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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?"
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!
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.
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
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.
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 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.
[1] The Telebit Trailblazer can still do better over a very bad phone line than the Courier but to do so requires you to use the Telebit PEP mode, so there has to be a Trailblazer on the other end.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 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.
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.