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

Buy a faster modem

[JustNiz]

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.

What my uncle did

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What my uncle did

[cnettel]

Welcome to the world of over-subscription. Exactly how is this different from most DSL providers? (Maybe a tad extreme, but I would bet that the service is good enough most of the time, and most importantly: possibly significantly better latency than dial-up.)

Re:What my uncle did

[carlivar]

So in other words it is exactly like a cablemodem?

Re:What my uncle did

[mr_mischief]

You wanna know something? People downloaded movies over dial-up, too! Really!!! It just took longer!!!!!

Seriously, I know someone personally who downloaded Lightwave 3D and AutoCAD both over dial-up. You wanna know something else? He wasn't the typical use case for dial-up Internet.

Someone downloading a movie now and then is fairly typical now. Doing it every day is atypical, let alone 24 hours a day every day. One reason it's typical to do so once in a while now is because the time to do it isn't much, much longer than going to the store to rent it. If this T1 equivalent (there was no mention about PRI or DS-1, but I'm pretty sure it's not an actual 25-pair copper wire) is not an acceptable speed to do something, people won't use it for that as much.

One company I worked for had, in 2003 or so, a 250 hour a month limit on dial-up, above which was charged hourly. We decided to do away with it. What percentage of customers do you think _ever_ went over 250 hours once it was free? About 3%. They had the chance to be using bandwidth 672 to 744 hours a month, and about 3% ever used more than 250 hours. A whopping number used far less during an average month. Some of these were people sticking with dial-up despite faster options, so they might represent the less inclined to use the Net anyway. Almost half lived in towns where there was nothing faster than dial-up for less than $80 a month if at all, so those would be heavier dial-up users. Still, 6 or 7 to 1 on ports and 5 to 1 on bandwidth was plenty. Certain customers were online over 500 hours reliably, and almost always moving data. Others averaged those people out.

The thing is, overselling bandwidth isn't a business issue. Having happy customers is a business issue. Having sufficient bandwidth to keep customers happy is an operational issue. If the operations people can't deliver, the price needs to go up, the promises need to go down, or the operations people need to go out the door. You can't really know which is the problem until you look at the build-out costs, maintenance costs, and admin costs associated with lines, routers, firewalls, and servers. If the marketing department over-promises based on good numbers, that's the marketing people's fault. If the company can't produce good numbers, that's the accounting people's fault. If the operations people keep fucking up, that's the operations people's fault. The price being too low could be the fault of accounting, marketing, senior management, the board, or the market and it depends on the company how that really gets set. The delivery of the promised service for the promised price involves three factors, and it only takes adjusting one to make things right. Lower promises, raise prices, or raise delivery. The fact that the competition is unethical, dishonest, and underhanded is not a defense. Yet promising more, delivering less, and hooking people on prices too good to be true is the norm.

I for one know what to expect, and I don't bitch if my bandwidth isn't at its max all the time. I do bitch if it's consistently very much lower, especially since I download in infrequent bursts so I'm not likely to catch most slowdowns. I grab a game here, a new compiler there, and a new OS ISO or four every few weeks. I stream music for a couple of hours sometimes. For the past couple of years, SBC/AT&T has done pretty damn well in my area at delivering what I expect. I'm online and actually at my keyboard probably an average of 10 or so hours a day between home and work, including weekends. I'm probably using more than 1 Mbps maybe 4 hours a week, but when I do I use everything it'll give me, which is usually very close to the rated speed of 6 Mbps if the servers or torrent shares can keep up with it.

People like competition because it lowers prices. Guess what? Too much lower prices mean lower margins, which often means shittier service. It also means that lots of companies fail or sell out because they could be investing that money at a better margin somewhere else, whic

Re:Packet Radio

[Guido del Confuso]

Oh, and the statement

Failing that a large wifi link (you can bump up the power a crap-ton once you have a ham license) could also work. is incorrect as well. A ham radio license will only allow you to operate on the ham bands, under the terms of that license. Regardless of the license you hold, bumping up the power on wi-fi equipment (which doesn't operate on the ham band) is illegal, because there are power limits for those frequencies that are quite low, and because it is illegal to use unlicensed or modified equipment on non-amateur bands.

Re:Cell?

[T-Bone-T]

I highly doubt he gets 3G. I live in a city of 200,000 and don't have 3G access. Someone living on a mountain that just got cell service several months ago is definitely not going to have 3G. I've heard coverage can be limited even in cities that do have 3G.

Re:Move.

[jawtheshark]

Your comparison is not really valid. He lived there for 20 years, and technology didn't come his way at all. Back when he moved there, dialup was the only option and it worked well. His choice back then was good, a nice probably not too expensive place to live with access to the internet. In those 20 years, nothing changed, but the rest of the world moved on. In his situation, I would also look for a way to get a good internet connection without moving. You have to look a this in context.

Sure, if these days, I'd have to move, I'd look at Internet connectivity as a "base necessity". However, if you made your life somewhere, you aren't goint to move just because of one small inconvenient issue. You'd know if you lived somewhere for 20 years.

I can very well relate to him: I live in a very small country and broadband is extremely expensive in comparision to the neighbouring countries and it came very very late. So some of my coworkers (living in a neighbouring country) had 1Mbps DSL while I was still on ISDN. When DSL was launched here it was 256kbps/64kbps, now it is 2Mbps/192kbps but in the neighbouring countries get 8Mbps/256kbps for the same price.

Somewhere in this thread I suggested ISDN, others suggested T1. Expensive (especially T1), yes, but as far as I understood it is for his work so he should be able to offset the costs to his employer.

Re:Satellite Reception

[Anonymous Coward]

He said that he didn't know about dishes.... He gave insightful alternatives.... So essentially, his $0.000000001 was much more worth than the comment you made.

Re:Cell?

[LWATCDR]

Actually He is more likley to have 3G. Why would they install a new tower with old equipment?

28k8 should be enough for everybody

[fsiefken]

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.

Re:Cell?

[color]

because they are just moving old equipment replaced with new ones in urban areas?
heck! they even export those used equipment to other regions of the world.

Re:You mention cellphones

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Yeah, that would be great if such a cloud of satellites actually existed, but they don't. The only two LEO constellations that are even remotely close are Iridium and Globalstar, but they are both heavily oriented toward telephone service and as such have a fatal combination of extreme expense and very low data speeds. You're far, far better off with dialup than with either of those unless you're in a location where even dialup is not available.

Right now, if you want satellite internet, your choice is high-latency geosync satellites or jack diddly squat.

Re:Cell?

[IgnoramusMaximus]

You are modded "funny", but that is precisely what a Libertarian (or better yet Objectivist) convert would tell you, with a straight face, probably thinking that he/she is giving you a life-changing, priceless advice. That or suggest you "start one" in your basement to "compete" with an existing one (usually some multi-billion per year in revenue, monopolistic affair with several hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure accumulated over 150 years, or so, with half of the local financial nobility on the board of its directors).

Re:Cell?

[untaken_name]

I use 3G and I haven't had any battery problems. Is it a device limitation, or is my phone an anomoly, or does it just have a good battery, or what? I always hear people knocking 3G and I've just never had any problems with it. Of course, this is month 3 of my experience with 3G, so maybe the bad times are ahead. I'm going to hope not, though.

Engineer's solution

[Chapter80]

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. ... Do you have an alternative solution for me?"

Move the hill.

Re:Cell?

[Ilgaz]

It is kind of excuse.

On phone stuff, don't trust Apple. I think your 3G phone/device must be high end so it has 3rd party application support yes? Based on Apple, you will soon get Virused because of 3rd party apps and take down entire USA network! :)

Stuff like these... They even rejected J2ME (Java) while it is in use on billion devices or so.

You know what "risk" 3G and 3rd party official Application support have? Someone could start a better iTunes like store and sell tunes through own Application to iPhone owners.

If you ask electronics people, 3G in fact uses less power to communicate. The "video call" etc. stuff is the battery eater,not the protocol when used for talking or basic Internet access.

I fail to see the problem...

[jonadab]

> 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.

Options

[geekoid]

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.

Re:Cell?

[The AtomicPunk]

No - we'd just tell you it isn't your right to use the goverment's monopoly on the use of force to mandate that someone else's company spend millions because you don't feel like moving.

I'm sure it has been said..

[Hsensei]

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.