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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?"
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.
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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 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
"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.
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.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
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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.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-wire_circuit
Sigs are for the weak.
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.
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.
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
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.