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What To Do When Broadband is Not An Option?
professorguy writes "I've been on the internet since 1984 (back before email addresses had @'s). But it looks like we're coming to the end of an era. From my home, I have 26.4 kbps dial-up access to the internet (you read that right). Since I am a hospital network administrator, it would be nice to do some stuff remotely when I am on 24/7 call. However, no cable or DSL comes anywhere near my house and because of the particular topography of my property (I'm on a heavily-forested, north-facing hillside), satellite is also not available. Heck, cell phones didn't even work here until January. So far, the technical people I've asked all have the same advice for reasonable connectivity: move. Move out of the house my wife and I built and lived in for 20 years. Has it really come to this? Am I doomed to be an internet refugee? Is this really my only option? Do you have an alternative solution for me?"
If you now have a cell tower within range, wouldn't cell phone based broadband be a possibility? Not the fastest, but much better than an analog modem.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
If the problem is simply getting around a hill, maybe you can set up some kind of fixed-position high speed wireless that will relay a satellite link from somewhere with a clear vantage. It doesn't sound easy to set up, but if it's a choice between that and moving...
Breakfast served all day!
Do you mean GSM cellphones? You might be able to get GPRS in that case. (EDGE would be even better!) That should be between 60kbps and 80kbps, which is equivalent or faster than ISDN. It will be more expensive, but since it's for work, you might be able to offset the costs to your employer. Also, did you look into ISDN offerings? Back in the early nineties, we switched to ISDN and it was a different world from dial-up. Frankly... I know some people do not see ISDN as broadband because of the speed, but well, it would improve your connection a lot.
Finally, you say sattelite is not available... How is that possible? Sattelites are are accessible as long as you can position your dish correctly. I have no experience with it, but I don't think you're bound to your local ISPs for that.
For the "selfmade" option, you could perhaps ask a friend in vicinity that has broadband and make a point-to-point connection between his place and yours. That's of course assuming you have a friend in vicinity that has broadband....
Otherwise, yes, move.... But I wouldn't do it either.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Strange, I just posted this earlier today! : http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=305523&cid=20712265 As an Oklahoma resident, feel lucky if you even get DSL. Until Real Competition occurs, there will be no decent high-speed Internet in most areas outside medium cities. If a small town/rural Oklahoma region has even slow DSL, it is probably because the Law States they must have it order to be the telco monopoly in that area, etc... Though the phone company may claim service is available in my RURAL area, bridge-taps galore and 1970's equipment/wiring make this a non-reality. So.... I got a HAM Radio license, Bought 2 towers and 2 TR-6000 radios (http://www.tranzeo.com/products/radios/TR-6000-Series) with 2 high-gain directional dish antennas and 2 bi-directional amplifiers. Thanks to a strategically purchased rental property IN TOWN ON A HILL, I bridge the connection from its DSL to my home. Normally, the Amps are extreme overkill, but I live in the middle of the Greenbelt of Oklahoma (think dense 30-40ft. Oak Trees) and the Fresnel Zones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_zone) are a real bitch with tree leaves. Works like a champ. Why not Satellite, AWFUL Latency and VERY HIGH Prices!
If you have cell phone service, does this mean you have full service, as in 3G connectivity? If you have this, you can get an unlimited data plan on your phone and use it to connect to the Internet at something approaching acceptable speeds.
I think you're the one that missed something obvious.
How close are you to the top of the ridge? How much money do you want to spend? How friendly are you with your neighbors? If you have line of sight to someone else who has line of site to someone else who has HSIPC (high-speed IP connectivity), or even direct line of sight to someone, then you can probably setup a 802.11[bgn] link.
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Well, you can always get a PCMCIA card from one of the big cell companies (I'm a big fan of Verizon's data network, but ymmv) and just buy an unlimited data plan. If your employer is at all halfway decent, they will be willing to cover half this cost.
If you don't want to do that, you can pay out the nose and have a cable company or telco run out dedicated data lines. They may say they're not willing to do this, but if there's enough technophiles in your area, then you may be able to get them motivated to wire up your area for free, or you can get your neighbors to chip in.
Or perhaps your employer could run a private link to your house and let you use that. Depends on how much they like you and what their IT budget is.
Get a ham license and set up 2 packet radio stations, one with access to broadband and the other at your home. The range is insane. As far as speed goes you'd probably have to do a little research as the standard speeds aren't much better than dialup. Failing that a large wifi link (you can bump up the power a crap-ton once you have a ham license) could also work.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
Without knowing the details of where you are it's hard to be specific.
If you have cell access, do you have access to any cellular data service? Line of sight radio (to an ISP, or to someone who can get DSL service) ? ISDN?
You may be on a north-facing hillside, but perhaps you have a neighbor that has the appropriate aspect to pick up satellite, in line-of-sight to you, by way of which you could pay for satellite to his location (for the use of his property/power he gets to share your broadband), and then construct a wireless bridge to your location?
You might try installing a satellite dish at the top of the hill, then running a line down to your house. Of course, if you don't own the whole hill, or the hill is too big, that wouldn't be an option. Alternately, I think you can pay to have cable lines run to your house from wherever the nearest junction is. But that would probably be too expensive. On another extreme, you could build a small tower, and mount a satellite dish on top of that. My grandfather was a ham and had an antenna that was essentially just a framework tower with a triangular cross-section. That might do the trick.
If my memory serves me right the fastest ones are able to do 56kb. Its hardly blazingly fast but its double what you currently have.
If you have line of sight to someone with broadband (even if it's from your roof or high in a tree) you can get a good WiFi signal with a 24 dB dish (~$60) - I've used them to easily get SSIDs on consumer-grade routers in stranger's houses two miles away (I assume there were a few walls in the way). One assumes the connection could be made much better if both sides of it uses these dishes. These dishes will even work through a little foliage if it's not too thick. You just need to get to know any line-of-sight neighbors so a connection with their network can be on the up and up. You can even agree to install broadband at a suitable site in exchange for access.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Please read here:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
For more information. This is a method that can be used pretty much anywhere though some special conditions apply.
Why don't you just move to a place that offers broadband? That is the first requirement I look for whenever I'm looking for a place to live. Whatever great aspects there may be about a region or a home, I disregard it entirely if I can't get high quality, reliable broadband there.
Otherwise, it's a bit like saying "I want to for a top tech company from San Francisco and pull in a top tech salary, but while working from a remote mountain top cabin in the snowy Cascade".
in my email address... I had another address with '!' too...
What? No broadband Internet? I'd go to a corner and then cry my heart out. Oh why! Oh why must I have no Internet! The horror of not being able to troll slashdot and other forums. The horrors of not whining and griping about my situation in life while millions of Filipinos go hungry.
Seriously, the Interweb isn't life.
First, get ALOT of pidgins...
rewriting history since 2109
My uncle and a business partner live about 10 miles north of Springfield, MO in a "dead zone" of any sort of high speed internet access outside of satellite (and satellite is a tradeoff due to its enormous ping times). So what he did was get a T1 installed and then erect a 100ft tower to broadcast a 900 MHz signal to the area and then started asking his neighbors if they'd pay $60/mo or whatever for internet access.
They now has 25 subscribers, which should pay off the tower and cover the T1 price in less than 2 years.
The rule to this stuff always is... if you want it and can't get it, chances are that other people want it and can't get it, either. Provide the service, and they'll come.
Of course, if 3G is available (NOT the 2.5G 100 kbps 500+ ms ping junk), then just go with that.
Here in Vermont there are a number of startups using wireless for remote localtions. Here's a random sample. Here's another. There are more. It's the sort of thing that self-styled entrepreneurs can do for not much investment, and that often gets good support from local governments that see it as key to economic development. So find some kids with a little bit of money to play with, who'd like to run their own business and build their resume for bigger things later, and encourage them to get entrepreneurial on you. If you can find a few dozen neighbors who also like the idea of buying the service, so much the better.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
There are a lot of unknowns in your question, but you could build a remote satellite station to wherever you can get the signal and then hardwire it to your home. Or power it there and use wireless equipment to get the signal to you. I had the idea of using surplussed directv/dish dishes and relays to create a highly directional signal relay to the closest place that you can get access. I wouldn't recommend that route if you were doing satellite also because of the crazy ping times, but if someone near you can get a decent DSL connection it might work well enough for what you're asking for. One of your neighbors would probably be grateful for the free DSL use as part of your agreement to install a dish somewhere on their property if you have line of sight. As far as power, my router at home draws half an amp, so you could set up a battery/solar setup to power it if you needed a relay point in the middle to get around/over a hill.
Knowledgeable people feel free to shoot me down, its just an idea.
Just a wild thought, but would it be possible to set up a dish on the top of the mountain and either set up a repeater or run a cable down to the house?
no, i don't know of an existing system that does this, but i do know of others with a similar problem.
maybe i should apply for a patent on the concept so when someone does i can get rich! (jk)
We would have to know more about your property and your neighbours.
String a cable up the hillside and mount a dish up there.
Work out a deal with whomever owns that property so that you can put a dish up on their land and share the Internet access.
Get a series of tubes
ISDN is what you need. It sucks, it is expensive, but it is much, much better than 26k dialup. I moved to an area with no DSL or broadband and made do with ISDN and then iDSL (DSL protocols over a bonded ISDN circuit) for 4 years. Sure, you aren't doing YouTube a lot or download ISO images, but you are connected well enough for remote work, including SSH. RDC is doable, but pretty awful in my experience.
;-)
The problem is finding decent ISDN equipment. I just threw out my old ISDN modem (I'm moving and I have DSL now). It took me forever to find it, but it was really useful. Little 3COM router with auto-dialing of the second line on demand. I used it for my voice and data for the first 2 years and then realized it was pointless and went with iDSL. It was pretty expensive, but got me even more bandwidth (144 up and down instead of 128 if I remember right).
If you really are as remote as you say, there's going to be a telco engineer somewhere who knows how to help you. You just have to find him.
*If* you have enough neighbors, you can start petitioning your telco for DSL. I live 5 miles up a road leading to a national park, well outside the range of DSL. They put some "magic box" in at the end of the road to serve me an my 20 neighbors. I get 1.5/768 now. Life is so much better
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
Note: I'm assuming you and all your neighbors are in the same boat.
Well, I know this is a less than optimal solution. But if you (or people you know in the area) have sufficient technical knowledge, you could try putting together some type of bandwidth cooperative and run a T1 (or fractional T3) into the area.
If it's just your PARTICULAR location in the community that's making high bandwidth impossible, ask around for neighbors who DO have high bandwidth and see if you can come to some sort of agreement (pay half his internet bill for a wireless connection, etc).
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
...but it's going to be slower than his current modem and there might be a lot of packet loss due to Hawks ;-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I would rather commit suicide than be without high speed internet!
Your question is missing some important details that could help give you better answers. Such as how far away are you from any area that can get broadband?
I've heard of people making 802.11 waveguide repeaters out of coffee cans and were able to power them using some PV solar cells and rechargeable batteries.
If you have good line of sight, in a rural area you _may_ get 1 mile or more per repeater.
Of course this creates lots of links in the chain of potential failures, but if build good to withstand the environment when it works it could be a good thing, else fall back on your dial-up.
This is assuming that you live close enough to civilization that has BB and someone there is willing to allow you to subscribe an account on their property and install some goofy looking hardware.
Sneakernet is still your best option.
or maybe Homing Pigeons?
I am serious, if Sneakernet is good enough for Google, why not for you?
I like microcars
"Finally, you say sattelite is not available... How is that possible? Sattelites are are accessible as long as you can position your dish correctly."
I have 5 dishes including one from the 'dark ages' of the 1980's (I still have my old 'BUG' dish). I've been playing with satellite reception for quite a few years. If he lives on the north side of a hill or mountain, the signals would have to travel through the hill, which they don't.
My girl friend tried to get satellite where she lives. It actually does have a southern 'view', but a neighbor's tree is in the way. It's a big tree, but none the less it's enough to block reception. While it is possible that in the winter when the leaves are off the tree she might be able to get decent reception, in the summer there is no way she could get the signal through the leaves on that tree.
It is not simply a matter of aiming a dish. You have to have a clear, unobstructed line of sight to the satellite (which are all equatorial, so in N America you have to have a southern view). This is more problematic the further north one is. The dish has to be aimed lower to catch th satellites so obstructions are more of a problem than in the south.
If you are in cell range you may be able to get high-speed UMTS (aka. 3G Turbo) running 3 Mbit (and being boosted to 7Mbit in near future.
Ericsson got some small UMTS routers with ethernet and 802.11b/g (WPA supported).
I once lived in a good-sized city, worked at a large university as a sysadmin, and had my pick of broadband options. Then, I moved to a very rural town 150 miles away and telecommuted via 56k dial-up for 2 years until DSL became available.
Aside from missing out on the fun stuff that a fast 'net connection provides, my work access was pretty acceptable. To help with the web browsing, I used squid/privoxy with firefox/adblock as well as a local caching DNS server. I set up a similar system on my work desktop, and then used an SSH tunnel w/ the fastest crypto protocol and maximum compression and used that to tunnel my pre-screened web traffic.
Of course, most of my work was text console based, so SSH and screen were my best tools.
I know you're running at half of what I was, and I don't know what you admin. So there may be not much room for improvement for your dial-up system.
Method of processing duck feet
Get N phone lines, N modems, and some kind of hardware that will bond multiple lines into a single higher-speed connection. You'd probably have to have special arrangements with your ISP (install the same hardware and dedicated lines), but I'm sure it's possible...
I had to do this twice (different houses, neither with cable or DSL broadband). The prices have come down drastically, but you will still pay at least $200-$300/month; maybe you can get your employer to subsidize it. The nice thing about a T1 is that it's a monitored line, which means if anything goes wrong the service provider jumps to get it fixed RIGHT NOW. Once I was moving my UPS around and unplugged it. Before I got it plugged back in to the outlet across the room the phone rang - it was my service provider, having noticed that there was a problem with the line.
You don't want to go to your local telco directly with this request; they probably don't even know how to spell T1. You want to go to one of the resellers like Speakeasy or one of the other providers whose ads occasionally appear in the Slashdot banner ad space. In fact, I'm sure that several of your fellow state residents will chime in with their opinions of local T1 providers.
Good luck!
Umm. I'm a ham. It's Amateur Radio - not commercial. You're not supposed to set up links like this that connect into a commercial network. And, unlike CB radio, where enforcement is nearly non-existent, the FCC and hams can and do police the ham radio bands.
In fact, your announcing this in a public forum may make hams local to where you live rather suspicious. They, and the ARRL, may be on your case sooner than you think.
He pointed out that he is on a heavily forrested, north facing mountain. I would assume that he means he can't get line of sight to a satellite for that reason.
I'd think he's be able to run CAT-5 to a VSAT terminal and dish in a clearing or something, however, so... hmm.
Here's to the crazy ones
If you want remote access for administration, unless you can do it all over ssh (which if 28.8k is insufficient, I suspect not), sorry - you're gonna have to either spend buckets of money or move. Latency is important for GUI-based remote access, otherwise it's just awful - even if the throughput is higher, a high latency 2 meg link can be worse than a low latency 28.8k link for gui access.
High latency is pretty terrible for command-line access too, but not quite as bad. Your solutions:
GPRS (cell phone) - 64K, but generally very poor latency. SSH is barely tolerable over GPRS. Forget GUI access.
3G (cell phone) - megabit speeds possible, but still with ghastly latency. SSH is tolerable. GUI access is probably frustratingly laggy. Exhorbitant unless you can get an unlimited data plan (and these typically are pretend unlimited).
Satellite (which you've already said you can't get) - latency is so bad that remote access either GUI or SSH based is impractical. Good job you can't get it or you may have spent a wodge of cash coming to this unhappy realisation.
You may be in with a chance if you can cobble together some "cantenna" style wireless access (or spend a lot of money on a microwave link).
Or you can spend lots of money on a T1. That will give you proper, solid broadband speeds not just downstream but upstream too, low latency, will work very well for remote access, and you'll have an SLA so if it breaks they should fix it quickly, instead of "when we get around to it" as for DSL. But I bet the setup fees are some thousands, and monthly charges are $hundreds. (Would your employer chip in?)
Perhaps ISDN? You can get 128kbps if your ISP supports bonding the two 64K channels. Not high speed, but low latency and it may be tolerable for GUI remote access.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
broadband can be run over electrical lines.
the technology already works perfectly.
see if your local power co-op or conglomerate can help.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Options:
1. DirectPC: There's no excuse to not get satellite Internet Access. Yes latency sucks, but surfing and many aspects of Interneting will be much faster. If you're telling me you can't get it because some tree is in the way, well heck dude, cut the tree - you live in a forest, one tree isn't going to make a difference. And if you love the tree too much, then run the wires UP the tree and install the satellite link securely atop a high tree branch near the trunk (yes you may have to cut a few branches)
2. MultiMode or Single Mode Fiber: Find the closest neighbour with broadband, explain your situation, offer a small monthly fee & install a media converter (CAT5 to Multimode or Single Mode fiber), then higher a wiring contractor to lay fiber all the way back to your shack in boonieland, install another media converter & there you be.
3. Setting up your own WiMax tower may be cheaper. You can setup 2 WiMAX towers these days for $10K USD or less, and they can be a few KM apart. Get your work to pay for 1/2 of the cost. Get your other boonieland neighbours to chip in monthly, and it may even get done for free. The second tower obviously need be where broadband is available... again near that first neighbour that has access to broadband. If he doesn't want to share broadband ADSL/Cable with you, then offer to purchase your own, but it gets delivered to your house & then you connect it to the WiMAX.
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
I know it's not much, but before broadband was available in my area we used two phone lines and two 56k modems bonded together using MultiPoint Protocol to get almost 112kbps. Sorry for the lack of a better link, but here's a FAQ from an ISP that supports this two modem connection.
Well in true slash-geek fashion everyone focuses on the technology. Now how about the other half of the issue. The issue of using whatever connection you do have (or will have) more efficiently? Just how much of your job needs to cross that connection?
why not see if you could setup a microwave relay at the top of the hillside, I believe the initial cost to set it up is about 1500 or something like that. On the top of the hill you can setup a sat, and relay the info over the microwave dish. This would be a fairly fast solution. Though you would have to be able to have line of site to the sat and the microwave dish, permission to put it up, and a power source(maybe solar panels I don't know, if theres a cell tower up there already it might be easy if you got permission from the tel com company). A stable tall tree or pole would have to be used. But thats the best I could come up with. Other people have already mentioned other ideas I could think of.
You have several options:
1. Your post suggests that you have limited cellphone connectivity. You can get a cellphone repeater ($200-$1000) to boost the cellphone signal. Depending on the carrier, you could be able to use EDGE/3G to get some connectivity.
2. You could use satellite . It is decently fast, but has high latency.
3. If you are in a neighborhood where broadband is widely available, but the specific location of your property is the limiting factor, you could work with your neighbor to share their broadband by way of a wifi connection. If you do some research, you will find a lot of ways to do it with things like repeaters, boosters and external antennas.
Good luck.
I had a similar problem. I eventually solved it when a new subdivision went in about a half mile from our farm. Comcast wired the subdivision, but wanted many thousands of dollars to extend it on to our farm. So I rented a shelf in the garage of one of my new neighbors and got Comcast service to the shelf. Then using a couple Proxim Tsunami radios, I setup a wireless link from my neighbor's garage to one of my farm fields. Using Power Over Ethernet, I was able to string an ethernet cable out to the antenna and radio in the field through a couple of my greenhouses. It could probably have been done cheaper, but since my business depends on reliable service that I didn't have to muck about with it very much, I went commercial. I blogged about it and posted some photos when I finished the project: "The New Internet Connection"
What is "4 wire unloaded circuit"? a google search only results in this post.
c0w goes moo.
Or another text-oriented browser. The ultimate pop-up blocker!
You can approximate that by turning off images in your
graphical browser.
Your need to see images to navigate is inversely proportional
to the merit of the site, in my experience.
Do any of the cell companies that serve your area offer "wireless broadband" service? A company I used to work for supplied me with an a Verizon card and it seemed to work well where there was service.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
True, although neither other HAM operators nor the ARRL have any enforcement capacity ... about all they can do is ring in the Feds. But you're right, the FCC does take a very dim view of such activities. It sounds like he's out in the sticks, which is probably why nobody has noticed anything.
Once he gets reported he may find himself out in the cold, with a few fines and no broadband to keep him company.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Works over POTS lines, avalible since 1984 (before the @ in email addresses)!
moox. for a new generation.
You should get a faster modem. I hear they have 56kbps modems these days, why aren't you using one of those??
You can also get cable, or DSL. These are much faster than your 26.4 connection! I suggest looking into them.
In addition, satellite is available. Try that, how could you have any problems?
Finally, have you thought about moving? Perhaps into a nice cookie-cutter subdivision with a great HOA. I can't imagine you have much of a reason to stay where you are.
I'm sorry... where did he say that he was using anything other than the spectrum already allocated by the FCC for 802.11x connections? I don't see any mention of him routing encrypted traffic or the like over packet radio.....
I mean, really. You forget to take a Prozac or twelve today?
----- Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious. - Paul Valery
Hmmm, I don't think he can remotely manage his servers with a library book.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
How about installing a WiFi connection? A high pole with a $75 dish and some outdoor access points can you pretty far if there is somewhere with DSL within line of sight...
ISDN?
10 frigin phone lines bonded?
dish or antenna on top of the hill?
moving! stupid fuck
Since you say that satelite is a non-option due to the specific topology, you could built a satelite receiver on the top of the hill, and make it relay to your house. There are a number of options there, including laser, wireless and, of course, avian carriers (rfc 1149) :-)
Best regards,
F
"The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again."
I have satellite, the one thing that will annoy you with working remote is that there is a round trip delay of around a 1/2 second at best (22k miles up then back down and then both again for the return packet-1/2second at speed of light). Usually unless it is the middle of the night the delay is closer to a full second, this is painful with ssh connections and other similar interactive work. VPN at best work sometimes, and at worst does not work at all. And all of the satellite providers have bandwidth limits on a per month basis, though if you are used to dial-up this is probably not a big issue. Dial-up is much better for low-bandwidth interactive work, and the high bandwidth interactive work (VPN, X-windows) gets very ugly on satellite if it works at all.
Around here the Long range dedicated point-to-point wireless goes for $100/MB/month+equipment, and the point-to-point towers can go quite a distance (15+ miles I understand). If you could get a location that had LOS with a provider and LOS to your location or physically close enough, you could pay to put up a tower and then get that signal to your location either through fiber (copper cable is dangerous to run outside for long distances as close lightening strikes can put large voltages on everything) or again wireless. If you have a neighbor in the correct location and they also want internet you could probably work out a deal with them. I understand though the tower+equipment can be at least several thousand $.
Suicide is always an option.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-wire_circuit
Sigs are for the weak.
I believe any solution will require an investment on your part. What I mean is that you may need to set up a tower or lay cabling to a point where reception could be received.
One question I have for you is how far the nearest neighbour is, since it may be possible to find a solution where you could share the costs, if of course your neighbours are willing to share the cost.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
T1 lines are much more reasonable than they used to be, although your particular geography may prove to make one an expensive option. Still, it's worth getting a quote - you never know until you ask.
Alternatively, setting up a directional antenna pointed towards a house that you have line-of-sight with that may have access to broadband is an option. If you don't have single directional line of sight, you could set up relay antennas as well. Do a little bit of research into pringle's can antennas and you'll find that there are a plethora of plans for long range home made antennas that are out there.
If you get cell signal, you may get decent access with a verizon high speed internet card or a sprint one. Make sure whatever you get, you can try out for a while first. You don't want a 2 year contract with something you can't use.
ISDN lines are an option as well, and may be available for you. Take a gander at a frame relay connection as well.
Thinking outside the box, you could talk to other members of your community about setting up a local area wireless network all sourced through a T1 located somewhere near the Telco facility or a well connected data center. Have the city put up a small bond to pay for the infrastructure and pay it back over time with collected access fees. You probably don't want to run an ISP, but I imagine somebody in the area might be.
Getting the local telco or cable provider to upgrade the area infrastructure is probably a losing proposition unless they have plans already in place, and you will have a difficult plan finding somebody that would fill you in on whether or not there are plans to get you guys high speed access.
There's also the option of a satellite dish on a flag pole or something similar that could get a clear view of the sky. Just because you can't get a clear view form your roof doesn't mean it can't be done.
Of course, this is all assuming that you absolutely need access at your house. Maybe you just need to be closer to home or freedom to do other things during the day - small businesses nearby with broadband connections may be sympathetic to your needs and might give you access to their network. Alternatively you could rent out some office space with a broadband connection.
There are a lot of options. It really is just a matter of how much time, money, and effort you are willing to expend to get rid of that 26K barrier.
The sad truth is that when no economical options exist, you have to go with one of the uneconomical ones. In your case, that's probably some form of leased line. Alternatively, you can try to rig up your own wireless links, but unless you have clear line of sight to any prospective POPs (if heavily forested then probably not), you shouldn't waste your time or money on antennas and access points. If it were me, I'd probably provision 4 B channels (256kbps) and negotiate a better rate by agreeing to some level of over-subscription by the ISP/telco, say 2:1.
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
He's using a dish. That means there won't be much signal except where the dish is pointed. What do we think the chances of him interfering with something else are? Zilch. And what is it that brings out the radio inspector? Isn't it something to do with interference? So, what do we think the chances are of him getting a visit from the radio inspector? Zilch. (Unless some tight assed Hitler Youth rats him out.)
In any event, one purpose of ham radio is experimentation. Real hams build their own rigs and do interesting stuff. BTW, I got my ticket in 1964. I agree with another poster. Take a Valium.
How close is your closest neighbor that has broadband? If within an nominal range, why not use wi-fi and some of those long range antennas you see built online?
You could try getting multiple phone lines put in and then having a router that can use the aggregate bandwidth for routing packets. I seem to recall reading somewhere about kit that can do this. On the other hand, it's probably expensive as it the sort of trick that companies pull when they want to expand their network a bit without shelling out for a major external pipe.
It probably is simpler and cheaper to move. Or accept that you're in the slow lane; I worked for years over 14k4, and that was good enough for text-only stuff (e.g. most email, basic HTTP, SSH). Forget dealing with anything much larger though unless you're really not in a hurry (I have used Framemaker on an X11 display over that 14k4 connection, and it could have sucked worse...)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I'm in Canada and googled that: the only hit was right back to your post.
And you posted less than an hour ago. Amazing.
Anyway, what is a 4 wire unloaded circuit?
Additionally, another possible solution is that you can just to apply a couple of extra telephone lines and bonding all of these dial-up connections together. It sounds crazy but as the bottom line it would work no matter if other conditions are met. (and may be cheaper as well).
No one owes you broadband, pal. If you want satellite service, make a deal with whoever owns the land at the top of the hill and get someone with a clue, mr hospital network administrator, to set up the antenna and router up for you. Or run a land/microwave line from somewhere closer. If you can afford to live out in the middle of nowhere, you can pay for broadband.
I mean, really. You forget to take a Prozac or twelve today?
No, he just confused his government issued ham license with a government issued badge. Some hams think they are the police for the airwaves - they're not, the FCC is.
If it's really the case that nowhere on your property gets any sunlight this time of year, then I really would suggest moving!
Admin with 28.8 doesn't have to be painful, if you use the right software.
If possible, avoid using graphical tools. If you are from the bang path era, you probably know that a consoles worked great over slower speeds than 28.8. Telnet is your friend.
If you're forced to use graphical tools, then tightvnc or ultravnc is a lifesaver. Limit the color pallette or pick jpeg compression - neither will be pretty, but you can get the job done. As others have pointed out, for graphical tools latency of the connection is much more important than bandwidth.
Get somebody with a clear view of the sky to allow you to set up a satellite terminal on their property, and then use WiFi, lasers, or some other technology to close the link between your property and theirs. Alternatively, you could certainly use an Irridium based data phone but that might cost more than my previous suggestion.
You may never get broadband the way you want.
Consider:
1) The Telcos will not build. Congress nor the Administration will not compel them to wire anything but profitable areas.
2) EvDO broadband from Verizon is not terribly efficient for things other than web surfing (and uses other than web surfing and email are probably against Verizon's TOS)
3) Your cable company won't build for the same reason the telcos won't.
3) WLAN and other emerging technologies will be buried by the FCC because they compete with the wired infrastructure. This FCC is really beholden to large corporate interests.
Your only hope is that Google wins the spectrum auction (unlikely) and then produces some really marvelous technology that will push broadband out into the countryside. But that is years away, even if things go well.
Good luck.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
1. Cell-based broadband. If your cell phone works, you can buy an expensive one and a data plan and hook the Cell up to your computer via USB and use it to surf.
2. Bonding multiple phone lines. But that's ghetto; I much rather prefer:
3. ISDN. Have you investgated if ISDN will work for you?
Although you say that being on the north side of a heavily forested hillside prohibits satellite internet, a tall enough tower will give you line-of-sight to the satellite. The question then becomes one of cost, zoning regulations and getting along with your neighbors.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
you have cell phone access? just get a data plan, then use your phone to use as a high speed modem.
I read the entry, but it doesn't say what the circuit *provides*. How do you make use of such a circuit?
This is something that really concerns me, because I want to move to a remote location, far away from the throngs of humanity when I retire. Fortunately that's still 2-3 decades off. But broadband access in rural areas in the U.S. is terrible so far. I'm hoping maybe there will be line-of-sight high speed wireless? I've heard that satellite Internet access has *horrible* latency problems, like on the order of *seconds* (not milliseconds).
The Company I work for builds these things. www.option.com I've been to the US several times (also not so populated areas) works fine !!!
There used to be these things called Webramps that had two and four modems in them and you could split your connection over multiple lines as they would all dial in at the same time. I haven't used one since 1999 but that may be an option for you. I'm sure someone on here could tell you how to build your own.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of disks... :)
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Your *only* option is to see if there's a WISP in the area, or to see if you're close enough to the phone CO to get ISDN. If you have the big money you could also put out for a T1 but that will probably run you upwards of $300USD/month.
I used a WISP called IonSky/WisperTel here in Colorado for 4 years (until DSL came to my house two weeks ago, FINALLY). Oddly I still don't have cell service at all (ever since AMPS went away there has been no coverage whatsoever here). It was overall terrible but better than dial-up and far more economical than ISDN/T1.
I also had ISDN for a few months many years ago but it was expensive and overall isn't that fast (it is reliable and always-on though, which is a bigger deal than you might think).
So, coming from a similar situation, I'll tell you: Find a WISP or it's ISDN for you.
Or move, if it's really that big a deal.
Dial-up isn't even suitable for SSHing in and doing a little bit of remote admin, it's downright unusuable in today's age.
wow that was fast o_O Google's spider must get the rss feed or something.
I too have had your problem, and so created a 21 mile wireless link (yes 100 milliwatt works just fine for 21 miles at 11 Mbs with proper antenna and line of sight.) A satellite link is going to kill you on latency. I would suggest what you need is a tower to get above the trees (and possible hills) so you do get line of sight to where you need (cell tower or town). I would then look at cell phone (data) service (possible with a repeater available from several vendors like cyberguys). Another possibility mentioned going wireless to a local wireless provider (or creating your own) is also possible (just by going to somewhere in a local town that you get line of sight to from your tower). But line of sight really is a starting point for all of this.
Most trees can be gotten over with 60 foot of tower, hills might be higher than that, depends on your area, you'll really need about 30 more feet that what ever the tallest item is between you and where you want to go.
You can get specialised modems that do pretty good speeds (> 10Mbps) over TP for a few kilometers. You need a pair of them for this to work. If this is enough to get you within DSL range or so, stringing some cables of your own (or hijacking unused phone lines) can be your solution.
If you are willing to string cable, you could also look into fiber optic cable. Or there is optical transmission, which can be affordable up to a few kilometers, depending on the weater conditions.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I love all the posters in this thread suggsting you get multiple phone lines; clearly demonstrating their lack of understanding of rural telecom.
I think what you need to do is talk to whomever lives on the other side of the hill, and see if they'll let you run a line over to them; and if they don't have satillite already see if they'll go halvsies with you.
See if you can get a 64kbps clear-channel ISDN line from your phone company. If you can afford to do so, you can link multiple lines together for higher speeds.
Yes it is, but not for the reason you said. He is using unlicensed frequency, the problem comes with the fact that he is using amps (and most likely going over the 42db power limit on point to point links). the TR-6 from tranzeo is not FCC certified for use with amps. The chances of him getting reported are very low.
The fact that he is a HAM only hurts him because he can not claim ignorance.
wtf... fix it.
you CAN get a 54k connection on ANY PHONE LINE. just might take a little tinkering.
and you can also get isdn from the phone company. 64k or 128k.
and then theres t1 ect direct from the phone company.
there are always ways. and you sound like you havent even looked into any but the most common.
heck. try this. every time you see a dsl or cable commercial on tv. call them up and demand it. might take about 3 months. but sooner or later someone will get sick of you. and notice it would be cheaper just to give you broadband in your area than keep wasting employee time telling you that you cant have broadband.
I have a Sprint EV-DO (er, sorry PowerVision!) phone as a modem plan (really good deal, since it actually replaces the data plan, so the bump isn't that much), which is the same service a data card (except you can't talk on your phone while it's in use). Bandwidth is good, comparable with DSL, but latency is typically in the 300-400ms range. Not terrible, and usable for SSH, but not really enjoyable.
Of course I'm spoiled, by some fluke I get 10-12ms to my data center over Comcast cable.
If this is in fact true - and I have my doubts that it is, please cite the specific federal regulations that prohibit this kind of setup.
Thx
If your company really values you as an employee (and you are not replaceable by someone with a lower salary and/or that lives closer to modern tech) get them to pay for a frame relay connection to you.
It uses laser instead of radio. See for example http://www.pulsewan.com/wireless/
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
I would ask your telco about getting an ISDN line. Most dialup ISPs can accomodate ISDN.
:)
The circut will pry cost you about $100/month though not including whatever the ISP is going to charge (WIth most you can just make a 64k or even 128k if they are stupid and they treat it as dialup:) and most CPE has POTS ports that allow you to use your phone line and bring up and down a b channel when needed.
ISDN gives you 128k or 64k and 1 voice conversation. With stac compression you can get several times that for some web surfing/emailing... Netbios traffic compresses very well
How many people within say a 20 mile radius of a Tall Hill or Tower are there? Put up a 900Mhz system if you would need to get through trees, or a 2.4 system if most people have line of sight. If you need help finding a wireless ISP. check out www.wispa.org. Hit the mailing lists if you need help finding a connection.
Ryan
(Network Administrator for a WISP)
You could burn all of your outgoing data to DVDs and drive them to you ISP. The latency would suck but I bet you could get some amazing transfer speed!
The same thought popped into my head -- at least I *think* it's the same thought, I don't know the terminology.
Back in college in the mid 1980s I shared an off-campus apartment with a bunch of other geeks like me, and we looked into getting a connection to the school's computer system (which they were surprisingly friendly about). I won't say it was "the Internet" since it was in a lot of pieces back then (and the school seemed to be on everything *except* the ARPAnet until very late -- even Mailnet, which was barely even anything).
Anyway the local telephone company (NYtel) said they could give us a 2-wire leased line to the school for about $36/mo, or a 4-wire one for $72/mo. The catches were: (1) about $600 for installation, (2) it's not one run of copper all the way there so we couldn't just run 20mA current loop or something, we'd need real leased line modems (I eventually picked up a pair of Gandalf 9600 BPS line driver/receivers cheap but I don't even know if that was the right thing, and that was about when dialups started getting that fast so it was pointless), and (3) the school wasn't an ISP, so it wasn't at all clear what would go at the other end (in those days, translating between SLIP and Ethernet didn't just mean stuffing Linux into some old clunker PC). So we never bit, but I regret it, it sure would have been educational.
Anyway those are 1980s upstate NY prices. I'm sure it's more now (and, we weren't talking about a very long distance) but I'll bet you earn more than you did in the 1980s too. And presumably the data rates are way higher now, and most ISPs would know what to do with their end. OK so it wouldn't be as cheap as DSL but how important is the Internet to you?
Also it might be worth looking into RF modems. Before cable broadband came to my neighborhood and made it all easy, I had the local mom + pop ISP (the best kind!) mostly talked into letting me mount a doodad in their attic (since they were only a block away -- if they'd been on the same block I would have just begged neighbors to let me string wires through the trees), and I was just hemming and hawing over which pair of doodads to buy. The data rates aren't fantastic but you can sure beat 26kbps. Anyway even if you don't sell the ISP themselves on the idea, maybe you could at least get their permission to buy space on someone's connection who's closer to you, and talk *them* into sticking a horn antenna on their porch railing or whatever. Privacy is out the window of course so that would have to be OK with you.
Do what a local fellow did here.
1) Set up two towers. One in an area where you can get a high speed connection. One close to your home (with the tops in sight of each other)
2) Setup a microwave connection between the two of them.
3) Connect the first to a t1 or better
4) Connect yours to your house.
5) Incorporate and sell of the extra bandwidth to your neighbours (either via wireless Ethernet, more towers, or heavens forbid more cable.)
6) Expand your network as more neighbours want service.
7) Wait for the local telecomm to come and buy up your company (and all your clients)
8) Profit
notice... no ??? I've already seen it done, and I wish I had been on the ground floor.
Internet over HSSM, High Speed Multimedia radio (ham 802.11), is not prohibited by Part 97's rule prohibiting commercial activity. If you were to encrypt or engage in commercial activity on the HSSM link in question you would run afoul of Part 97. The act of sharing a Internet connection over a Part 97 802.11 device has clearly been endorsed by the ARRL's HSSM working group. There are several discussions on the ARRL site and elsewhere on the internet about this and proper operation procedures for HSSM. Check it out, lots of old geezers like you are sharing there internet connection over HSSM to avoid paying to dsl or cable and they are perfectly within there rights to under Part 97 rules.
Actually how far are you?
With good 'old' 802.11 antennas you can shove wireless 15-25 miles. Look for someone within that range that has access to Cable or DSL and work out a deal.
The antennas are going to be about $200 each, but the APs should be pretty cheap by now. You can use a tower/pole to get the antenna up high enough to shoot it down, and then it is just a bit of tweaking so you are getting a bounce or reflection.
(This is using the older 1-3mbps 802.11, but it works well, and is faster than some broadband anyway.)
Interesting. I'm not quite at geezer status yet but it's been a long time since I had any involvement with amateur radio. Thanks for the info.
... but does that extend to tunneling a connection through a VPN, or using SSL to access a secure Web site?
Now, I understand the reasoning behind disallowing encryption of the connection itself
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Well that's an easy question with an easy answer...
A T1 is often availible where other broadband isn't though it will be a lot more expensive.
If you have a friend with broadband in line of sight from your house then a wi-fi link (using high gain antennas, e.g. reused satalite dishes) to them may be a possibility.
Also consider looking at what data plans the cellphone company offers and try to find out if they are availible in you area.
why can't you use satalite?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
http://www.eionwireless.com/products/vip11024_ptmp.html
We have pushed it 70KM+.. The price is right at $1200~ per unit. Allows for SNMP, telnet/web administration, temperature sensors,etc. Pretty solid in rough terrain and works great over lakes and salt water.
run a cable or wireless hops(battery+solar bolted to the treetops can support decent wifi hops in most cases) rent or share the hops with ur neighbours - whose land these will be on - and rent the final access point to the telecom company.
Easy, Install a Wireless node/repeater at the top of the hill...
Just ask the good Jedi how they feel about "Balance" now...
For remote administration of windows the rdp protocol performs adequately on 28k8, there is an equivalent project for linux called freenx. Forget about VNC, it's to painful at these speeds (perhaps 640x480 in fuzzy mode will work).
Ofcourse you can install ssh with compression for terminal access.
For faster internet browsing you can install a proxy on a dedicated faster line someplace else that resizes images and gzips webpages on the fly such as webcleaner. You can also use mobile versions of internet pages for lower bandwidth, for example diggm8
Put all technical documentation on your local system for fast and easy access. For example wikipedia database dumps can be downloaded and used offline.
Use pop3/imap offline mail clients instead of webmail clients to check your e-mail, leave large attachments on the server.
Forget about VOIP, just use the phone or instant messaging.
Forget about YouTube, just program your digital video recorder one week ahead for all the interesting shows.
My parents live 12 miles up in the mountains facing Santa Barbara. Despite being 50 yards from the termination of a Verizon fiber optic line and being in a community of 50 densely-packed houses desperate for broadband, no company was willing to spend the tiny amount of money it would take to provide DSL for that area of the mountain. I convinced my dad that fixed wireless was an option and he found a company willing to shoot 1.5/1.5 broadband in a 13-mile line direct from a building near Santa Barbara Airport. He has pretty good latency (we do iChat AV video all the time, no problem) and no real slowdowns due to weather. He's paying $200 a month, but it's worth it (he had to buy the equipment, too, but $600 was worth it too). Look into fixed wireless.
I don't like 'em much, but they give you satellite broadband in places where DSL and Cable aren't available...
--E--
I believe anywhere the phone company strings wires, they are required to offer T-1 service (1.5Mbs). It isn't cheap however. I used to be a work at home programmer, and it cost my company something like $2k installation charges to get the necessary repeaters, etc. installed. Times change, and I now work out of an office again, but because we are somewhat isolated, we have taken over paying for the T-1. I think the monthly bill is $400 or $500, so it depends on how much you really want/need the service. Because I have a direct connection to the internet and fixed IP addresses, I can log on to my home machine via ssh (assuming I can get through the company firewalls).
I also have a cell phone card for when I travel from T-mobile (cg-89 that also works with Linux), but the bandwidth isn't that great, and you have to worry about latency.
When I looked into it, the sat. providers would cap your bandwidth, and if you went over a gig or so a month, it would reduce your bandwidth to modem speed.
The ONLY types of transmissions an amateur station can make are spelled out in 97.111. You will notice that "relaying an internet link when commercial broadband is unavailable" is not among them:
Authorized Transmissions:
(a) An amateur station may transmit the following types of two-way communications:
(1) Transmissions necessary to exchange messages with other stations in the amateur service, except those in any country whose administration has notified the ITU that it objects to such communications. The FCC will issue public notices of current arrangements for international communications;
(2) Transmissions necessary to meet essential communication needs and to facilitate relief actions.
(3) Transmissions necessary to exchange messages with a station in another FCC-regulated service while providing emergency communications;
(4) Transmissions necessary to exchange messages with a United States government station, necessary to providing communications in RACES; and
(5) Transmissions necessary to exchange messages with a station in a service not regulated by the FCC, but authorized by the FCC to communicate with amateur stations. An amateur station may exchange messages with a participating United States military station during an Armed Forces Day Communications Test.
(b) In addition to one-way transmissions specifically authorized elsewhere in this Part, an amateur station may transmit the following types of one-way communications:
(1) Brief transmissions necessary to make adjustments to the station;
(2) Brief transmissions necessary to establishing two-way communications with other stations;
(3) Telecommand;
(4) Transmissions necessary to providing emergency communications;
(5) Transmissions necessary to assisting persons learning, or improving proficiency in, the international Morse code;
(6) Transmissions necessary to disseminate information bulletins;
(7) Transmissions of telemetry.
In addition, if he were to use such a ham/internet setup to conduct ANY business transaction (like order a book from Amazon.com, for example), he would be violating the non-commercial use restrictions of section 97.113.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
A telephone handset is basically a microphone at one end, and a loudspeaker at the other. Both the microphone and the speaker require two wires to the telephone exchanges. So you get four wires.
In the past, there was some electrical voodoo performed where only two wires were required. Both the microphone and the speaker were both on the same circuit - but with the right use of capacitors and resistors between the two, the feedback could be cancelled out. This was known as a two-wire circuit.
There is a certain amount of capacitance in the wires because they are running together all the way to the exchange, so the circuit is "loaded" with some other components to block out high frequencies. Unfortunately, this really does not work well when you start trying to running high bandwidth data across the line ie. ISDN, DSL or ADSL. So you can get the line "unloaded".
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
- RFC 1149 - Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers
- RFC 2549 - IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service
I'll send you my bill in the mail.And don't try to protest that homing pigeons are impractical! They have been tested in a real implementation and has actually been demonstrated to be faster than ADSL.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
You don't need to put the satellite dish or the wifi antenna on you roof.
Have an hill nearby? Use it!
Of course a long antenna cable would bring enormous losses to the point of making the whole thing unusable, so your best solution is to find a place from where you can see (literally! You need line of sight) both your roof and the southern sky or an area where broadband is available, if any.
Next you build there your repeater. Basically it will be made up by an access point connected to a small directional antenna looking towards your roof and a more powerful ap or satellite rtx plus its dish properly aligned on the other side.
The appliance will need some kind of power supply (solar panels and good batteries will help) but, most important, an excellent protection from rain and moisture.
You can find a lot of information among Ham Radio operators: it's normal for them to bounce a radio signal on the surface of the moon and get it back; helping you to design a repeater will be an one afternoon project.
Do you have ISDN in the US?
I'm in Australia, and before ADSL became available in our area, we used ISDN. The speed was only 128Kbps (in both directions), but the latency was fine, and it was a permanent connection. For around the same price as 256Kbps ADSL, we had a decent connection to the Internet, with a good upload speed (important for VPN). Of course, when ADSL arrived, we switched to that.
First try and find out if there is a Wireless-ISP providing service in your area. You can check with people on the ISP-Wireless list:
http://isp-lists.isp-planet.com/isp-wireless/
You may have to be willing to pay for your own equipment to get the signal that you need through the trees to your house. The lower the frequency the better it will go through trees. You will also want to have directional antennas on both sides of the system (grid or Yagi for 900Mhz). There are a lot of options for equipment to do this with.
Canopy, Trango, and Tranzeo are just a few, Here is a link to one from Tranzeo:
http://www.tranzeo.com/products/radios/TR-902-Series
This one is from Trango, probably a good choice:
http://www.trangobroadband.com/wireless_products/m900s.shtml
You will want to get good antennas, here is a 15dBi 900Mhz grid:
http://wisp-router.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=GD9-15P-NF&eq=&Tp=
Wisp-Router can also sell you a coax jumper that you will need to connect the radio to the antenna.
You will want as much elevation as you can reasonably get to install the radio and antenna. Put the radios outside next to the antennas and run quality CAT5 to the inside for your connection.
Now you need to find someone to connect up to. Either an ISP or another person who you can get a broadband connection setup at their location and link to with wireless. Maybe you can get a second Internet connection installed at their location or increase their service level so you both can share it.
If you use the equipment above I think it is quite possible you will be able to get access. This depends on how far you have to go to find someone who has access and is willing to work with you of course.
Good luck!
Now for the silly answer: clear out the house of illegal drugs and join NORML and do what you can to get your house raided. A friend of a friend had crappy dial-up because of his remote location and after much complaining was told too bad, so sad, the dial-up he got was the dial-up he had to live with. Being one of the more unusual types in his neck of the woods, he was vocal about legalizing drugs. Eventually, his trailer got raided, and lo-and-behold, although he was an advocate for drugs, he didn't use them himself - so with zero evidence, the D.A. dropped the charges and he was free to go home.
But his dial-up speed magically hit 56K solid forever after that. ;-)
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
Just for reference, the reason it was designed that way is because in the beginning of telecommunication, the exchange station would just feed 48 V into a line on which the microphones and speakers of both participating telephones were simply connected in series. It's obviously an extremely simple design; befitting the era, I guess. I don't know how it is done these days, but in the days of old, capacitors and resistors weren't used to cancel out feedback, but rather a very special transformer circuit called a duplex coil. Nowadays, it seems to be hard even to find information on how it was constructed.
You might wonder why I know these things; it is simply because I've been trying to design a "telephone soundcard" (like a modem, but without the modulation/demodulation part). It turns out that it is rather easy to construct a converter from a two-wire circuit to a four-wire circuit using two opamps and five resistors. Of course, that won't make the line unloaded.
1.) Get a router hooked up to broadband in a different location. Then make a get some fancy RF antenna equipment ( antennas / parabolic dishes / 2.4 GHz amplifiers ) and point the antennas at each other. *abracadbra* you now have a point to point ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-range_Wi-Fi ) connection with broadband =). 2.) Get unlimited data rate plan with wireless company X. ( Although you will have to restrict your usage because they strongly dislike actually using your unlimited data rate plan as if it were unlimited... (they dislike it much more than broadband... MUCH more.)) 3.) Go into your utility closet. Take out your TI SDK development kit (hopefully you have the TI 6416 so you can handle a high data rate wireless signal). Use your spectrum analyzer to find a wireless network ... like a satellite. Code up your own wireless demod / mod ... or modem. *abracadbra* you are now piggy backing off of some guy's satellite network =)!
What exactly are we going to do about it? Stop whining, dude.
There are so many options: 3G, EDGE, microwave, satellite, laser, mesh networking, etc.
Check to see if there are any point-to-point wireless providers for your area. Depending on other traffic, I get up to about T1 speeds with an 18 inch dish on my roof that points to their antenna. If it's not available, it's not an option but you might not be asking the right question.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Well, you said you had cellular service... talk to your cellular provider and get cellular internet. Not as fast as broadband but alot faster than dialup.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
I get lots of spam advertising faster Internet downloads. Isn't that an option?
But seriously...
I had a friend in a small community where they formed a co-op for Internet access. All the members had to be within line-of-site of the co-op transmitter, but the transmitter could be located some place where they did have high speed access.
Seeing as you didn't mention it I'll throw out the WISP idea. A wireless ISP. Getting more common in rural areas. I used one for a while...though Wal-Marts brilliantly unrestricted rfid system nearly killed the ISP....until they were forced to jack up our prices and install a repeater. Thanks Wal Mart...but I digress. Look into a Wireless ISP instead of actually building one yourself.
People these days turn their noses up a T1, but lemme tell ya - I'll take symmetric moderate bandwidth with LOW latency over high bandwidth asymmetric crap-ass backchannel high-latency ADSL shit *any day*. Even worse is that effing "wireless broadband" they're selling these days.
Throw in a squid proxy, and that'll be a *nice* connection for all 25 people -- assuming they are reading e-mail, surfing the 'net, and doing anything but gnutella or bit-torrent. Some traffic shaping should even make these usable, albeit slow during busy-hour. Even 2 or 3 P2P users won't destroy a T1, 200k per P2P client is acceptable and still leaves half the T1 empty for general purposes surfing.
Once upon a time, my office had 3 meg wireless and 768k SDSL (synchronous DSL over dry copper). I chose the SDSL for my general-purpose surfing and liked it a LOT more than the wireless connection. Now we run the whole office and development lab over T1, and frankly, there's more than enough bandwidth to go around.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
For you kids wondering how you sent e-mail before SMTP's @ convention (alluded to by the poster), you had to know a network path to a well-known server your friend also knew. And!we!liked!it!like!that!dammit
If the area is heavily forested - then chances are you're in an unincorporated area - so put up a tower that goes above the treeline and get yourself a southern facing exposure...
Actually, all that mumbo jumbo which I've also found posted numerous places (as you probably did) was wrong - though I have seen it posted numerous places. A standard POTS phone system uses TWO wires. The phone company ran FOUR wires because TWO were backups (rarely used in that fashion anymore for POTS) - OR were/(rarely)are for providing additional power from a transformer to certain devices (alarm systems and such) - and way back when, used in the rotary dial days for similar functionality. That was for the standard RJ-11 setup.
A telephone only NEEDS 2 wires - and only USES two wires. Often two line setups were ran through (in the house/office) all 4 wires and then split into two jacks (erroneously or otherwise). Often (erroneously or otherwise) when installation done in this fashion (often by Verizon), certain other things that conformed to the old rarely used spec would no longer work - such as modems and faxes - as well as certain phones - while on the other hand, many two line phones were set up to work using a standard 4 wire cord that plugged into a standard outlet and supported 2 lines via the standard pair for line 1, and the backup pair for line 2). This is also (among cost savings reasons) why some phone handset, modem and fax machine companies shipped a wire with a single pair (2 in the center) - to ensure that whether there were two lines or one, backup or none, the phone/modem/fax would work.
Check out these links for references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POTS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJ11%2C_RJ14%2C_RJ25
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
I bet it's pretty long. When you work in the city, it's pretty damned irresponsible to live far outside of it. You're like a suburbanite, only worse.
The phone's speaker and microphone are both in the circuit (plus the bell or ringer); the "sidetone" (your own voice as heard through the speaker) elimination is done in your telephone. In fact, some telephones let you adjust the sidetone up and down. When you install multiple telephone handsets on one line, you're basically just hanging multiple sets of microphones, speakers, and ringers off of the same two-wire balanced circuit.
You're right that a normal POTS line has stuff applied to it at the CLEC end that attenuate high-frequency signals, but they're not there to eliminate sidetone.
To a telco person, a 'four wire' circuit is going to be two unloaded loops, because telephone people tend to think in terms of 'loops' or 'pairs,' one loop per phone line/number.
Most modern homes are wired with Cat 3 wiring, which includes 3 discrete pairs, but unless you order a second line from the phone company, you probably only have dialtone on two wires (one pair), and only one pair comes out from the pole to your house. (Which is actually cool, because if your house wiring is done in a star configuration instead of daisy-chained, you can use the two dry pairs for 10BT Ethernet, in a pinch.)
Slightly OT but cool: Anyone interested in POTS phone technology might want to check out this page (http://home.utah.edu/~nahaj/cave/phones/) which explains how to build a very simple one or two-wire field phone system just with phone handsets. Apparently they are used in cave rescue and other applications where radios don't work. It's a good introduction to how POTS works, though, since it doesn't introduce the complexity of the ringer, switching system, etc. It gets into sidetone and sidetone-suppression a little.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"Seriously though, "overselling" is less a technical issue as it is a business issue, i.e. promising some service level and then simply not providing it. "
Only if you live in a world of absolutes. Ratios make all the difference.
"Of course, the reason that ISPs oversell is because nobody would pay what they are charging if they had to call it like it is in their sales pitches. "Unlimited Always-On Service" sounds ever so much better than "Intermittently-fast Generally-slow Heavily-throttled Mostly-On Service with Outsourced Technical Support.""
So in other words people need to be lied to because they can't handle the truth.
"The question then becomes: how do you educate consumers as to what they can realistically expect? "
Simple, you face them with the truth and take no guff when they complain about the reality check.
"Realistically you can't, because the issue is legitimately complex and it would require too many syllables. Sure, if the majority of broadband users understood what you just wrote it might be different."
The truth isn't hard to understand in a technical sense. It's hard to accept in an economic sense.
"But they don't, and they never will, and that's the problem. At least, it's the problem until networks become as fast in reality as we're being told they are now."
The only reason "never" is in there is because it's not a technical issue which can be outgrown, but a human issue, which historically humanity never outgrows.
'commercial activity' extends to making an online purchase via such a link, not just operating a business. If you are party to commercial activity, on either end, you have broken part 97 ...
... I don't know. But off the shelf this does not operate by part 97.
analogous to a ham buying a pizza over a telephone patch (via ham radio). Explicitly illegal.
But, this gear is 802.11, not ham gear, the guy posting doesn't know what he is talking about as far as I can tell: (1) you don't need a ham license to operate the radio in question and (2) he broke the rules by amplifying it, ham or no ham. That's my understanding of the situation.
(do note that one of the GHz ham bands covers 2.390 to 2.450 GHz so its possible he modded it or presumes it operates in this region
Hang yourself with the phone wire while tying off with the serial cable. no DSL??? is there a reason to exist??
Dont Judge The situation by the Misfortunate. Goga.
No, I do not mean a google search.
Instead,
1) convince google to (instead of buying some massive pasific-ocean-floor cables) lay some insanely awesome cables right to your home.
2) ??? (i dunno how the fuck ur ganna manage to do step 1)
3) Profit!
Just in case anyone else was intrigued by "MVL Modems," I did a little searching and apparently they are a variation on DSL that's a bit more robust.
This fairly ancient (1998) article claims 24,000 line-feet at 768kbps and gives the name of an equipment manufacturer who pioneered the technology. Given the sparse information available and the fact I've never heard of it until today, I'm going to guess it was kinda stillborn.
Still might be cool in a pinch, though.
One thing I've always wanted to find out is whether there's a way to use two cheap consumer DOCSIS-compliant cable modems to transmit data over a dry piece of point-to-point CATV coax. The OEMs charge an absolute bundle for real cableco headend gear, and I've always wondered if it would be possible to hack two consumer ('tailend'?) boxes to talk to each other. Given the distances that you can run cable for compared to most UTP services, its ease of installation compared to fiber, and the ubiquity of DOCSIS equipment, that would be a pretty neat way of extending an Ethernet network over very long distances on the cheap.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
1. Get a T1. Expensive but it works and the telco will install the necessary repeaters to get it to you.
2. Cut a deal with the guy at the top of the hill and run some wire down the street.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
It does seem to do that for a LOT of the electronics forums I read. Others I read don't get in nearly as fast yet both have RSS feeds.
I think someone at google is catering to us.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
When we bought our farm in the early '90s there was no phone. We face wrong for satellite and there are mountains in the way. Cellular connections aren't an option either. The first winter here I laid a mile and a half of twelve pair UG cable inside 1" diameter black plastic water line on the surface of the ground from the last pole (POTS NID) to my house. That has worked fine for sixteen years. I laid twelve pairs because when DSL or ISDN became available I wanted to have the capacity. We now have DSL (aDSL for those who care) although we are far beyond the official range of the circuit. The reality is it works much further than they say and we get excellent speed. So, if you can lay your own cable over the necessary distance you may well be able to get broadband.
Another alternative is to install your own WiFi system with a long distance extender from the nearest NID where DSL is available. A pair of devices like http://cellamericas.com/ASU24005g-802.11g-wifi-access-point-wifi-repeater-wifi-bridge-outdoor-wifi-pr-16309.html may do the trick for you. This is probably what I'm going to replace my cable with because we get a lot of lightning here due to the copper vein in the mountains and over the decades the EMPs have blasted many of our wire pairs. I've found the EMPs don't harm the WiFi.
Cheers,
-Walter
Sugar Mountain Farm
in the mountains of Vermont
http://sugarmtnfarm.com/blog/
http://hollygraphicart.com/
http://nonais.org/
OK, then I won't.
I like microcars
Like puzzle games? Warehouse51 for iOS
You're also assuming instantaneous transfer at each end. If you're sending your 4GB stick to someone with a cable modem running at 3Mbps/512kbps down/up, that's the max you'll get. And that's even assuming you keep him fed with enough memory sticks. Since they're somewhat cheap, I'd assume you would.
Second problem is pidgeon transfer. When you want to use birds to transfer messages, you have to first raise the birds in a rook. Then, you transport them to another place, possibly your ISP. When they release a bird with a message, it goes "home" to where it was raised. You'll need to transfer the birds back at intervals. The ISP will also need to host birds, but I'm assuming they won't have as many. After all, upload speeds are always lower.
How many birds will you need for this? Assuming one bird transfer per day, and maybe you use a bird every 30 minutes as above, you'll need approximately 50 birds per day. If you want error checking for duplicity, you'll need twice as many.
I wish people would be more realistic with the pidgeon data transfer methods. It has great promise.
I believe the power limit for unlicensed operation in that band is 100mw to the antenna. Anything higher requires a license.
Off the shelf 802.11 gear operates under Part 15, but when you increase the power and go licensed, you're operating under part 97 (unless you get a commercial license, of course) rules, which as has been noted, adds a few rules as to what can be done on the link.
As I understand it, anything that involves money changing hands is out. I'd also suspect that if he's browsing anything that has language you can't use on-air, he's in violation...
not to mention if he's surfin porn.
True story... I purchased some property in the national forest. One factor that was contingent upon me buying this house was that I have access to broadband and not suck-ass satellite. I checked with the local phone company and they told me I was eligible for DSL service. Then later they told me I was too remote and they couldn't provide it.
At that point I could have accepted their judgment, but instead I decided to identify everyone on the board of directors for the phone company/ISP and contact them letting them know how upset I was over this situation. Two days later the vice president contacted me and said he was "fast tracking" setting up the equipment to provide DSL. A month later I had my broadband. If you bother the executives in these companies they're apt to tell their underlings to "do whatever the guy wants so I don't have to hear from him again." It works.
That's sort of partially correct.
The way balanced audio works is via two signal conductors, and then a separate ground. That's probably the three wires that you're thinking of. Really the ground isn't part of the circuit (and sometimes the ground is intentionally broken to prevent loops), but it's why you have three pins in an XLR jack.
Basically, a balanced audio source will act like a 'push-pull' current source. Rather than simply having a voltage on a wire that varies in time, you have a continuous loop, and you 'push' down one side of the loop and 'pull' up on the other, or vice versa. If you were to hook an oscilloscope probe up to both sides of a balanced audio circuit while something was going down it, you'd find out that the signals on each side of the circuit are 180-degrees out of phase wrt each other. By convention, one of the signal lines is usually called the '+' side and one is called the '-' side,* with the '+' side usually being in-phase with the actual microphone input.
The advantage of this, over an unbalanced line, is common-mode rejection. If you use a transformer (or some type of modern transistorized circuit that simulates a transformer; op-amps acting like difference amplifiers also work well) on the receiving end of the circuit, you can basically 'throw away' any signal that's the same on *both sides* of the circuit. E.g., lets imagine that your balanced audio line is right next to a 60Hz power line. The 60Hz is going to get into the balanced line, but it's going to be the same on both the '+' and '-' sides, while the actual audio is going to be 180 degrees o.o.p. from one side to the other. This makes it easy to reject the interference: when you run the balanced audio into a 1:1 transformer, the 60Hz doesn't produce any current actually moving through the transformer's coils, and thus no output (or very little).
I'm not sure where balanced audio circuits originated. I think that it probably started with the phone company (which has been doing balanced loop circuits practically forever; in telco parlance the '+' and '-' are sometimes called 'tip' and 'ring' respectively, after their placement on old 1/4" jacks) and later migrated to studio audio and sound reinforcement later, rather than the other way around.
Some further reading on balanced audio:
http://www.videomaker.com/article/9732/ Good basic article, might make sense if my explanation doesn't.
http://www.tvtechnology.com/pages/s.0071/t.1585.html Also good, assumes more knowledge of electrical concepts (i.e. impedance).
* Some audio people insist on calling the '+' side of balanced audio connections "hot" and the '-' side "cold," which I think is stupid since they both carry signal (unlike, say, the 'hot' and 'neutral' in your power socket), but you hear it tossed around.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Google is working hard to keep its index fresh and relevant. Thats the reason you are able to posts in Google index in minutes. More info at
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/minty-fresh-indexing/
I'm really trying to figure out what you're talking about, and where you got the idea that the second pair is for daisy-chaining.
The red/green (or blue/blue-white) pair is for the first phone line; the yellow/black (or orange/orange-white) pair is for the second phone line. See the RJ11/14/25 standard.
Standard RJ11/14/25 jacks and plugs can support up to 3 lines on up to 6 wires. These days, some houses just use RJ45 throughout the house, which means 4 lines are possible (8 wires).
Many phone lines are run in a star pattern from the network box, not daisy-chained at all. Where multiple jacks are connected to the same wire run, the red is connected to the red, black to black, etc. There's no crossover between the two pairs.
I think the FCC actually ruled on the "pizza question" about 10 years or so ago, and said it was allowable as long as what you were buying was purely for personal use. I suspect if you ask around on some of the Ham newsgroups on Usenet somebody can quote chapter and verse, but IIRC a food order via the 'patch on your way home is OK, but using it in lieu of a cellphone to make a business call is not.
The problem with extending this to the internet is the prohibitions on encryption. Even if your Amazon order is acceptable, the encryption it uses to make the transaction safe is NOT OK. The FCC has not granted any exceptions to the encryption/encipherment rules, except for the very narrowly defined case of satellite command-and-control. They don't even let people encrypt traffic in order to comply with HIPAA rules in disaster/medical situations.
So, the way the rules are now, if you did have an 802.11 link operating in the section of the ISM band that's also an Amateur band (which is only a subset of the channels that most Part 15 devices use), you could legally operate under Part 97 rules, including power up to 1kw ERP if you really needed it, BUT you'd have to find a way to disable ALL encryption. So no SSH, no SSL/TLS, nothing: probably not even encrypted password handshakes. Everything has to be plaintext or you can't operate under Part 97, and you're back to Part 15 and its measly 100mW limits and antenna prohibitions. (Though I'm not sure where they draw the line on cryptographic authentication, since it's not really designed to obscure the meaning of anything; that seems like it'd be OK.)
That's the thing that makes using a highpower 802.11 system unattractive to me, at least as an everyday Internet connection.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I feel for you, I really do. My dream house meets basically the same specs that you have. And I'm sure that we share similar reasons for wanting to live away from burgeoning cities.
The catch, of course, is that being isolated from civilization means, well- it means that you're isolated from civilization, internet included. We can't have our cake and eat it, too.
There are many suitable solutions posted in this discussion, so I won't try to elaborate on them. All I'm trying to say is this:
You live in peaceful isolation for a reason, right? Take a fearless inventory of your needs/desires, and decide for yourself if the money is really worth it- I mean both the costs and the benefits.
Forgive me if I sound cranky or isolationist, it's been a long week...
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
I've been using my EV-DO enabled cell phone for mobile data and can reliably get 1.2mbit downstream though I've forgotten what my upstream bandwidth is. This would seem like a reasonable possibility as you've stated that cell phones do work in your area. Linksys and Netgear both sell routers for the PC Card form factor mobile data cards.
I live in a rural area here in South Central Wisconsin. Cable stops 2 miles away, DSL is a good 20 miles away. I looked into satellite, and the prices are VERY cost prohibitive.
:)
AllTel recently launched an EVDO service. The setup was a snap, Motorola MotoRAZR V3m phone, USB cable, and about 5 min of tinkering in linux, and I was online at a very respectible 400k/100k connection, with around 90-100ms latency.
Having said this, it doesn't make it easy to do a whole network this way. I did some research, and found a solution to that as well. Kyrocera offers a router (the KR1) that has both a simple USB port on it, and a spot for an EV-DO PCMCIA card. Quite literally, it would be plug 'n go, and an AllTel tier2 rep even said it works great for them at the office.
Best of all, the plan is already decent for cell phone service (4 people are on my plan, and I pay $100/month in total, and have more minutes than I know what to do with).
I've been hobbling along at 26.4kbps for quite a long time. It's very nice to finally get out of the stoneage
Investigate where the phone companies equipment is placed, and find out what equipment they have there already. If you order specific business services (ie a type of contract with multiple lines, etc) they will be forced to upgrade all the equipment up to your nearest connection to their media. Like someone else noted, many of these types of things are tariffed or are requirements for providing service created by your local municipality. This equipment often is the same that would net you DSL. Unfortunately, this kind of thing isn't something your local telco will want people to know, so pinpointing what service to subscribe is a pain.
You could try to get a USB device to wirelessly get a cell phone connection with EVDO speeds. The two fastest providers are Sprint and Verizon, because they both use EVDO... Cingular and T-Mobile do not use this, so their speeds are slower. I have a PCMCIA one of these Sprint cards, and I get 1mbit down constantly while driving in the car, and I lost my connection only once every 30 minutes or so, for about 15 seconds... Most of them are PCMCIA cards, for a laptop, but they do make some USB ones, such as the Aircard® 595U by Sierra Wireless. Before you get it, you should check if your area gets a signal. Type in your zip code on the side panel at the right, and when the map appears, you must remember to check the box under the map that says "Sprint Mobile Broadband Network". If your area receives no service, you should try to find out if Verizon cards get any reception there either. Chances are, if cell phones using Sprint or Verizon get reception at your house, then a USB card should, too.
I do believe you can still get print versions of Playboy...
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
If you're that isolated, couldn't you chop down one or two measly trees and put a satellite dish up on a 10-20 foot mast without needing a permit or your neighbors freaking out? That would give you at least a reasonable downlink. I'm not sure what sat connections cost these days, since I have AT&T DSL available in the town I just moved to, which I recently cancelled after two days and three attempts at getting the service I requested. Then there's Time Warner Cable, with its independent contractors like Jeb's Redneck Cable Co. and NoShow Cable Inc., which destroy your bathroom, let your cat escape, and always make any installation or service change a real adventure. Even a "borrowed" wifi connection to an unknown neighbor's cable was better than AT&T, unfortunately. But the last time I used dialup, temporarily in 2002 I think, I still got twice your 26.4k down speed. Ouch.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
as we scan down the thread and discover that the consensus actually does seem to be to become your own ISP. ("Get a T1 and bring in some neighbors.")
Even sharing a DSL line with a line-of-sight neighbor and installing wireless is in the same class of response because someone has to administer the connection.
So. Compare.
On the one hand you can purchase the equipment, rent the line, etc., and then you have to pay yourself to administer it. (Or maybe hire a part-timer.)
On the other hand, you can sound out the local ISPs and buy enough stock in one that seems sympathetic enough to go ahead and get DSL running for you.
Which is cheaper? Might depend on how hard-headed (and maybe pre-bought) the local ISPs are, as well on your level of experience and skill and whether there is anyone close enough to call when you get in over your head.
Not directly but as a modem. I have an N800 with a Nokia 6103 phone on T-Mobile. Edge network works like ISDN on good days and a 56k on the bad ones (depending on my bars) I can watch a youtube video but wouldn't expect real high speed interactive video. All in all it's 1999 all over again when I'm on the go. The advantage is that no matter where I am if I have telephone I have the net. Makes 24/7 support a lot easier on my family life for sure.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
move.
or else!
Very nice Laumer reference in the .sig.
He's one of the (if not the) best.
The Monitors is genius.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Look around and check with your local telecom operators and explain your problem. In some areas power companies also provide broadband access. I ran into this site on the net: Wireless Internet Service which seems to be offering a set of alternatives.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Interesting. Cause here in Europe, all copper I've ever seen has been two-wire.... And yes, you can get "alarm-cables" here too, but they're dry two-wire setups, not four wires...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Life is short, take more risks, why not consider moving if you believe you'll end up with better access to something you need? Internet will be more and more essential and eventually become the primary means of delivery of modern media in the next 5 to 7 years.
People are very mobile nowadays, if they don't like something or see an opportunity, they just move and grab it.
Consider also that this is a choice you make not only for you, but also your wife and children. They'll share your pain or benefits, whatever you choose to do.
You could consider not selling your place but renting it, and renting a place elsewhere for your family (or buying it in mortgage installments). This way you won't end up on the street if something goes awry, and always have a home to go back to.
I'm sorry if this totally not applies to your situation (it's possible, I know very little), but it's always good to think outside the box for a bit and think about how it may play out.
Without Internet connection you wont have to waste time reading stupid articles about a guy living in a log cabin who cant get Internet as if it was "Stuff That Matters".
Has compression really hit a wall? Why is gzip and ziv-davis limited to 2 times compression? What about the stacker filesystem of old? Did it boast greater compression? Is moving to a new place for Internet stupid?
If you haven't got line of sight to a place where you have power and broadband access, your only options may be find out more about cellular or go without.
You might, and I emphasize MIGHT, be able to squeeze more Kb/s out of your modem by using a different ISP. Modem communications work by magic. Here's a link to an article I wrote many years ago about some phone line problems. Probably still largely as correct as it ever was. http://donaldkenney.110mb.com/GLOSSARY/LINEPROB.HTM Maybe it'll help. Fortunately, you can test ISPs without cancelling your old one.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
with no broadband i would recommend magazines and DVD's.
What about driving to the suburbs and borrowing someone else's net.
I have a buddy in Canada that solves these problems for all kinds of people. He uses high speed towers and line of site. You can probably get something setup between you and your neighbors pitching in. The speed should be very reasonable.
check him out at http://www.syban.net/
T1 is the answer, I'm afraid. If you do your homework, you should be able to do as I did - $300/mo for 3 years. Yep, it's a lot. Business-class service, though; you can pull the full 1.5Mbps down at the same time as up 24/7 and AT&T won't complain, and if the line goes down, they call *you* and not the other way around.
Others have said "you can always get satellite". Apparently they don't live behind a tall mountain, on a steep north-facing slope - it's quite possible to not be able to get a signal at all because of the LOS requirements there. Last place I lived, I had about three degrees extra..... my dish pointed almost straight up the hill, luckily between two trees, to get to the right spot in the sky.
Consider also for the satellite reachability issue: many people in the USA live close to the 50 degree north line, which means that you don't have to be on *that* steep of a hill to have trouble getting a line of sight.
Just a thought that a lot of people miss.. If you have dial-up, it's still fast enough to remotely connect to a place that has broadband. I.e. you have a computer at work (since he's the admin I'd hope he does) that is on a fast internet connection. You dial into it and then do your surfing there. Sure, things are disabled and it's not REALLY fast, but I bet it's better than his dial-up connection. It works okay, I've done it in the past. There's definitely some issues with things, but if you get used to it you can use the remote computer just as your own (assuming normal usage - won't be doing much for gaming =( ) Anyway, just thought I'd drop this out there, as I didn't see anyone say it.
ISDN while not as commonplace is still around with most of the local phone companies. A lot of high end Video conferencing machines keep ISDN still alive. Its not terribly fast but much faster than dialup.
A fractional T1 while also on the expensive side might be an option as well.
If you have a neighbor with broadband you could use a Microwave link to connect you to the small network you setup in their home. Since you mentioned you live close to a mountain you would have line of sight for several miles around.
four wire lines are real..they are not simply parallel lines within a house. I have a four wire line running to my rural property and once had two separate lines running with these two separate circuits..However this is definitely not the way to get a decent internet data rate....Get together with other neighbors and set up a wireless LAN with a dedicated tower if necessary to get a wideband input to this system. I have exactly this. The equipment is made by Motorola. We have a local tower but competitive systems have a series of local mini transmitters which cover the area. For me, the local tower was set up by one man and he has about one hundred customers. He has a direct air connection to a repeater about ten or 15 km away and in turn that repeater is connected the same way to the internet backbone in Alberta. My connexion is about 950 mb/sec so slower by far than cable in Edmonton but considering that I used to have also 26.5 kps, I feel very satisfied. Weather does not interfere at all with my data rate and that includes both rain and snow. The foliage would affect it but I have a high reception tower to avoid this. It is a 2.5 gigahertz signal by the way and outlets as a standard ethernet. Check out Canadasurfs.ca to see how the system works. It will require some organisational work on some people in your area to get this working but I know that there are coop LANs all over.
Set up RONJA with your neighbor which does have DSL access..
Get work to pay...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
He could always borrow Penny's book.
I am fascinated by your idea of a modem without the modem part and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Well perhaps you can convince your company to use something like Citrix metaframe.
It's a virtual desktop, the software runs on their server giving you basicly the view of a desktop.
All their software can be put in there with full functionality if you use windows, outlook word excel etc.
What you get, is only a compressed data stream of that desktop view, and you send only some mouse positions and pressed keys. Therefor it doesn't require much since its also compressed in a smart way (only the parts that change on screen will be sended). And if i remember well a phone line is enough. (ask citrix people/vendor)
Ofcourse you would set it up as a not to big screen with a not to high screendepth, if i was you.
YOu can set that when your making a connection.
I work in the IT, and i often take over screens with simmilair softwarem over slow connections.
Another option is use web brouwser based email, (if your on MS use Exchange Outlook web access instead of outlook).
If you use also other company software ask if there is a web based version of it.
Perhaps less functioniality but often people dont require full functionality like outlook (like me).
Also discuss this with you company perhaps you're not the only one.
Well hope it helps
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
This is a good advice, my experience tells me that very good link from point A to point B can be achieved using 802.11b/g wireless.
For example - use 2 or more sets of the following:
Waterproof casing - $10-30
Parabolic antenna 24dBi (N female connector) - Hyperlink, PacificWireless, Andrew - cost about US $75
LMR195/240/400 (rpSMA to N male) pigtail, 0.6m, 3m or more in length - cost from US$10 to US$20(3m)
Wireless router - Buffalo, Linksys - and put DDwrt in them they are about 50-70$ each (http://www.ddwrt.org)
Ecellent alternative are Mikrotik routers, a bit more expensive ($100) but much more flexible (http://www.mikrotik.com) they also sell complete devices integrated in antennas)
Then find any location in the range of 50km with faster internet, setup all in your home, put it up and use. These devices use small amounts of energy (5W) and work reliably. You can even connect from your home to such device using normal wireless card in your PC. Line of sight is a must for such distances. Having two hops is not a problem, only more expensive.
I have seen effective speeds of 17mbps and more on links with more than 20km, working for months without any human intervention.
Doing a good job is like spilling coffee on a dark suit, you feel warm all over, but nobody notices.
A HAM radio license also affords one the right to use more powerful radios in the existing 802.11B/G/N range. This traffic is NOT subject to the regulations against encrypted data over public airwaves.
I grew up and lived most my life in rural areas in Texas.. Back about 8 to 10 years ago I used ISDN in a town with about 200 people.. The phone lines sound like the quality of yours, i would and still dial up there at around 21.6k or something. ISDN would give me 128k. T1 is generally an option for anyone with the money, that is what I have now. runs me about $500 a month however and I share it with one other person via wireless..
Depending on the terrain and distance to the closest place with DSL/cable/etc you might could use one of the versions of point to point wireless, I have considered doing that myself. I would say that would be one of your better options IF you can managed to work that out.. Satellite internet in my experience works for downloading larger files from a single source (like FTP or from a HTTP source), but its latency is terrible, I rather surf on a 56k modem or ISDN. The ping times Ive seen on sat were between 1200ms to 2500ms.. which i find it a bit amazing they dont have something worth a damn in that area without that latency yet (but i do not know the technical issues on that, i just find it odd..)
So i would at least get ISDN, should be available to you, would be around 6x the speed you have now if I understand right using both lines bonded. If you got the cash to shell out they should be able to get a T1 to you for $500 to $700.. I went through a re-seller from AT&T and she managed to get me a better price than AT&T was going to give me themself.. but that is quite expensive. And there is always the wireless to the next town that has something cheap and usable.
s/©//g
1. Phone local isp's and take the query up with them, they might have had similar problems with other clients in the area and found feasible work a rounds. :P
2. Get a bunch of children with white boards and make them run between your home and your isp
Why everyone's wasting space talking about phone line options I don't know. He's a hospital network admin who's been online since 1984. It's safe to assume he's researched the options pretty thoroughly and 28.8k is as good as he can get.
At those speeds, forget trying to work directly, you're better off with a remote desktop product. If the budget allows Citrix is meant to be very good, however for a smaller outlay, Dameware's Mini Remote control is superb. For $89.95 you get a remote control program you can use to manage all your desktops at work *and* you can install a copy at home as well.
It supports the RDP protocol which I *think* is better for slow connections, and has it's own driver for true remote access. For best performance just set it to 800x600 in 256 colours, and it even has a set of defaults for 28.8k connections.
I've been using it for 2 years and couldn't imagine running a network without it now. If you're interested, check out http://www.dameware.com/
What's a "ufbwjcsoir"? A Google Search only results in this post.
Nice one.
Also, if you're just using web browsing over a slow connection you might want to look at onspeed (www.onspeed.com). They install a small client on your PC and compress everything that's sent to you. If you ramp the compression right up graphics look pretty crap, but websites load much faster.
It's been a while, but I think it may still work (or even work better with new devices)
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2001/pulpit_20010712_000697.html
Or solar powered wireless boster repeater thingies... ;)
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
2 CAT5 plugs and install your own link.
You have lights, right?
One of the great social programs of the last century was the Rural Electrification Initiative. Vast resources were employed to string wire to outlying areas.
Granted, even by the 1970's, we were still not quite at 100%, but that's not the point here.
If you have electricity, you already have wire run to your house, and the technology exists to pass broadband-speed data on that wire.
Sorry, this isn't really an answer, more a polemic on the idea that's it's just too expensive to get broadband out to everyone in our country.
We did it once, we can certainly do it again.
Globalstar satellite phones work with a clear view of the sky, any sky and with the car data kit (included with the phone) you can access the internet at 34800 or so. I even have a cable to go directly from my laptop to the phone so I'm not even tied to the car/house.
Actually Primestar dished work really well too, just remember that they are "offset" so the aiming is counter-intuitive (ya gotta flip it or angle it towards the ground). http://www.wallawalla.edu/frohro/Airport/Primestar/Primestar.html is a good start but I'd put a POE access point or router in place of the tin can. Mark Stevens (the most famous of the "Robert X. Cringely"'s and a Wayne County Ohio boy, home of Smuckers, birthplace of Rubbermaid and Certified Angus) has some more tricks if you like. I collected primestar dishes and still have 8 or 10 of them. Cool toys!
Whoosh!!!!!
The rule forbidding commercial traffic was updated in 1993 to allow communications that facilitate business transactions as long as the control operator is not running a business. For example, ordering pizza or calling about a personal appointment is permitted. Linking directly to the internet is permitted with the usual caveats including encryption, cyphers, operator control, music, and of course running a business. Personally I would find the lack of encryption in the proposed use to be a show stopper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinternet
I infer from your post that now your mobile phone works where you are. Therefore, the solution is to get 3G broadband. Here in Europe we use GPRS, UMTS, and HSDPA a lot. In fact, right now I am posting from a 1.8mbps HSDPA connection on a Thinkpad laptop right on the middle of the sea onboard a ship. There are PCMCIA (cost approx 400 EUR), ExpressCard, and USB mobile antennas that you can connect to laptops and desktops, and 3G even works on GNU/Linux. If your mobile phone really works there, then 3G or in the worst case GPRS should work as well. Just call your mobile phone operator to learn how much you pay per kilobyte and what the monthly download limit is, then consider the price (here 30 Euro per month for 80 MB per month at 1.8mbps) and your needs and sign up if you like it.
check these people out. They do just that. They provide internet to places that cant get it. It is an inflteable satelite ball that will give you internet world wide. www.gatr.com
I remember my (ham) professor saying if you were a ham you could amplify any normal 802.11* gear up to 100 watts EIRP, but must limit your power to "Only as high as needed to get the message across". And unencrypted of course. Which always made me wonder what if a ham is doing non-ham activities, just got his linksys router for his house, and wants to encrypt it? It's all *his* stuff... meh..
Back in the AT&T days (pre 1982) when all phone outlets were 4 conductor and pulse was the norm, all 4 wires were used.
I had a phone outlet in my room but but no phone and I used to listen to my sister's telephone conversations (like a little brother would do) by hooking up a speaker to the bottom 2 terminals.
I figured out that I could pulse dial my friends by tapping on the terminals and use another speaker for a microphone.
Back then, you just couldn't get another phone without parental approval because phones were leased and no one had a phone sitting around so I used old tape recorder parts.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
A couple years ago I was staying with family in the North Woods of cheesy Wisconsin, where Verizon owned all of the phone lines. I planned on staying up there for a while and after being spoiled with a constant internet connection, I opted to get a second phone line installed. So when Verizon came out and installed the line, I ended up giving them a call after the technician left to check a few things... long story short the operator ended telling me that hte new line installed was capable of DSL, and further more, I was the only one in town with this ability. A lot of the times, DSL can't be supported in a home because of older telephone line setups, but if you order a new one to be installed, then that may fix your problem. I wouldn't anticipate, if I were you, to be able to get this imformation from anyone at your local phone company, most of the time they take the obvious general answer, if no one else has it then you won't either. At most, ordering the new line to be installed should cost you 80 bucks, and the surprise at hte end of the install would be either you can get DSL on it or you can't.
WWPD - What Would Picard Do?
If your cell phone service is now working good, perhaps cel phon internet access via a teahered cable is an option. I have Verizon service with a BlackBerry 7250 using a teahered cable. In non-evo areas I get 144k, in evo G3 areas I get up to 1.5mb on my laptop. Just make certain you get the 'unlimited' option and the minutes do not get charged against your phone minutes. Cost is an addition $15/month over the cell phone.
Sprint SERO plan (check it out via search on Yahoo/Google) offers it with the regular SERO plans. Coverage is not as good as Verizon.
Have fun.
At least here in Omaha, some of the builders or new homes will daisy-chain from one outlet to another. The better way for a phone installer's standpoint is do a hub and spoke, but not everyone does it. What really sucks is when the electrician daisy-chains and you need to install a third line....and they only cut the line and hook up lines 1 and 2. That means you have to hit up each jack and connect the wires again for line 3...not much fun.
the correct url for ddwrt is http://www.dd-wrt.org/
http://www.ddwrt.org/ is nothing but "sponsored links"
Satellite is NEVER an option. EVER. Satellite is only for National Geographic or some Forbes 400 company that absolutely must communicate in the middle of nowhere. To pay for it residentially is idiocy. It is too expensive and physics will guarantee you a MINIMUM 1200ms lag time on your connections. The TCP/IP packets must travel to the Ground Relay station UP TO the Satellite and then BACK DOWN to your Dish. Each trip to/from space is between 600 and 800 ms in my own experience. I think they went 2-way some time ago, but the residential offerings in 2000 needed a modem and a phone line to send the packets back. That's 2 wholly different network paths to establish a TCP/IP session. It works about as well as sounds. Forget anything real-time, and most file transfers start having problems. I couldn't tell you how many timeouts I had on my FTP services back then. Furthermore, unless there is dedicated hardware, you will have to install a uber-crappy SAT modem into a computer and then use sharing from it. I had to build a WIN2k server and use RAS and Proxy back then to make it work. I had a really good firewall, but you can never really trust a MS system to do security.
If you cannot use some creative wireless bridging ideas to create a link between you and a friendly point down the mountain (LOT of other posts on how you can do that with even a Pringles Can), you are left with only 2 options.
1) Build yourself a WIN2K server box and install four 56K modems. Bridge them and you can at least create a 8 KB/s connection and then share it with RAS. Personally, I would LOCK that sucker down HARD and VPN a connection over to your work and send everything through it. Drop every packet that does not come from a static IP at work.
2) If you really don't have to move a whole lot of data between you and your office, you can always use good ol' remote administrator (famatech) to connect to a machine at work and do all the work from that machine. RA can downgrade to grayscale @ 1024x768 and still be quite responsive with a 2 KB/s connection.
When you upgrade/retire the pigeons, you can always have a pigeon roast for supper.
I know your pain. I'm a software development consultant and live in a heavily forested river basin with no southern exposure, no DSL and no high-speed cable access. I've looked into everything, even starting my own wireless ISP for the neighborhood (too many trees!). The real pisser about my situation is that there is a fiber repeater station on the highway about 150 yards from my house without any POP access! I have settled with ISDN (2 x 64kb channels) for the last four years.
It doesn't do everything I would like, but I am able to work remotely using SSH and RDS. I can't download full-length movies, but I do download a lot of music at night and my son plays WOW with only occasional fits of latency deaths. One person can be on browsing the web or playing WOW or working remotely and one more person can be browsing the web wo/ images. My son has even had some friends over with two of them on WOW raiding at the same time. Actually, quite amazing if you think about it.
What I did was get a cheap Cisco 800 series router off e-bay and called Verizon to get another circuit wired into the house. Unlimited use of the circuit is $83/mo. and my ISP is another $45/mo. I've tried every other possible cheaper national ISP, but their ISDN service was spotty and unstable. This local more expensive ISP has been rock solid.
My neighbor has a cell modem that works OK down here, but the latency is pretty high and the ISDN still beats it in throughput.
Good luck!
I read someone suggested satellite, apparently they didnt fully read your post.
Someone suggested 3G cell, apparently they don't get that even if that is offered where you are, the fact that cell access 'just barely' works probably means it isnt or wont where you are.
If this is a legitimate business need, then you need a business Internet connection. If you have a phone line, you get get a leased line (A T-1 would probably be the place to start looking). It wont be cheap (although it might still be less than 4 phone lines and 4 Internet accounts unless you can get real cheap prices on both) Probably the less expensive way rather than pay for the T1 line itself, as well as Internet service, would be to just get a T1 between your house and your employer. That will give you the best response for remote management, and then you can tap into the Internet connection that I assume is there for whatever (business purpose) access you need to that.
Depending on how far you are from a more convenient location that CAN get cable/ADSL/whatever, how about a microwave link between your house and that location? No idea about cost, practicality, bylaws, etc., but it's an idea. Of course, you'll need line of sight, which will mean you need a tower (based on your comments about satellite), so maybe you just need a tower for a satellite dish. Bylaws again.... You're a hospital network admin, for Christ sake, this is in the National Interest!
Not only that, but you can get pretty damn cheap unlimited internet through certain providers for your smartphone, which you can sometimes connect to your computer via USB and use as a modem, which may be an easy way to test it out without buying additional hardware. Unless you have a cell phone that doesn't do this, which I guess is pretty probable.
Otherwise, you can get satellite internet which, if you live somewhere with clear skies, is pretty goddamn good. Except for anything that does poorly with 1 second pings (deathmatch, anyone?). They mitigate the latency sometimes by running your upload over modem, thereby cutting the travel of the signal roughly in half, but I have no experience with this. The only place I've had experience with satellite is at the tip of the Baja peninsula, which a)has clouds only when you're getting hammered by a hurricane (seasonal), and b)had no other options available where my client was. But other than getting used to waiting a bit for a click to register, it's pretty damn fast and reasonable.
Other than that, I have no ideas. You could try carrier pigeon. Or be extremely happy you're unable to allow work to invade your home.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Everything old is new again...
I still have some old Ethernet hubs with BNC Coax uplinks on them...
Sidenote: if you've got a pair of point to point coax, you could also use them as a DS3 - there are lots of cheap, old M13s and other stuff like that out there - you might not have to futz with DOCSIS, which I believe is asymmetric.
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
Madonna is like the C programming language.
Naturally sloppy and confusing?
Riddled with curly brackets?
Ubiquitous?
Through the efforts of many professionals over the years, at first glance seems quite a bit younger than she is?
Please stop stalking me, bro.
You say you are on the north side of a heavily forested hill. Presumably you also own a fair chunk of the land around you. Strike out south from your house and find a spot that can see the geosynchronous satellite band. If you can't, you'll need to build a tower up to a sufficient height. From that point it is a relatively simple matter of running a long coax cable and trenching it in.
If you aren't feeling that handy talk to a few of the local dish installers until you find somone willing to do it.
Back when I was stuck in 24.6land, I learned about ISDN, an ancient "broadband" service. It was slow, but always on, and much better than dialup. Check with your phone company for availability.
I can think of a few options that would not require purchaing a carrier or a carrier pigeon as others have suggested. 1) Run all your servers on Linux and use screen via a compressed ssh session. OK, maybe this would require too much re-work, but this is /. so it had to be said.
2) Co-locate a WAN accelerator and connect your computer to this device. You may be able to get the hospital to let you co-locate there if you use it primarily for supporting their systems--or even purchase the thing if you can justify it for other purposes [remote clinics]. I think Riverbed has an installable client. This would reduce latency on some applications and speed up data streams that have repeating bit patterns. It also does a great job of proxying CIFS connections.
3) Co-locate a PC and RDP into it. Your screen updates might be a bit slow, but applications should function just fine. You might even try a combination of this and #2. RDP is a rather lean protoco, but you never know.
Good luck, otherwise I might know a realator in your area. :)
-rd
There are a lot of posts here with variations on the specifics, but basically all say "find a place that gets high-speed landline service within line-of-sight, then use some method of wireless." I agree, if there is anyone within line-of-site who gets (or can get) high-speed access.
If not, I suggest you cut down one or two trees as necessary, buy a telephone poll or an antenna tower, locate it appropriately in your new clearing, and put a satellite dish on top of it. Unless by "north facing hillside" you mean you live immediately north of a large sheer stone cliff, this should be feasible without spending as much as it would cost to move, and avoiding all the associated inconvenience.
Just to note, I agree with certain previous posters that the root of the problem here is government granted monopolies on communications infrastructure, crippling competition. To put it in terms of the Slashdot-cliché car analogy, competition between DSL and cable is like giving Ford a monopoly on trucks and SUV's and Chevy a monopoly on cars, barring everyone else from participating in the market at all, and calling that "competition."
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
If you can get enough people that want DSL in your area, you can petition to your local DSL provider to extend access to your area. I work for Verizon and we will often install extensions to area's that we deem profitable, based on popularity of demand. If not, you can ask about the possibility of fiber optics. They run the FIOS down beside the railroad here but it's not yet open to the public (here, at least). Business only. Worth a shot though.
if you can run it to someplace that has fast internet. use 2-wire T1 HDSL on that one loop, office card on one end, subscriber card on the other end. instant T1 feed. suppliers include Adtran and ADC, tellabs probably has a system. google "HDSL 4" for more.
not as inexpensive as a hilltop or valley neighbor willing to split the cost of a fast connection and a couple wi-fi boxes and 3-pack of Pringles with you, but pretty solid. unless your wires get wet. HDSL gets pretty butt-ugly with wires wet in the jacket.
there are LOTS of solutions if you have somebody within range and eyesight that has speed-wires... modulated laser (Canobeam, etc,) line-of-sight microwave, wi-fi, etc. whatever tech person told you "move" is rather fixed in thought.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
In the US, eavesdropping (wiretapping) is illegal, but there's no provision to design systems to prevent eavesdropping, as this wiring system seems to be setup to do.
When I was working modem tech support (10 years ago), the most frequent complaint from people who had bought v.90/k56flex modems was that their speed was maxing out at 26.4. We'd occasionally get that from people who had bought 33.6 modems, but the 28.8 and below's consistently maxed out.
The 33.6 and 56k protocols do a lot of tricks with the line that the 28.8's don't; 28.8 is pretty much the highest speed American phone lines support without those tricks. I don't remember the technical reasons, but there you have it.
Pretend there is some witty statement here.
Wow. I think you just dated yourself and proved your membership in the Mad Scientist's Club.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
The russians have a unique satellite system called Molniya. Because of their high northern latitude, Ivan Ivanovich cannot use geostationary satellites. Therefore the dozen or so Molniya sats orbit serially in a 12-hour highly excentric north pole trajectory to provide constant coverage evn for those above 60degrees north! I think ground station requires use of 8ft or 12ft dish antenna though. Net service may be available via them, of course HIPPA or whatnot law may prevent you from relaying sensitive yankee data via godless communist link, blah-blah.
Do you have neighbour's in your line of site with broadband? If so, buy a pair of high gain directional antennas, and set up an 802.11 link.
You can buy such antennas here: http://www.wlanparts.com/
A couple of months ago(Apr-June07) my sister-in-law, let me use her Verizon Broadband wireless service. I really hated to go back to 28.8K dialup. Never had any problems. She said it added about $60USD to her monthly bill, but I thought that it was worth it. Good luck.
Try going to wildblue.com, or to www.hughesnet.com they are the two most popular satellite internet companies for the US. While there service is not what DSL is it is far better than dial-up and HughesNet is supposedly going to be having FIOS equivalent speed available sometime this year. Note, that their prices are a little high then basic DSL, and ypu may end up paying between 60-80 a month to get a solid speed that you will be happy with, but anything is better than dial-up.
I'm not sure I could ever go back to dialup. While it used to be acceptable, most web designers now assume broadband, so modern dialup would feel far slower than it used to.
The reason I used the formulation "modem with the modem part" is just because that's one of the comments I got on the project in real life. :)
"Ronja is a free technology project for reliable optical data links with a current range of 1.4km and a communication speed of 10Mbps full duplex."
http://ronja.twibright.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA
Basically, you should be able to get to the top of a hill or another vantage point where satellite reception is possible by using this or other methods.
If you can't do it with an SSH terminal session, it doesn't need doing.
SSH runs beautifully at 9600 and above.
> I have 26.4 kbps dial-up access to the internet ... it would be
> nice to do some [work] stuff remotely when I am on 24/7 call.
Umm, so use ssh, what's the problem?
When I was on dialup, the modem was admittedly 33.6, but OTOH the connection was shared, so that's pretty comparable. I used ssh all the time to shell into work from home for various reasons, and occasionally into home from work. The only reason I'm not still on dialup is because Verizon appears to have completely stopped repairing land lines in my area and the line was no longer clear enough to sustain a dialup connection. So I had to break down and shell out for cable modem service (which, fortunately, is available here, albeit from one provider only). Otherwise I'd still be on dialup.
X11 forwarding is painfully slow over dialup, but I never experienced any significant problem with regular ssh (or tramp for editing remote files), and although it can be nice to have you don't actually _need_ X11; any network administrator who can't get work done without a GUI is in altogether the wrong line of work.
Dialup really isn't all that bad, once you're accustomed to it. Really large items take a long time to download, but with a decent resume-where-it-left-off tool (e.g., wget), even that is not really a big deal, you just let it run while you sleep and/or are away from home. The largest thing I ever downloaded that way was a three-CD set of ISO images for a Linux distro (I do not now recall which one). It took a few days, but it worked.
You could possibly get ISDN, but it's probably not worth what it would cost. My advice is to learn to live with the dialup. Yes, you *can* do remote system administration over dialup.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
use isdn; get two lines if you can afford it. you should be able to trunk/bond them together for a fatter pipe, and smaller isp's should have special deals available to isdn customers with multipler dail-ups to the same account. depending on your location to the dial-up connection, if you're on the same intralata as your isp, and the cost to dial-in can be a single call charge despite the length of the call(provided it's not considered an intralata long distance call)... but YMMV, it's been years since i had to do this.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
Call up your local ILEC and request a dry pair, aka a dry pair. Get it connected to a remote site that does have access to cable or DSL within a 17.5k foot distance from your home. If you've lived in the area for 20 years you surely have a friend closer to town that you can call on. Terminate the dry pair at his house. Equipment for setting a small scale point-to-point DSL network across the dry pair between the sites can be had in a online for about $200-300 per end. You can also pick up long-range Ethernet (LRE) equipment for even less and possible have more throughput. Now you just have to get Internet access to your friend's house. In all likelyhood they already have Internet access. You could pay for a second connection. You could also just pay to bump up the speed of their existing service. I've seen this method used before successfully. Do not tell the phone company that you're using this for anything other than alarm service or they will charge you out the ass.
1) Pay to have the wire laid.
2) rent a small office in a nearby town you can drive to in an emergency.
3) suck it up.
to answer your question:
If broadband isn't an option, then you can't get broadband. You kinda answered your own question.
The LAST thing I would do is move.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, it's not like anyone else would date him.
This is an option that will work for you. Its much faster then most, and its stable and not affected by weather. This company provides service in Kansas, but you may find similar companies in your area. http://www.kansasbroadband.net/index.cfm Check out "how it works" http://www.kansasbroadband.net/howitworks.cfm
It may not solve your internet problem, though.
-- a friend
Not *just* Swedish -- a number of countries use both the parallel (US-style) and serial (Sweden-style) arrangements of jacks, although the parallel style is more common.
Good suggestion. People in my area started a WISP (magnolia road internet co-op) and after a few initial hitches (T1s are VERY expensive for the amount of bandwidth provided) they seem to be doing okay (they're almost 3 years in now and are financially stable with a service that is generally positively regarded). I would have used their service if DSL hadn't have become an option here.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The newer protocols have somewhat better latencies - 3G in particular, which is what you probably want for speed if you can get it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It doesn't work :/
> Move out of the house my wife and I built and lived in for 20 years. Has it really come to this?
YES.
So, that seems OK to download things at work's computer to check them there later.
But HOW are you supposed to gain some throughput with that?
Probably, poster's access speed is limited by his copper pair geographically remote located telephone line. It's not because you connect to a fast ISP that automagically your line upgrades to a better one. The ISP will provide data limited by your line so...
Yo do your surfing stuff 'at' work's computer. You will want to read what you surfed at that computer from you home so you have to download it from you work's computer! You are limited there. You gain nothing.
Sooner or later your data will have to pass by that longtime forgotten (by PTT company) copper pair. It will be still a dial-up connection.
It wont help either when SSHing his remote servers.
My apologies if this has already been suggested, but you did mention satilite as unavailable because you live on the north-facing side of a mountain... have you considered using a microwave transmitter to connect to a satillite reciever on another point on the mountain that can reach a satallite? I'd imagine that you could use something similar to get down to an area with broadband if such an area is within a few miles. Perhaps even a point-to-point wireless with the hospital itself?
I heard of there being shotgun modems before cable or DSL broadband were around. Basically you run two or more phonelines to it in parallel. Whether or not you can still find one or any current dial-up ISPs still support such a thing is another question.
In my area, (where lots do not have access to broadband via cable or DSL), there are two other options. One is radio via Digis or Direct TV has an internet option. Even those who have "stand alone" homes (completely off all grids) can have broadband.
Not just a Swedish thing.
;-).
Daisy-chaining is the usual setup in Germany as well, for the same reason that was already mentioned here: to prevent eavesdropping.
But there are also other useful setups. If an answering machine, e.g., is placed after the phone in the chain, then you can just pick up the phone when the answering machine already started to run. Another use is modems. Put them early in the chain, then nobody can accidentally pick up the phone and interrupt the Windows update that is already running for 17 hours
Daisy chaining is very, very common in the US as well, at least in houses that are more than 5 years old. However, they're usually daisy-chained from jack to jack, not from device to device, so nothing will stop your wife from picking up the phone and getting a screech if you're dialed in to the internet unless the phone is plugged in to the jack at the back of modem.
I have a Cingular (now AT&T) Wireless G3 card. It nets me 128k on a bad day, and in excess of 1M on a good signal. If you have a new tower in range, chances are you can net 1M easily. Mine is an unlimited access plan for $59 a month, the same cost as cable internet. I use it for travel work, but there is no reason you can't use it at home. You do need to change to a laptop, as the only option I have seen is PCMCIA. I heard rumors of a USB option, but haven't seen one, so I cannot verify the existance of such a beast.
citrix will work over dial up, it was designed to. Any windows app will run on it. it is just as valid a solution as any other one here.
Those who can, do.
(from the WISP that posted above) If you need an amp, you are probably doing something wrong.
A staple item of commercial WISPs is something like this:
About $60 with shipping, high gain, not too hard to work with (the grid doesn't catch much wind).
A 2' solid dish probably works a little better, but costs about $150.
If you can get LOS, a pair of these should work to ten miles without too much pain. Without LOS, it might go thru 100' of trees (but range will be severely impacted), just depends on how thick they are. If you buy StarOS radios, you could probably do both ends for $600 total.
Most people a not trying to use all of your line all at the same time. /.
Most people will be reading e-mail or
Don't expect to view movies from netflicks.
Its Internet access, not cable TV.
Some wifi antennae is able to get the signal up to 50km (in my experience), so you can link your house to someone else's and proceed with dsl from there.
From the way it sounds, your options aren't too good. But you do have options. It sounds like the phone-line quality won't support 56k (I assume you aren't still on a 28.8 modem). But if you get a second phone line and modem, you could multilink your Internet connection--that roughly doubles (or better) your connection speed. There's software out there that can accomplish that for you.
Anyone who said "just connect to a neighbor who does have connectivity." No problem, that's SEVEN MILES away.
Anyone who said "Just shoot over the top of the hill." Great, that's FOUR MILES from here.
Anyone who said "Cut down trees." Do you know what a forest is? I'd have to cut a swath through the trees over a mile long to shoot close to the horizon, but I don't own that much land.
And no, no wireless broadband and only 1 carrier is on the cell tower so far, no broadband equipment yet (we've been promised it's coming by 2012).
The real problem is it doesn't matter how this gets solved. The day my new 1MB connection is hooked up in a few years (whatever the solution turns out to be), it will ALREADY BE OBSOLETE. By 2012, there'll be 100M connections in the cities, all services and websites will be designed with that speed in mind.
Then everyone will be screaming about how they are slow, it'll take a few years for 90% of the country to catch up to those 100M speeds (of course my town won't be included), and by then the cities will be at a Gig. And there I'll be, with a useless 1M connection and my thumb up my ass.
><gts
When you choose to live away from civilization, along with all the beifits you also have to live with the compromises. Fresh air no FIOS and such. You win some you lose some not cake and eating it too and all such mess.
~
That's not what that article says at all..
Two models - one which had to plug into a nearby outlet, and one that used the 48V from the phone line itself. Nothing about a power transformer running on an additional pair.
Although if I had the first model, I'd cut the transformer cord and do just that - run the power over an unused line - which is possible what some people did.
I've used phone lines as speaker wire before for whole-house audio; there are lots of crazy uses for unused lines.
This site has a link to PDFs of the "Bell System practices document" on several princess phones. I won't link to it directly to spare the owner, but search for "practices" if you're interested. The wiring diagrams all show (BK) and (Y) as connected to the "DIAL LIGHT TRNSF".
I didn't mean for this to be a controversial statement, just a bit of history. If you have some first hand knowledge of the situation that differs from my first-hand knowledge, by all means please share.
Thanks for these links, they do make it clear that the phone came with a transformer that utilized the second pair, and that it was standard to do so with these phones. Learn something new every day.
What bugged me was the phrase "we remember that the yellow/black pair was connected to a transformer" made it seem like this was standard practice regardless of whether these phones were installed, which hasn't been the case in my experience.
No worries. I see how it sounded obnoxious. I really meant to be laughing at myself and my age, rather than your comment. I thought my story was simply the pre-RJ one, but the Wikipedia article makes it clear that the 2nd pair was actually used for several different purposes (as well as a second line, as you noted).
I work for the leading regional broadband provider here in Ireland. Despite the major telco here, eircom, claiming that they have about 95% penetration, only about 60% have geographical access to broadband. cable isnt a major option here. DSL is the major player Wireless makes up the rest. Thankfully the company I work for uses a fairly innovative form of wireless. Our home grown technology is based on bog standard cable modems with an attached antenae operating in the 3.5GHz band. The advantage we have over rival WISP's is that our range can be up to 30km away! We reach people like you in our licenced areas. If you could get a few hundred folks together with line of sight to a high point, you could scratch your own itch :-)
The general kinds of things I would do are below. I'm dealing with this in a "money is no object" kind of way, because ALL of these options are expensive and I don't really know how expensive.
1. Call the business part of the phone company and see what they will sell you. Maybe they can sell you a T1 line and they're holding out on you because it's not a consumer offering.
2. If some kind of DSL or cable is nearby, call and beg those companies, offering to front some money if they'll bring it to you.
3. See how close you can get a friendly neighbor to get more traditional broadband, and run your own "last mile" Options for the last mile include: ethernet, pringles can WiFi and buying your own DSLAM on ebay to run DSL. Note that you can get unlooped "security" lines from the phone company to run a private circuit to your neighbor's house to run your own DSL, if there's intervening territory so you can't run your own lines.
4. You said "hill" and not "mountain" - so consider what it would take to get satellite. Would a tall HAM-type tower do it? (The answer is yes, but the question is really is the height required practical for you) Could you rent 10 sq feet from someone for a smaller tower at the top of the hill or on the other side?
Now we're entering the "Make the most of your bandwidth" options.
5. Compression: If you're not using an ISP that does automatic tgz compression of all downloaded things before they hit your browser and isn't downscaling at least the largest images, make that happen. A roll-your-own way is to simply setup a little hosted server somewhere with real bandwidth and install a proxy, (Squid?) then force all your outbound web traffic through the proxy. In your position, I doubt this'll make your latency worse in any measurable way.
6. Adblocking: Turn on really aggressive ad blacklisting, so those things never ever come close to loading.
7. Skip some content: I think there are also FF extensions that'll let you skip large content and only load it on purpose, which could be helpful.
8. Caching: - cache the heck out of your connection. The easy way is just to massively inflate your browser's cache and never ever empty it. A harder way that will sometimes give better performance is to setup a proxy (squid) on your fast local network, tell it to cache the heck out of everything and then give it a lot of RAM. An advantage is that this gives you that whole system's physical RAM as cache - so the cached parts aren't just fast, they're REALLY fast. Plus you have much more control over how intense the caching is.
9. Preloading: If you have a relatively unmetered line but just very low bandwidth, you can also make sure you make optimum use of your connection during nonpeak times. For instance, use a wget script to preload into the cache things you read often. Make sure your mail is setup to download before you're likely to check it. (One way to accomplish this is to setup your mail to check all the time, but your dialup to auto-dial at appropriate moments... say an hour before you wake up and an hour before you get home from work.
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There's some hardware out there that does that, look for hardware you can use with Asterisk (I remember thinking of setting up a PBX, it was a bit pricey but I don't remember details). Also, if you've got a soldering iron or a crimper you could just create a RJ45-to-mic-plug adapter, not sure if that would work though.
I realize this is funny, but becoming an ISP works for some people.
At it's core, a DSL provider is running a big line to an exchange and then splitting it into little pieces. Some of these exchanges are significant buildings, but some are relatively small.
I discussed earlier what you might do if you have neighbors who can get internet. If you don't have neighbors at all, everything is going to be pricey. But if you have neighbors who don't have but WANT internet, you could all start a coop to get internet. This would still be expensive, but less ridiculously expensive. If you have a whole town without internet, you might even get the town officially involved and convince them that everyone would benefit from being wired up.
So you basically just find someone who'll bring reasonably big lines somewhere near you - which is not necessarily limited to our telco monopoly - and figure out how you'd split those lines with the people who are interested.
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Just cut down some trees. Then you'll have room for satellite.