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?"

Comments

cellular internet, or pay out the nose...

[the unbeliever]

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.

Re:Cell?

[rs79]

26.4 is the maginc number isn't it? They SAY 28.8 but you don't seem to actually be able to get it.

I live in a fairly remote area, no cable or dsl. I used 26.4 for a decade and was finally able to get sat last xmas and now wireless is available and I'll probably switch to that - faster and cheaper.

But, if I was still stuck in dialupland I'd get a, 2, or 3 more phone lines and bond them together. The latency will be no better but the throuput is better.

I checked the (competant) ISPs around here support this. Yours might.

If you're in Canada look at a "4 wire unloaded circuit" - it's about half the price of a regular phone line. Bell might say they don't have it, but it's a tarrifed item. They do, and must sell it by CRTC regulations.

Re:You mention cellphones

[the unbeliever]

Satellite requires a clear view of the southern sky. All the satellites I'm aware of are in geosynchronous orbit around the equator, thus the southern facing requirement. Submitter goes into detail regarding his northern facing hillside dwelling.

ISDN, your friend from the past

[Kostya]

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 ;-)

Satellite Reception

[Cheech Wizard]

"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.

Re:Satellite Reception

[full_path]

I live on the north side of a heavily-wooded slope, too. When I invited a Dish Network installer out, he took one quick look, said "no way", and left.

It took me a while to find a solution. In my case, parts of the property do have narrow views through trees that, while not due South, proved to be adequate. I figured out what orbital slots a network of dishes would need to "see" in order to serve my needs, and used this French guy's magic calculator to figure out at exactly what time and date the sun would be directly behind those orbital slots. At those times (I actually took an afternoon off of work to do this), I ran around hurriedly snapping pictures of sunlit areas on my property.

Some of 'em are on the roof of the house (biggest clearing on the property). Others are in totally never-would-have-guessed-that locations on the ground. I parked dishes in those locations, and used RG-11 cable to help overcome some distance problems, along with off-the-shelf switch gear to integrate them.

You'd need to sort out where Hughes has orbital slots serving its satellite network, then calculate the right dates and times, and take the pictures. Any sunlit area revealed by your just-at-the-right-moment photos, in my experience, about six to eight feet wide is viable. In some cases you can stretch a smaller opening by taking down a few limbs. If you find viable dish locations, then you need the toughest thing of all to find - an installer with a sense of humor.

That's because the days of self-installs are generally long over with. You could do sort of a proof-of-concept setup for an installer, though, by putting up the post or posts and using used low-end used gear from eBay to verify reception.

I'd suggest at least doing the math to figure out when your next opportunity is (they occur twice a year, one in the Spring and one the Fall), and taking the pictures. You never know. My access to the 101 orbital slot is from a short post on the ground underneath a dogwood tree, which is now missing a few limbs on one side. To look at it from the house, you'd swear there'd be no way this thing could see the sky, much less a satellite. It generates signal strength levels in the low 90s.

Granted, I've only demonstrated that this technique works for satellite television reception. I haven't tried it for bidirectional satellite internet access. I do know that my Dad's got satellite internet access, and while it is certainly not ideal, he would never go back to dialup.

Good luck!

Re:Buy a faster modem

[nicolaiplum]

Buy a better modem. The older (flat, black) USR Courier series are still the best modems made for talking to other modems [1], but you'll have to find one secondhand now.

[1] The Telebit Trailblazer can still do better over a very bad phone line than the Courier but to do so requires you to use the Telebit PEP mode, so there has to be a Trailblazer on the other end.

Re:Fixed wireless?

[arivanov]

Why pringle cans? If you need it for real work you might as well go for the full monty. These guys http://www.rad.com/ have anything up to Gigabit range and some of their gear in the MB range is relatively cheap. There are a couple of other companies who offer similar gear. We used to use them in the days when I worked in an ex-soviet block country and when 26.4 was the magic number for the whole country, not just a single place on a north facing hill. From there on all you need is a neighbour who will allow you to put a SAT or share a DSL line.

Re:You mention cellphones

[TheRaven64]

For internet access, you don't want to be using a geostationary satellite, due to latency problems. You want LEO, which typically means a polar orbit and a cloud of satellites which you switch between every few minutes. For TV, latency is not an issue, so most TV satellites are geostationary, which reduces the number you need.

Re:What my uncle did

[ScrewMaster]

So they're sharing a 1.5 mb/sec T1 among themselves and twenty-five other people? Let's see, figuring a total of 27 users (your uncle, his partner, and the 25 subscribers) if divided equally that means each gets .. 55 kbits/sec. I guess it qualifies as broadband but not by much. Good as a single-channel DSL line anyway. Of course, with a decent router they can allocate bandwidth more intelligently than that, and if it came down to a choice between that and dial-up, I'd go for it in a heartbeat.

Maybe once he gets that T1 installation paid off he can put in another one.

Re:"4 wire unloaded circuit"

[HateBreeder]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-wire_circuit

Re:You mention cellphones

[Rakishi]

I don't know of any consumer satellite internet that DOESN'T use geostationary sats. The complexity an cost of having to track the satellites, your dish needs to be aimed at them and they are a moving target, makes it far from worthwhile.

Also the latency while high is not unusable for everyday usage and only games are really affected. Also a number of satellite providers use dial up for outbound traffic to mediate the problem.

The biggest problem with satellite internet isn't the latency but the relatively low bandwidth and indecently low download/upload caps.

Re:+1, Funny

[jawtheshark]

I'm sorry, but the RFC states the following:

Frame Format
The IP datagram is printed, on a small scroll of paper, in hexadecimal, with each octet separated by whitestuff and blackstuff.

This evidently excludes 4GB flash disks. It might be an interesting extention and I propose to make this RFC 1149.n ;-)

Re:Here was my solution:

[ckblackm]

Morse code is no longer a requirement for obtaining a Ham radio license.

Re:Here was my solution: And it's likely legal

[borcharc]

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.

Re:What my uncle did

[mr_mischief]

I've been out of the ISP scene for around 3 or 4 years. Things may have changed quite a bit.

Most dial-up ISPs could run a town with 500 subscribers off of one DS-1 circuit and a bank of 64 or so DSP cards in the access concentrator. Not everyone was online at the same time, and not all of them were using all of their bandwidth when they were. 6 customers to a modem was considered extravagant over-building by many in the days of dial-up. In fact, the BRI or channelized DS-1 lines that customers dialed into were often more expensive than the backhaul lines, since one can fit more than 2.5 DS-1s worth of call terminations into one DS-1 worth of bandwidth.

Now, things might have changed a bit with more people being somewhat Internet savvy and with broadband penetration having risen, but the users probably haven't changed _that_ much since the days of dial-up, especially those that are still jsut coming from dial-up.

Yes, 1.544 Mbps divided by 64 is about 2.9 kbps. No, the customers would not generally notice a thing, because only about 1/6th of dial-up users were requesting anything at any given time. If half were, it was still 49kbps. It used to be quite safe to oversell bandwidth by at least 3 to 1 and often 4 to 1 or slightly higher even on fixed DS-1, SDSL, or frame relay. So 1.544 Mbps / ( 25 / 4 ) is kind of like 1.544 Mbps / 6.25, or about 252k per person average. 27 users is about 232 kbps. That might not be as accurate these days as it was when I was in the ISP field, though.

Even if you about half your oversell, 1.544 Mbps / 13 is 121 kbps or so, which is much better than the 26.4kbps to 41kbps most people end up getting for rural dial-up.

That's all your oversell to the ISP. You can generally "over apportion" internally between your NOC and those POPs if you run central bandwidth lines and have a star-pattern network of backhauls. Not all ISPs did this, because it's often cheaper in a particular area to have a local loop with bandwidth than to have a point-to-point between towns plus the extra bandwidth centrally. In those star-shaped, centralized uplink situations, though, you could save bandwidth lots of ways besides just plain overselling.

You often had P2P among your customers (some amount of this helps the local bandwidth plan, too, but only if the P2P never leaves the POP). You have the users connecting to your mail server a lot and the ISP's web site some. You can cache DNS lookups, which cuts down a little bit of traffic lots of times over. Mail that never leaves your domains need never leave your network, and lots of mail is sent to people your customers know locally. If the sender and recipient are both customers, you never route that mail outside your network. If you do web hosting besides just connectivity, anyone using the websites you host from your network never hits the public Internet. In crunch times for bandwidth upgrades, some ISPs were even known to give big price breaks on hosting the websites of popular local businesses, as bringing popular sites in-network saved on lots of bandwidth. Some found that being a mirror site for TUCOWS or such actually saved money, because the mirror updated during slow traffic and the end-user downloads then hit the local server. ISP-sponsored chat servers and ISP-run gaming servers were sometimes used both to better serve the customers and to keep the traffic local, but the extra maintenance required often outweighed bandwidth concerns. All of this adds up to many ISPs using far less bandwidth to the public network than what they sell to customers.

For one example, I once had a star-shaped network with more than 30 DS-1 equivalents (coming from DS-1s, PRIs, Frame Relays, frac DS-1s, BRIs, dialup POP in that NOC, etc.) of bandwidth fed into a NOC using a burstable DS-3 for main bandwidth. We paid for up to 6 Mbps all the time, and paid extra for 95th percentile usage over 6 Mbps. We rarely hit over 10 Mbps, and we rarely hit over 6 Mbps outside of the 3 PM to 11 PM window. I don't think we ever hit over 15 Mbps o

Most POTS are one-loop/two-wire.

[Kadin2048]

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. Um, not sure what time machine you just stepped out of, but every POTS handset at least in the US/Canada works this way. You get two wires, and it's really just one signal (the two wires act as two halves of a balanced circuit, similar to professional audio systems).

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.

OT: Balanced audio.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re: "4 wire unloaded circuit"

[hab136]

In case anyone is wondering, the reason there are four wires in every wall socket is because the telephones are daisy-chained together -- two of the wires just continue to the next wall socket

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.