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?

[rs79]

26.4 is the maginc number isn't it? They SAY 28.8 but you don't seem to actually be able to get it.

I live in a fairly remote area, no cable or dsl. I used 26.4 for a decade and was finally able to get sat last xmas and now wireless is available and I'll probably switch to that - faster and cheaper.

But, if I was still stuck in dialupland I'd get a, 2, or 3 more phone lines and bond them together. The latency will be no better but the throuput is better.

I checked the (competant) ISPs around here support this. Yours might.

If you're in Canada look at a "4 wire unloaded circuit" - it's about half the price of a regular phone line. Bell might say they don't have it, but it's a tarrifed item. They do, and must sell it by CRTC regulations.

Re:Cell?

[Duhavid]

Come on!

Think outside the box.

Buy the ISP local to you, then mandate service in your area.

Simple, no?

Re:Cell?

[Threni]

> Actually He is more likley to have 3G. Why would they install a new tower with old equipment?

Same reason Apple launched a supposedly modern phone and forgot to support 3G with it?

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.

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!

May I suggest RFC 1149?

[erroneus]

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.

What my uncle did

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What my uncle did

[mr_mischief]

I've been out of the ISP scene for around 3 or 4 years. Things may have changed quite a bit.

Most dial-up ISPs could run a town with 500 subscribers off of one DS-1 circuit and a bank of 64 or so DSP cards in the access concentrator. Not everyone was online at the same time, and not all of them were using all of their bandwidth when they were. 6 customers to a modem was considered extravagant over-building by many in the days of dial-up. In fact, the BRI or channelized DS-1 lines that customers dialed into were often more expensive than the backhaul lines, since one can fit more than 2.5 DS-1s worth of call terminations into one DS-1 worth of bandwidth.

Now, things might have changed a bit with more people being somewhat Internet savvy and with broadband penetration having risen, but the users probably haven't changed _that_ much since the days of dial-up, especially those that are still jsut coming from dial-up.

Yes, 1.544 Mbps divided by 64 is about 2.9 kbps. No, the customers would not generally notice a thing, because only about 1/6th of dial-up users were requesting anything at any given time. If half were, it was still 49kbps. It used to be quite safe to oversell bandwidth by at least 3 to 1 and often 4 to 1 or slightly higher even on fixed DS-1, SDSL, or frame relay. So 1.544 Mbps / ( 25 / 4 ) is kind of like 1.544 Mbps / 6.25, or about 252k per person average. 27 users is about 232 kbps. That might not be as accurate these days as it was when I was in the ISP field, though.

Even if you about half your oversell, 1.544 Mbps / 13 is 121 kbps or so, which is much better than the 26.4kbps to 41kbps most people end up getting for rural dial-up.

That's all your oversell to the ISP. You can generally "over apportion" internally between your NOC and those POPs if you run central bandwidth lines and have a star-pattern network of backhauls. Not all ISPs did this, because it's often cheaper in a particular area to have a local loop with bandwidth than to have a point-to-point between towns plus the extra bandwidth centrally. In those star-shaped, centralized uplink situations, though, you could save bandwidth lots of ways besides just plain overselling.

You often had P2P among your customers (some amount of this helps the local bandwidth plan, too, but only if the P2P never leaves the POP). You have the users connecting to your mail server a lot and the ISP's web site some. You can cache DNS lookups, which cuts down a little bit of traffic lots of times over. Mail that never leaves your domains need never leave your network, and lots of mail is sent to people your customers know locally. If the sender and recipient are both customers, you never route that mail outside your network. If you do web hosting besides just connectivity, anyone using the websites you host from your network never hits the public Internet. In crunch times for bandwidth upgrades, some ISPs were even known to give big price breaks on hosting the websites of popular local businesses, as bringing popular sites in-network saved on lots of bandwidth. Some found that being a mirror site for TUCOWS or such actually saved money, because the mirror updated during slow traffic and the end-user downloads then hit the local server. ISP-sponsored chat servers and ISP-run gaming servers were sometimes used both to better serve the customers and to keep the traffic local, but the extra maintenance required often outweighed bandwidth concerns. All of this adds up to many ISPs using far less bandwidth to the public network than what they sell to customers.

For one example, I once had a star-shaped network with more than 30 DS-1 equivalents (coming from DS-1s, PRIs, Frame Relays, frac DS-1s, BRIs, dialup POP in that NOC, etc.) of bandwidth fed into a NOC using a burstable DS-3 for main bandwidth. We paid for up to 6 Mbps all the time, and paid extra for 95th percentile usage over 6 Mbps. We rarely hit over 10 Mbps, and we rarely hit over 6 Mbps outside of the 3 PM to 11 PM window. I don't think we ever hit over 15 Mbps o

ISDN, your friend from the past

[Kostya]

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 ;-)

Re:You mention cellphones

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:"4 wire unloaded circuit"

[HateBreeder]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-wire_circuit

Re:+1, Funny

[b0s0z0ku]

...but it's going to be slower than his current modem and there might be a lot of packet loss due to Hawks ;-)

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.

Re:Here was my solution: And it's likely legal

[borcharc]

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.

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.

Re: "4 wire unloaded circuit"

[jez9999]

I am fascinated by your idea of a modem without the modem part and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.