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Really Remote Internet Access
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."
Do you think he is worried about identity theft?
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.
were he really fast, he could use one half of a set of headphones for listening, and the other half as a microphone, if they were small enough. Earbuds work really well for this purpose, he just needs to split a jack and add another stereo jack. A little wire-rigging and he'd be set for less than 5 bucks.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Surely he's using Tiger by now.
Three hours away from the nearest woman.
I wonder what sites he vists most often?
I thought satellite internet was downlink only, with the uplink being provided by a phone modem. What is this guy using that is bi-directional?
So that we can legitimately claim that there is literally no place on earth safe from being slashdotted.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
...what one thing would you bring with you? apparently this man chose the wrong answer as a child
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
When the rainy season happens and his solar panels become useless it's bye-bye World of Warcraft, hello Pin-the-Leech-on-the-Jaguar!
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.
.3 to .6 of a second delay, talking to people within a few hundred kilometers). I'd say, all in all, pretty crappy experience.
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
But its better than nothing I suppose.
.
Err, 480ms rather. I cant do math. Damnit, there goes my whole post.
.
If he doesn't have a credit card.. how is he paying for this mysterious satellite?
Or is he pirating it?
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Sase
"It's the opposite of that."
Because the carnivorous jaguars are much worse than the vegetarian jaguars, believe me!
Insert witty sig here.
The days of being amazed by remote connectivity are over. For several years it has been feasible to setup VSAT powered by generator or solar. You can get up and running for less than $5,000 and a couple of hundred dollars / month.
The Regional-BGAN has been operational for a couple of years, but has been very expensive and a max speed of 144kbps and a foot print that only covers middle east, europe and northern africa. $700 up front and $10 / mb.
In the next couple of months, Inmarsat will be bringing their new I-4 satellite online to be used with BGANs. This will provide speeds of almost 500kbps (depending on how you like to calculate your overhead) in a unit the size of a laptop. Coverage initially extends from Europe to southern africa and central australia.
By the end of '06 the network will be almost global - including the amazon.
Just for the record, I've done Skype and other VoIP over the RBGAN. It works ok with a similar delay to any other satellite phone. But the cost is still quite high due to the cost / mb.
So, it really is a god-forsaken place after all.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Turn the globe up a bit and rotate it just right and you can get it so you can see nothing but blue. Those are the south seas of the Pacific. There's no reason to go there at all unless you're whaling. . .or in the 'Round the World single hand race.
It's nasty "country" where the wind has thousands of miles of scope to build up waves. Some years ago one of the competitors in the race capsized in those seas. She got an emergency signal out to the orginizers, but with no shipping lanes within a thousand miles or so the only one around to attempt a rescue was one of the other competitors, who, as it happened, was sleeping at the time.
How did they get in touch with him to alert him to the situation?
They emailed him.
KFG
...in IEEE's magazine Spectrum..
Bill Woodcock of Packet House travelling the world and setting up Internet connections in remote locations.
Antarctic Culture - The Seasons
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.
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.
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/
There are many LEO satellites (notably, Iridium sats in polar orbits and GlobalStar sats in various inclined orbits) that provide internet access for non-equatorial regions.* Granted, speeds are 1200bps to 9600bps and it will be horrendously expensive (around $1.60 per minute last I checked), but it can be done and often is done on oceangoing ships large and small for sending GPS telemetry back home and also so the crew can email their landlubber friends.
Now, for *broadband* satellite internet, AFIAK you are limited to geostationary satellites around the equator. Bill Gates' Teledesic broadband internet-via-satellite venture, which would have been LEO, fell flat on it's face and I am not aware of any alternatives. I suppose you could buy four or eight Iridum phones (at $1,000 a pop) and gang them together into some kind of Frankenstein dialup-speed connection. I hope you are rich or you'll soon be decalaring bankruptcy!!
* Granted, GlobalStar does not cover the poles very well. IIRC there is also Inmarsat, but I'm not sure if they do data?
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
has full internet access via satellite. His latest project: setting up Skype for phone service
Combining a high latency connection with an app that demands low latency? Good luck.
I live on Niuatoputapu, Tonga. 1-3 months to the next town (whenever the boat comes). I often have to clean the sparkplug in my generator before booting.
My net connection is 14.4 dialup that cuts out every five minutes... long enough to load Slashdot and POP email.
The distance and latency problem is indeed the main issue. I've only worked with Starband systems so i can't talk for the other providers out there but....
typically i saw a ping time of about 600-800 ms. Working with ssh over a connection such as this is a bit hard but if you know your keyboard shortcuts you can do alright. You just have to think about what your going to do before hand and not be addicted to the backspace command. Another option is to edit files using emacs or vim's ssh remote access method.
Starband's 480 line of modems now has the "TCP acceleration" software built in which helps out quite a bit. I suspect what happens is some sort of UDP encapsulation but please don't quote me on that one, i'm not sure of the internals. However, in practice it's quite nice. Once you use their built in http proxy loading a web page acts just like a typical broadband connection. large file-transfers in the downstream direction works very nice as well with speeds of about 100k/sec or so.
Upstream is a different matter. If I understand how the bird is working they use a round robin arraignment for receiving the uplinks from the client ground stations. This means that you have to wait your turn before you can x-mit data up to the bird. Latency kicks in again and upload speeds slow down quite a bit. As of right now i've got a server uploading data files at about 11k/sec. Better than nothing though, and rather cheap and easy to setup.
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.
So, if you get 5 * +1 Funny and 5 -1 Troll, you lose 5 points, even though, logically, you should come out even. Get too many Funny mods and you can actually get banned ...
So what mods are doing to compensate for the defective slashmath is modding funny stuff as informative instead ...