Slashdot Mirror
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!
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 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
No one has ever gotten 56kb in the US, due to bureaucratic rate limitations on analog lines... But many, many people don't get close to that because of line quality, which also degrades with distance...
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
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?
I second the suggestion of ISDN.
ISDN will be available anywhere you can get a phone line (in the US at least) assuming your ILEC supports it, which they almost certainly do. It's more expensive and slower than other high speed Internet connections, but has the advantage of you being able to get service. Finding old ISDN equipment shouldn't be too hard.
If you are independently wealthy or your employer really loves you, get a T1. Like ISDN they're available anywhere, but they're a wee bit more expensive. Depending on distance from town you might be looking at $500 to $2000, or even more, per month. Call the phone company and ask for a quote; that much won't cost anything. If they claim they can't do it, be more persistent.
If you're very persistent, you might be able to talk your phone company in to installing a dry pair to your property, then you could connect the other end of the circuit to someplace with high speed Internet service and set up your own high speed network after an initial investment in the appropriate hardware. There is, however, risk in doing this since the phone company may not promise any level of signal quality over the line, there's a recurring per-mile charge for the line itself, and the equipment you'd need might be a bit spendy.
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.
The dish has to be aimed lower to catch th satellites so obstructions are more of a problem than in the south.
If you want an reasonable estimate, look how high the sun is in the sky at equinox (around March 20 and September 22, that is now), which is when the sun is directly over the equator. An estimate using math is 90deg - latitude. Even if you're at 60 degrees north you have 30 degrees to go on, which is damn steep over any distance. The problem is usually just that hillside you're in, and if you can steal a few meters (end of house furthest out, mast to raise it a bit above the roof) or just roll out cable on either side of the hill you're good to go. If you're really stuck with a big hill/mountain, there's often enough people to set up a local relay. In short, there's rarely a problem getting coverage anywhere.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
ISDN worked for me her ~4km from the local exchange. Our big monopoly telco refused to provision my line for DSL for years. ISDN was the only option. It's faster than dialup, latency is better and because it's digital there are less dropouts. Having an ISDN card in the machine was neat for 2 reasons; not the least of which was I had two lines, 3 incoming numbers and could make the whole lot talk to asterisk to do voice and fax from my PBX as well.
Now that ADSL2+ is an option with a non-monopoly carrier I get speeds over 4M all of the time with zero dropouts (current connection active for 7.5 days and the onyl reason it went down is because a backhoe operator dug out the power cables in our street last week. Try pushing the ADSL2 issue if it's available on your exchange. It can work really well depending on the quality of the copper to your house (and 26.4 sounds like you might have reasonable copper).
I drink to make other people interesting!
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.
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.
I have known DSL CLECs who have done 1000:1 (yes, one thousand to one) for bandwidth oversubscription. "back in the day", I knew of an ISP that had about 8000 dialup users (in total, about 600 actual ports) served by 3 T1s.
There are many businesses that have 200 or 400 desktop PCs behind a single T1 for Internet bandwidth, and most folks still think that it is pretty good.
The average joe just does not use a lot of bandwidth, unless they get into P2P applications.
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()?
Yes, there's a bit of latency, but ssh works just fine. I did work on servers in the United States every day. Takes all of about two minutes to get used to the 1-2 second lag time. Even VOIP worked fine, better than DSN phones, actually.
Nothing like 1 mbps of dedicated satellite bandwidth after screwing around with NIPR all day.
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."
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
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/
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.
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.