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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'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.
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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.
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