth the extra motor-gear, even though I'm now missing out on some satellite TV
An extra dish for TV is being looked at, it'll be lighter than all the motor gear and I won't loose Internet connectivity and have to re-do a cross-poll everytime I want to watch TV.
|>>?
I'm 35. I was born in a country town, and back then, our oven was a wood burner. Our heating was by a kerosene heater - I still remember it. Utilities and services that we take for granted in the city take a while to get out to the bush because rural Australia is mostly quite sparsely populated. A large proportion of our population lives in a small number of cities, and the rest of the country could be categorised as 'mostly empty'.
Telecommunication capabilities in the more remote regions are still considered to be below standard. This issue is one of the major sticking points in the Australian government's attempts to fully privatise our (effective monopoly) major telecommunications carrier, Telstra. There is a fear that a privatised Telstra would not see value in providing service to remote regions, and would not install lines or would let maintenance go, further isolating people.
Not really, for one the roof isn't strong enough. The other issue is that the roof is two and a half meters above the ground.
The original design called for the dish to be mounted on the back of a truck as you suggest, but if you need to go shopping for milk or eggs, you need to take the dish down.
We briefly looked at putting it all on a trailer, but voted against it because it would look portable and someone was likely to "borrow" it and we were thinking of towing a caravan at the time, which sort of ruled that out.
The wireless base-station is the very least of my problems. It is plugged in and switched on most of the time when the dish is online. Of all my equipment it's so far been the most reliable.
|>>?