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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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ==
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