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

Cell?

[LinuxGeek]

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.

Re:Cell?

[arminw]

.....Someone living on a mountain that just got cell service ........

Maybe living on a mountain could be an advantage. It all depends who lives in the valley below. Do you have any friends with DSL a few miles away, down in that valley?

We had a 12 foot satellite dish we used to use for TV before the little DirecTV type dishes came into use. We have a barn/workshop about 1000 feet from the house. I wanted to have a link to the shop for a test. One day I mounted a wireless access point (linksys) on the focal point of that long dead 12 ft monster and pointed it at our barn.

I was able to pick up the signal, not only from the corresponding link in the workshop, but also (surprisingly) a number of miscellaneous signals from other wifi devices many miles away. Some of them were not encrypted and allowed me to get Internet connectivity at high speed, after adjusting the dish for maximum signal.

A 12 foot dish antenna has a very high gain, but is unwieldy and hard to come by these days. However it can be a means of communicating with very low powered devices rather far away. I have read of amateur radio hobbyists using such dishes to bounce signals off the moon. We recently took the unsightly monster apart and sent it to a metal recycler. We now have DSL service, as a package phone deal. Nobody gets any sort of cell phone service right where we live. Our visitors are mostly bummed by this, but some like the peace it gives them.

Re:Cell?

[cusco]

There are a number of radio networking systems out there, some of which are reasonably priced and very good. This is a solution that one of our customers uses to transmit security camera video. It was installed and works perfectly by one of our hardware techs who knows nothing about networking sitting down and reading the manual.

http://www.trangobroadband.com/technology/point_to_point.shtml

I know of a local ISP which uses this same company's equipment to feed clusters of users in office buildings up to 30 miles away and never has to visit the equipment more than once a month. If you can get a decent pipe within line-of-sight or only one hop away this should feed you and your neighbors. We're going to use it in a few years to connect our very remote vacation home to my brother-in-law's ISDN line.

Fixed wireless?

[PCM2]

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...

Re:Fixed wireless?

[XgD]

Or a high-speed wireless to a "neighbour" (who may be some distance away) that does have broadband. Pringle's cans are pretty magic.

Re:Fixed wireless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another vote for checking into fixed wireless. Search for WISP. I started a business about 18 months ago and have about 20 houses connected now. (I haven't really focused on hooking up more, the waiting list is about 40 more)

A year ago I was 80' up in a man-basket (hooked to a crane), "re-modeling" a farmer's silo. I wanted to take off the metal cap and put in a catwalk. That connected 9.5 miles to a water tower, where I have a dsl connection. Since then I have learned that grain legs are easier to work from. I'm developing POPs on two of those, and have several more lined up. Once I get above the trees, I can link two grain legs at several miles distance.

I would suggest looking at www.staros.com (software and hardware). Another source of hardware I like is www.wlanparts.com (Pasadena wireless). I started with Trango 900MHz radios, but the StarOS ones are faster, cheaper and have more features. My TrangoLink10 has been very reliable, basically non-stop for about 10 months now. It did start to fade for 30 minutes once, but the signal was never dropped (not sure if it was the snowstorm, or another WISP testing equipment on that water tower)

You might be able to mount the radios in a tree and avoid the cost of a tower. (if you don't use 900MHz, which might go thru the trees) Look at the StarOS forums for some info on that.

Oh, you might check into sharing a T1 with neighbors. That way you would only need to setup an AP and connect them. But a T1 for me was $600/month, I didn't want to commit to that. I think I paid for my wireless backhaul in 3 months, compared to a T1.

Here was my solution:

[Zymergy]

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!

line of sight to someone with broadband?

[victorvodka]

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.

Re:"4 wire unloaded circuit"

[Brian Gordon]

wow that was fast o_O Google's spider must get the rss feed or something.

Four-wire unloaded circuit

[KC1P]

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.

Re: "4 wire unloaded circuit"

[Dolda2000]

Maybe I'm somehow misinterpreting you, but you speak as though two-wire circuits were a thing of the past, which is about as far from reality as one could get. Virtually every subscriber connection in the any part of the world that I've checked is a two-wire circuit, and that includes at least Sweden and the US. 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 wouldn't bet about the daisy-chaining being true in the entire world, though -- they could be connected in parallel as well). One single telephone only uses two wires when you use it to talk.

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.

Re: "4 wire unloaded circuit"

[Ucklak]

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.