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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..'"
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.
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.
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.
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