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Really Remote Internet Access

Posted by Zonk on from the can-we-have-a-souvenir? dept.

RexDart writes "The BBC Online has profiled Duane DeFreitas, an adventurer and guide living in Guyana. He's three hours away from the nearest town (in the dry season; three days away when it's raining), yet has full internet access via satellite. His latest project: setting up Skype for phone service, as soon as he can import a microphone and speakers. Yet more proof that the internet is truly everywhere. Mind the jaguar."

7 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Mic & Speakers by fembots · · Score: 4, Interesting

    setting up Skype for phone service, as soon as he can import a microphone and speakers

    Is there a software which turns text into audio for Skype, and turns audio from Skype into text? Can the normal text-to-speech software do that for Skype?

    To him it'll be like an IM client, but the other party might enjoy talking/listening instead of typing.

    --
    Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
  2. Re:Performance of Skype over Sat? by PornMaster · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Since skype uses TCP, it'll be even worse than satellite phones... since there need to be ACKs.

    So one high-latency trip to send the packet, and another one for the ACK.

    --
    500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
  3. Re:Performance of Skype over Sat? by epiphani · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I looked at satalite access a few years ago when I was looking at buying a house too far out of town to get broadband.

    Geosynchronous Orbit is at 35,786 Kilometers. It takes light 120ms to get from earth to a geosync satalite. (source).
    Hence, 240ms round trip. Back and forth, you to your provider. Another 240ms to get a responce.

    The only reason I'd consider satalite access would be for bulk downloads. 540ms on an ssh session would quickly drive me insane.

    So add that half second to whatever routing overhead there is involved in skype (I usually see about .3 to .6 of a second delay, talking to people within a few hundred kilometers). I'd say, all in all, pretty crappy experience.

    But its better than nothing I suppose.

    --
    .
  4. Re:Performance of Skype over Sat? by seanmeister · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The latency issue is what kept me away from satellite.

    I live about 15 miles outside of Deming, NM - corner of No and Where. My only options were dialup, satellite, and (hallelujah) SWNM.com, a local ISP that uses Alvarion BreezeAccess II hardware to provide wireless access to a decently-sized chunk of the county.

    Most of my work is with clients back east, and satellite latency would have driven me nuts. I found the Alvarion hardware for about 60% less cost than what the ISP charges for it, so I bought it and signed up - so far so good! They advertise the service as 250kbps, but I'm typically running around 400kbps, give or take. Probably a step back for someone used to cable, but I've never had cable internet, so I'm satisfied with it.

  5. IP over Ham by cyberfunk2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've heard you can do IP over shortwave radio (i.e. Ham Radio), would this be a reliable/ reasonable option in this case?

    In what cases does that sort of system work? Is it high bandwidth ?

    I'm hoping for some knowledgable Ham slashdotter here.

  6. sat access in the amazon by bobsalt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My brother has been using sat for internet 3 hours from nearest paved road for last year or so. It works great! I took a grandstream budget-tone(preconfigured to connect to my asterisk server) with me last summer when I went down there to visit. It blew them away when I called time and temperature at a local bank and the audio was crystal clear. They laughed at me when I tried to call my wife and all she heard was strange noises-lol Oddly enough we could hear her fine. Very weird to hear a perfectly clear voice that far out in the middle of no where. The radio phone going to a little town 80km away sounds ok, but you can tell its over a radio.

    My brother has started using skype and its bearable. You almost have to say over at the end of each sentence.

    I set up a wrt54g running http://www.openwrt.org/ and it acts as a little ap there for them. The really cool thing is, I left it running openvpn, so when ever they fire up the generator it will connect up to my server. I thought using putty over a dial up was bad, this is around 800ms-1000ms, still very cool to be able to ssh into a router in the middle of the amazon. Ya, I know I'm a nerd....

    the only bummer about the sat service is you have to use a windows pc for the connector. It has some client software that runs to connect it..

    here's their website if anyone know someone that needs internet in south america for $65 a month

    http://www.gilat.com/

  7. Remote remote Internet access by Dissectional · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I recently finished a trek to the Mount Everest Base Camp in Nepal. Prior to entering the more remote areas ( towards Tengboche, out of Nache for those that care ) there was a sattelite Internet provider operating. It worked out to be around $10 Australian dollars for ten minutes. What was funny is that I did this whilist the rest of the country was under a declared state of emergency due to the maoist problems, whereupon the king severed all telecommunications in the country. Obviously, the sattelite feeds couldn't be tampered with in this way ( they literally used side cutters to chop data lines in the towns and Kathmandu ) - so while everyone else was cut off from the world, myself and a mate were able to send e-mails to friends back home - dispite the fact that we were half way up a mountain.