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!
Do you mean GSM cellphones? You might be able to get GPRS in that case. (EDGE would be even better!) That should be between 60kbps and 80kbps, which is equivalent or faster than ISDN. It will be more expensive, but since it's for work, you might be able to offset the costs to your employer. Also, did you look into ISDN offerings? Back in the early nineties, we switched to ISDN and it was a different world from dial-up. Frankly... I know some people do not see ISDN as broadband because of the speed, but well, it would improve your connection a lot.
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 no experience with it, but I don't think you're bound to your local ISPs for that.
For the "selfmade" option, you could perhaps ask a friend in vicinity that has broadband and make a point-to-point connection between his place and yours. That's of course assuming you have a friend in vicinity that has broadband....
Otherwise, yes, move.... But I wouldn't do it either.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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!
I think you're the one that missed something obvious.
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.
You might try installing a satellite dish at the top of the hill, then running a line down to your house. Of course, if you don't own the whole hill, or the hill is too big, that wouldn't be an option. Alternately, I think you can pay to have cable lines run to your house from wherever the nearest junction is. But that would probably be too expensive. On another extreme, you could build a small tower, and mount a satellite dish on top of that. My grandfather was a ham and had an antenna that was essentially just a framework tower with a triangular cross-section. That might do the trick.
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.
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
Please read here:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
For more information. This is a method that can be used pretty much anywhere though some special conditions apply.
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.
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
I don't think this is a practical solution for three reasons. One, packet radio is very slow, so there isn't much benefit to it. Two, anybody could eavesdrop on your Internet connection, so you have virtually no privacy. Three, Amateur Radio licensees are forbidden from using Ham radio for conducting business. So Amazon, eBay, or any site where you're buying or selling is verboten.
Oh yeah, and you have to keep it G-rated on Ham radio, so porn is out too.
I would rather commit suicide than be without high speed internet!
"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.
I had to do this twice (different houses, neither with cable or DSL broadband). The prices have come down drastically, but you will still pay at least $200-$300/month; maybe you can get your employer to subsidize it. The nice thing about a T1 is that it's a monitored line, which means if anything goes wrong the service provider jumps to get it fixed RIGHT NOW. Once I was moving my UPS around and unplugged it. Before I got it plugged back in to the outlet across the room the phone rang - it was my service provider, having noticed that there was a problem with the line.
You don't want to go to your local telco directly with this request; they probably don't even know how to spell T1. You want to go to one of the resellers like Speakeasy or one of the other providers whose ads occasionally appear in the Slashdot banner ad space. In fact, I'm sure that several of your fellow state residents will chime in with their opinions of local T1 providers.
Good luck!
Umm. I'm a ham. It's Amateur Radio - not commercial. You're not supposed to set up links like this that connect into a commercial network. And, unlike CB radio, where enforcement is nearly non-existent, the FCC and hams can and do police the ham radio bands.
In fact, your announcing this in a public forum may make hams local to where you live rather suspicious. They, and the ARRL, may be on your case sooner than you think.
If you want remote access for administration, unless you can do it all over ssh (which if 28.8k is insufficient, I suspect not), sorry - you're gonna have to either spend buckets of money or move. Latency is important for GUI-based remote access, otherwise it's just awful - even if the throughput is higher, a high latency 2 meg link can be worse than a low latency 28.8k link for gui access.
High latency is pretty terrible for command-line access too, but not quite as bad. Your solutions:
GPRS (cell phone) - 64K, but generally very poor latency. SSH is barely tolerable over GPRS. Forget GUI access.
3G (cell phone) - megabit speeds possible, but still with ghastly latency. SSH is tolerable. GUI access is probably frustratingly laggy. Exhorbitant unless you can get an unlimited data plan (and these typically are pretend unlimited).
Satellite (which you've already said you can't get) - latency is so bad that remote access either GUI or SSH based is impractical. Good job you can't get it or you may have spent a wodge of cash coming to this unhappy realisation.
You may be in with a chance if you can cobble together some "cantenna" style wireless access (or spend a lot of money on a microwave link).
Or you can spend lots of money on a T1. That will give you proper, solid broadband speeds not just downstream but upstream too, low latency, will work very well for remote access, and you'll have an SLA so if it breaks they should fix it quickly, instead of "when we get around to it" as for DSL. But I bet the setup fees are some thousands, and monthly charges are $hundreds. (Would your employer chip in?)
Perhaps ISDN? You can get 128kbps if your ISP supports bonding the two 64K channels. Not high speed, but low latency and it may be tolerable for GUI remote access.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
What is "4 wire unloaded circuit"? a google search only results in this post.
c0w goes moo.
Wi-fi equipment band partially intersects the HAM band, so it's possible and have been done several times.
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
Hmmm, I don't think he can remotely manage his servers with a library book.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-wire_circuit
Sigs are for the weak.
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?
Wrong. A 4GB Flash disk can easily be attached to a pigeon's leg. If round trip time is even 30 min (1800 sec) between his home and the collection point, and only one pigeon is in flight at the time, you get 4GB = 32Gb =~ 32,000,000,000b. 32,000,000,000 bits / 1500 s = 17,777,777 bits / sec = 17 MBps. This is faster than FIOS!
Latency may be a problem as would be packet loss.
-b.
I'm sorry, but the RFC states the following:
This evidently excludes 4GB flash disks. It might be an interesting extention and I propose to make this RFC 1149.n ;-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
I have a Sprint EV-DO (er, sorry PowerVision!) phone as a modem plan (really good deal, since it actually replaces the data plan, so the bump isn't that much), which is the same service a data card (except you can't talk on your phone while it's in use). Bandwidth is good, comparable with DSL, but latency is typically in the 300-400ms range. Not terrible, and usable for SSH, but not really enjoyable.
Of course I'm spoiled, by some fluke I get 10-12ms to my data center over Comcast cable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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()?
Actually, all that mumbo jumbo which I've also found posted numerous places (as you probably did) was wrong - though I have seen it posted numerous places. A standard POTS phone system uses TWO wires. The phone company ran FOUR wires because TWO were backups (rarely used in that fashion anymore for POTS) - OR were/(rarely)are for providing additional power from a transformer to certain devices (alarm systems and such) - and way back when, used in the rotary dial days for similar functionality. That was for the standard RJ-11 setup.
A telephone only NEEDS 2 wires - and only USES two wires. Often two line setups were ran through (in the house/office) all 4 wires and then split into two jacks (erroneously or otherwise). Often (erroneously or otherwise) when installation done in this fashion (often by Verizon), certain other things that conformed to the old rarely used spec would no longer work - such as modems and faxes - as well as certain phones - while on the other hand, many two line phones were set up to work using a standard 4 wire cord that plugged into a standard outlet and supported 2 lines via the standard pair for line 1, and the backup pair for line 2). This is also (among cost savings reasons) why some phone handset, modem and fax machine companies shipped a wire with a single pair (2 in the center) - to ensure that whether there were two lines or one, backup or none, the phone/modem/fax would work.
Check out these links for references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POTS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJ11%2C_RJ14%2C_RJ25
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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
You're also assuming instantaneous transfer at each end. If you're sending your 4GB stick to someone with a cable modem running at 3Mbps/512kbps down/up, that's the max you'll get. And that's even assuming you keep him fed with enough memory sticks. Since they're somewhat cheap, I'd assume you would.
Second problem is pidgeon transfer. When you want to use birds to transfer messages, you have to first raise the birds in a rook. Then, you transport them to another place, possibly your ISP. When they release a bird with a message, it goes "home" to where it was raised. You'll need to transfer the birds back at intervals. The ISP will also need to host birds, but I'm assuming they won't have as many. After all, upload speeds are always lower.
How many birds will you need for this? Assuming one bird transfer per day, and maybe you use a bird every 30 minutes as above, you'll need approximately 50 birds per day. If you want error checking for duplicity, you'll need twice as many.
I wish people would be more realistic with the pidgeon data transfer methods. It has great promise.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
I think the FCC actually ruled on the "pizza question" about 10 years or so ago, and said it was allowable as long as what you were buying was purely for personal use. I suspect if you ask around on some of the Ham newsgroups on Usenet somebody can quote chapter and verse, but IIRC a food order via the 'patch on your way home is OK, but using it in lieu of a cellphone to make a business call is not.
The problem with extending this to the internet is the prohibitions on encryption. Even if your Amazon order is acceptable, the encryption it uses to make the transaction safe is NOT OK. The FCC has not granted any exceptions to the encryption/encipherment rules, except for the very narrowly defined case of satellite command-and-control. They don't even let people encrypt traffic in order to comply with HIPAA rules in disaster/medical situations.
So, the way the rules are now, if you did have an 802.11 link operating in the section of the ISM band that's also an Amateur band (which is only a subset of the channels that most Part 15 devices use), you could legally operate under Part 97 rules, including power up to 1kw ERP if you really needed it, BUT you'd have to find a way to disable ALL encryption. So no SSH, no SSL/TLS, nothing: probably not even encrypted password handshakes. Everything has to be plaintext or you can't operate under Part 97, and you're back to Part 15 and its measly 100mW limits and antenna prohibitions. (Though I'm not sure where they draw the line on cryptographic authentication, since it's not really designed to obscure the meaning of anything; that seems like it'd be OK.)
That's the thing that makes using a highpower 802.11 system unattractive to me, at least as an everyday Internet connection.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
I am fascinated by your idea of a modem without the modem part and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
This is a good advice, my experience tells me that very good link from point A to point B can be achieved using 802.11b/g wireless.
For example - use 2 or more sets of the following:
Waterproof casing - $10-30
Parabolic antenna 24dBi (N female connector) - Hyperlink, PacificWireless, Andrew - cost about US $75
LMR195/240/400 (rpSMA to N male) pigtail, 0.6m, 3m or more in length - cost from US$10 to US$20(3m)
Wireless router - Buffalo, Linksys - and put DDwrt in them they are about 50-70$ each (http://www.ddwrt.org)
Ecellent alternative are Mikrotik routers, a bit more expensive ($100) but much more flexible (http://www.mikrotik.com) they also sell complete devices integrated in antennas)
Then find any location in the range of 50km with faster internet, setup all in your home, put it up and use. These devices use small amounts of energy (5W) and work reliably. You can even connect from your home to such device using normal wireless card in your PC. Line of sight is a must for such distances. Having two hops is not a problem, only more expensive.
I have seen effective speeds of 17mbps and more on links with more than 20km, working for months without any human intervention.
Doing a good job is like spilling coffee on a dark suit, you feel warm all over, but nobody notices.
I grew up and lived most my life in rural areas in Texas.. Back about 8 to 10 years ago I used ISDN in a town with about 200 people.. The phone lines sound like the quality of yours, i would and still dial up there at around 21.6k or something. ISDN would give me 128k. T1 is generally an option for anyone with the money, that is what I have now. runs me about $500 a month however and I share it with one other person via wireless..
Depending on the terrain and distance to the closest place with DSL/cable/etc you might could use one of the versions of point to point wireless, I have considered doing that myself. I would say that would be one of your better options IF you can managed to work that out.. Satellite internet in my experience works for downloading larger files from a single source (like FTP or from a HTTP source), but its latency is terrible, I rather surf on a 56k modem or ISDN. The ping times Ive seen on sat were between 1200ms to 2500ms.. which i find it a bit amazing they dont have something worth a damn in that area without that latency yet (but i do not know the technical issues on that, i just find it odd..)
So i would at least get ISDN, should be available to you, would be around 6x the speed you have now if I understand right using both lines bonded. If you got the cash to shell out they should be able to get a T1 to you for $500 to $700.. I went through a re-seller from AT&T and she managed to get me a better price than AT&T was going to give me themself.. but that is quite expensive. And there is always the wireless to the next town that has something cheap and usable.
s/©//g
What's a "ufbwjcsoir"? A Google Search only results in this post.
Also, if you're just using web browsing over a slow connection you might want to look at onspeed (www.onspeed.com). They install a small client on your PC and compress everything that's sent to you. If you ramp the compression right up graphics look pretty crap, but websites load much faster.
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.
Madonna is like the C programming language.
Naturally sloppy and confusing?
Riddled with curly brackets?
Ubiquitous?
Through the efforts of many professionals over the years, at first glance seems quite a bit younger than she is?
Please stop stalking me, bro.
> 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.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
use isdn; get two lines if you can afford it. you should be able to trunk/bond them together for a fatter pipe, and smaller isp's should have special deals available to isdn customers with multipler dail-ups to the same account. depending on your location to the dial-up connection, if you're on the same intralata as your isp, and the cost to dial-in can be a single call charge despite the length of the call(provided it's not considered an intralata long distance call)... but YMMV, it's been years since i had to do this.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
Call up your local ILEC and request a dry pair, aka a dry pair. Get it connected to a remote site that does have access to cable or DSL within a 17.5k foot distance from your home. If you've lived in the area for 20 years you surely have a friend closer to town that you can call on. Terminate the dry pair at his house. Equipment for setting a small scale point-to-point DSL network across the dry pair between the sites can be had in a online for about $200-300 per end. You can also pick up long-range Ethernet (LRE) equipment for even less and possible have more throughput. Now you just have to get Internet access to your friend's house. In all likelyhood they already have Internet access. You could pay for a second connection. You could also just pay to bump up the speed of their existing service. I've seen this method used before successfully. Do not tell the phone company that you're using this for anything other than alarm service or they will charge you out the ass.
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is an option that will work for you. Its much faster then most, and its stable and not affected by weather. This company provides service in Kansas, but you may find similar companies in your area. http://www.kansasbroadband.net/index.cfm Check out "how it works" http://www.kansasbroadband.net/howitworks.cfm
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.
~