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..'"
Most ISPs (and I would imagine Satellite ISPs are no different) operate wholly on scripts. If you deviate from what is accepted on those scripts, you're not supported. In most cases, simply running anything other than Windows or (occasionally) Mac OS/Mac OS X is enough to lose your support.
I had an ISP once who wouldn't even help me out when the link went completely down and the DSL modem couldn't even sync... because I ran Linux. They begged and pleaded with me, "Do you have a Windows machine you can use?"...
Given that things like this are the norm, do you honestly expect some guy in a truck with a Debian box to get support?
Amazing accomplishment. If I were the person who pulled this off, I'd send a long letter to the CEO of my ISP, telling them what people can do with "unsupported" setups. Not like it'd make much of a difference. The only way ISPs can find enough "qualified" techs is if the only "qualification" is "can read from a script and follow simple orders".
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
... where can one get 2-way satellite internet connectivity in various parts of the world; how much does it cost [he had a ton of trouble with some of these options]; and where do you buy it?
When I was looking at the Debian sat-dish mini howto, they had some lists of satellites, but I found no way to actually buy in. Even emails went unanswered.
For me, it's the Baltic region (Lithuania). But it could be Rotterdam, or Liverpool, or anywhere I roam. So a list of the different options might be useful.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Celebrating 30 years of Electricity
:)
:)
In some cases, it really is that bad. In others, especially out where he's going, it's a lot less than that. I remember living several places within 3 hours outside Perth in the mid 80s which didn't have mains electricity. Fun times
And we have almost universal phone service. In many remote areas, Telstra, while sucking in oh-so-many-ways, has very cool payphones that have solar panels on the roof and satcom gear hidden up there too. They're basically an entirely self-contained payphone. You put them down somewhere, point the antenna, and hey presto, phone service. Local call area is the size of Europe in some cases, but has only 20 other phones in it, etc.
Hmm... I think with some proper tools and software you should be able to auto-align the dish - I mean, Meade telescopes do it if you provide it with a proper reference point.
With a GPS, a level-sensor, some kind of direction sensor (since it's such a big antenna, differential GPS on two points might work out pretty good), and then some algorithm to "wiggle" the antenna toward the strong signal point once the aforementioned sensor array moved it to the general region, I think he should be able to park his van, unload the dish, and hit a "auto-search" and have internet connection in no time.
now, of course, to properly align a dish in the middle of nowhere under 10 minutes is no small feat, and maybe he is automating it all anyway... just random ramblings.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Americans seem to forget we have sheep stations bigger than Texas in Australia.
We've got a couple of trailer setups that we use for high-speed video conferencing anywhere in Australia. They're a ruggedised "4wd" trailer with a 1.2m dish and a 12V inverter, hanging off the back of one of the 4wd's. Takes about 10 minutes to setup from parking to surfing anywhere you can see up and north.
"Yes, I made those changes. Let me reboot. [3 seconds] Nope, still broken. Yes it rebooted, I have a really fast computer. Okay, I'll hold for level 2."
Once you get past the drones at level one, you can get to the people who are allowed to tell you things like "the router serving your entire county is down" (this actually happened). I asked why the level one guys couldn't simply say "Nobody in San Diego has service" - the level two guy claimed that they not only weren't allowed to deviate from the script but in fact would be punished if they were caught! (Hence the term "drone" - if you weren't one before you started there, just wait a few months...)
I've had ISP tech support people develop that confused tone when I mentioned I was using Debian Linux ... so I just said "it's Red Hat" and you could almost hear the light come on over the phone. It doesn't happen so much now, though.
/var/log/syslog..."
;-)
Recently, I've had the pleasant experience of ISP techs asking what OS I was using, and when I responded with "the firewall/router is Debian, my desktop is Red Hat" they've (a) been pleased they're dealing with a user who knows what an OS is and (b) gone "aah.... good. OK, in
It's always nice to see that even in a job as bad as ISP tech support, some people are interested and know more than they absolutely have to. I tend to ask for particular techs now (the sort who when I say "my DSL modem just lost sync" don't respond with "OK, now click start->..."). Less frustration for me and them
You are basically correct. My dish is technically an uplink station, but I have no control over power. I can only control aim and polarisation.
Aim is achieved by using a set-top box in install mode, then I maximize the signal. Polarisation is read off a map and adjusted accordingly.
When I get online, I send an email to the BOC to get a cross-poll check done so I don't splat over other people's signal, but I've set it up seven times so far and have yet to get asked to change the polarisation.
The accuracy is waaay less than 1 degree. I could calculate it, but using a 16mm bolt, the difference between connection and not is 1/8 of a bolt-turn.
|>>?
One day I made the tactical error of telling the guy on the phone that I was actually running Debian and that I was running Win98/WinNT, whatever he wanted, in a VMware box.
He immediately assumed that the problem lay there...
(Suffice to say it wasn't)
The Gilat software seems to work OK under VMware, but there are some tricks like needing to disconnect the transmitter from the modem so the software can talk to the modem, because otherwise it ignores the ethernet port - go figure.
My biggest fear was that Gilat had done some funky IP/Ethernet stuff and that it required an actual ethernet port, but my fears luckily proved unfounded.
At one stage I was looking at bolting a Windows PC under the dish as well - gladly that didn't need to happen!
|>>?
Direcway says, what, 10 times on their site that you cant use their dish for mobile internet? Then you pull up a business website and they sell a fully loaded mobile satellite internet truck... Its just that they dont want you to know that you really can use it anywhere and they just dont feel like offering it to home users or rv users or internet nuts.
*There's Klingons on the starboard bow, scrape em off Jim!*