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Dealing With Dialup
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like my parents may end up stuck having to use dialup to access the Internet from their cottage inside the Cape Cod National Seashore. Neither Comcast nor Verizon want to bother upgrading the hardware required to get them faster service. They could put a satellite dish on their roof, but it's a 300-year-old house and they feel a dish would be as prohibitively ugly as running dedicated lines would be prohibitively expensive. I've suggested they get familiar with a text-only email client; I also suggested they talk with their senators and local political reps. , Are there other ways they can increase the functionality despite the pitiful bandwidth? Any other good ideas? Any success stories you can share where people have finally got the bandwidth they crave?"
if email is the biggest issue, a pda that gets wireless intarwebs from cell towers could be the solution. i hears talk that their making ones that are actually faster than wired broadband.
We've had problems with our broadband being capped down to dial up speeds from time to time (Virgin sux), and I purchased one of those USB Modem sticks.
Speed isn't super fast, about 750MBS, but it does the job.
We're Mac users and have one in each room. We put the USB modem on an iMac, configure it to share its internet connection via airport, and we're happy.
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There are some companies offering (expensive) wireless broadband on 5 GHz. Maybe not on the tip of the Cape, though. When I checked, they were priced like T1s...prohibitively expensive.
I'm guessing they're not able to get DSL.
There's also the possibility of using WiFi access points and directional antennas to create a point-to-point link with someone who has broadband. I did this for my brother and it works well, just need that person willing to share their broadband connection.
The first thing they should probably look into is shared wireless broadband multiplexing. By synchronizing and RSI-ing home wifi routers across whole neighborhoods, it should be possible to create a large enough mesh in which a communal network is created. By then expanding the reach of such a mesh network through the growth of the group itself (through more community members adding themselves to the network by physically adding newly-bought routers) and through the use of technologies like WiMax, it should be possible to reach an internet logon node. At that point, it's pretty much elementary, my dear Watson, to get a working link up.
The benefit is that as the community grows and more benefits appear for each user, the cumulative benefits become attractive to those who were at first unwilling or wary of such a mesh. When they start joining, they provide their own routers which in turn makes the mesh stronger, more resilient to single-point failures, and simply more stable for everyone.
There are plenty of companies providing this type of solution, but the best that I've found (and seen implemented in various small towns across the US) have been home-grown. Good luck to your parents!
Sorry, they don't want a dish because it might ruin the looks? Put it on a pole. This sounds the classic NIMBY crap we always get from this corner of the country. Then to top it off, since no company wants to spend the fortune it would cost to serve a few customers you want me (aka the guy who funds the government with the help of a bunch of other income earners) to pay for it?
/.? Being forced to live with old single core processors?
Look, there may be wireless solutions in the future. I also do just fine with my email over dial up when necessary (just don't let it download anything with attachments).
DIAL UP IS NOT THE END OF THE WORLD.
Your parents have an open solution by a provider. (satellite) Obviously the looks of their house is more important than high speed internet.
Whats next on
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Is there anything preventing you from using an EVDO connection through Sprint or Verizon? I know Verizon has a MB cap but Sprint is supposedly unlimited. When i decided to abandon Comcast about 4 months ago i got a sprint modem and the unlimited service package. for roughly the same price as Comcast.
Transfers are around 3 mbps in my area with respectable upload speeds. If there is no EDVO signal in the area speeds may be slower then dial-up if not nonexistent.
Get a satellite dish.
Mount it on the ground.
Cover it with a fibreglass imitation rock, or some other feature that's microwave-transparent but blends in with the local scenery.
How near is a house with cable internet? Can they talk to one of their friends and then you set up point-to-point wireless? You could share the bills and half the cost. If it's 100m you could even run cat6 for speed.
If it's available, a cell based service might be the best solution. The pricing has come down quite a bit and while the speeds aren't great it doesn't take much to beat dialup. You can even get a router with a pcmcia slot and share the connection with multiple machines or even neighbors and split the cost. Good luck.
Support bacteria, the only culture most people have.
Googling a bit gives the option of "hiding" the satellite dish, some exist in the UK at least, not sure how well it looks in reality: sqish
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
It will also work if you put it somewhere in the garden behind something where you don't see it. Just run the wire into the house and you are fine.
Do not know the distance we are talking about, but sounds like there won't be anything prohibitive on line of sight.
:) Here's one: http://demi0urgos.livejournal.com/5924.html
Closest neighbour who can have a fast connection, arrange with them to setup a WiFi, but not with regular uni-directional antennae, use directional, big one.
More precise you can align the antennaes, the further you can reach with better bandwidth. To avoid the bad looks, you could hook it up in a tree too.
If you are DIY type, there's lots of DIY tutorials to make one yourself on the cheap, which is just as good or better than some which costs insane high bucks. Just google "DIY WiFi Directional Antenna"
Picture: http://img237.imageshack.us/my.php?image=smalllabattstilt2nr.jpg
Used: Beer can, some copper wiring, and some household items.
You actually can get quite damn good distances with this kind of setup, alternatively, you guys might want to ask if you could use signal boosters to amplify the strength of signal, but beware, there's very good reasons why by default the output is weak, but that's mostly directed towards to areas where there is other users.
Also, get the best hardware you can find on sane prices, using some cheap D-Link crap or something like that, is plain shooting yourself on the foot, they don't even work for 10 feets, nevermind 10miles no matter what kind of antenna you use.
Also, by nature WiFi is not very reliable, but setup well, it should work fine most of the time.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
one of those 3G broadband USB or PCMCIA modems?
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
Seriously, why is it always "turn to government"? It is a free country. They are free to live somewhere where they can get broadband. The broadband providers are free to not provide where they feel it is not profitable. This is not like telephone or cable (which have a government monopoly in many cases). Why should government be able to force a private business entity to enter a non-profitable market? Except perhaps in the case cited of an artificial monopoly?
Besides, it seems like they have an option (satellite), but they just don't want it.
Dishes can be painted to match with the existing surrounds - making them blend in fairly easily.
I was in Siena, Italy - a city that didn't develop during the Renaissance after losing a war to Florence - and there were dishes all over that were painted to match the stone and brick work of that city.
If a city that old can have dishes without looking bad or distracting, I think a house in New York will be okay.
Never give up on the easy solution - it's probably the best one.
Nuke dialup from orbit, it's the only way to be sure...
np: Kettel - Afwezig (My Dogan)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Knowing nothing about the area or indeed what kind of people live there, the only thing that springs to mind is to find somebody nearby ask pay them to latch onto their connection, if possible. Or, if nobody has it and everybody want it, how about forming a cooperative? The cooperative would build a shared broadband connection in whichever way was feasible, and perticipants would pay a share of the costs; it wouldn't necessarily have to be very expensive, and a shared facility could be built in an out of the way place that doesn't damage natural beauty, old houses etc.
i can't vouch for coverage on outer cape cod, but verizonwireless is an excellent value these days. $60/mo for unlimited use. this is of course after any up-front equipment costs. this would use cell-phone signals to provide an internet connection, and typically it supports only one computer. if you need to share the internet connection with 2 or more computers, there is at least one company (can't recall the name) that makes routers designed for use with a cellular internet connection.
They should mirror the internet during the night, updating a local cache, and when they surf during the day, they actually surf the locally cached internet.
They might even be able to use their browser cache for that, I would think. I have mine set at 50Mb and I never get complaints from my browser that it needs more, so I would say 50Mb is enough. Maybe set it to 100Mb of you also want a backup.
I hope this helps. And if not, I still have a 14k4 modem somewhere of you want to speed up the caching process.
Privacy is terrorism.
The only thing i can think of from the top of my head are a Cache Proxy, but that pretty much requires you have flat rate on the modem pool phonenumber. Configure it to refresh the most visited pages/sites manually and/or automatically. If this is a success is very much dependant upon their surfing habits thou. For e-mail i would have run a server that popped the e-mail to it and then served it to the local client. Offtopic: The news i read immediately before this was about three of Stockholm's municipal housing corporations that has started to upgrade it's 90k home and 10k business customers connections to 1 GBit/s.
If your parents can afford to own (as you imply in the phrasing) a historic Cape Cod cottage as a vacation home they can afford to use a cellular service to check their e-mail and finances. Most likely, you're 15 and don't want to miss your World of Warcraft raid sessions and 4chan while on vacation. Boohoo, tough luck, deal with it.
The WildBlue dish is 28x26 inches.
Mounting this jet black dish inconspicuously would not seem to present any particular problem.
Unless they are driving up there in a horse and buggy, and use whale oil lamps to light the night, i would say the illusion is pretty well broken anyway. Why not mount the dish on something near the house, or even on a post or something? It isn't going to distract anymore than the SUV sitting in the driveway
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
An idea might be to take a damn walk or stay home off the cape.
There is no point in going to the National Seashore if you are going to websurf while you are there.
Get off the net is the answer to the problem.
Guaranteed they have absolutely no need for the internet and probably ought to have the cabin siezed and given to someone who would appreciate it.
If you can't have broadband connection, you can always purchase a 3G mobile broadband device.
Although not every place has 3G connection, every day the number of places are increasing (with either UTMS or EV-DO) and the speed is acceptable, not the 20 or 30 Mbps you get with cable (depends of the country) but you get a nice 1.8, 2.4 or 7.2 (depending on the technology), but in places where you can't get 3G, you'll have GPRS that is slower than a normal dial up access, so make sure you have 3G access before buying the device.
Cheers
Carlos Segura
linksys even have a 3G broadband router.
Meet with neighbors; develop a cooperative approach w/ a major provider; get a higher speed line run to a central location further inland; use a wi-fi relay to distribute bandwidth.
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
Using a Unix account might not require as much user education or volition as you might think. Here are some of possibilities if you use a shell account on the user's ISP:
- Faster Web browsing using Lynx
- No, there's nothing (seriously) wrong with Lynx
- You can also use W3M or Links or Elinks if you like
- IRC chatting with EPIC4 or Irssi
- I know IRC doesn't use a lot of bandwidth, but every little bit helps
- Instant messaging with TTY clients
- Centericq does some protocols
- Pork for AIM
- Cabber or Imcom for Jabber
- These are both crashy I'm afraid
- There might be a text version of Gaim or Pidgin
- Offline downloading
- User can download to the ISP first with Wget, Bittorrent, or the ftp command
- User can later download the file to his or her home computer with an FTP client
- Slightly more efficient
- Resize large images with Imagemagick
- Re-encode or down-sample audio
- With the Vorbis Tools oggenc command
- Or use Ogg Speex, which is down right awesome at reducing the number of bytes needed to store human speech
- A friend of mine used Ogg Speex to download the first Codecon presentation to his dial-up account
- Probably in much less the time it would have taken to listen to it
- Re-encode or down-sample video
- Use Mplayer's mencoder command
- Maybe VNC or the low-bandwidth X proxy might be options
That's how I used to do dial-up. Except for things like the fact that Ogg Vorbis, Mplayer and Jabber weren't invented yet at that time. Fortunately my ISP let me have a shell account.
All this said, Windows XP is a lot more stable than Windows 3.1 was for me, so maybe it's better to run some client programs. Here's some tips for that.
- Filter the e-mail at the ISP
- Spam these days is very large in file size
- Use Spamassassin or some other filter at the ISP
- Of course, a lot of ISPs do this for you already
- Turn off Javascript and disable plug-ins
- If you're bent on using sites like Myspace or Yahoo Games or Youtube you might not have a chance at using this on dial-up anyway, so you may as well turn off the Web browser "features" they require, for faster loading of many Web pages out there
- In the old days you could have Netscape not automatically load images, but then load them if you clicked on them, or clicked on the "load images" button
- This was the ideal solution, but unfortunately neither Firefox nor Seamonkey offer this feature
- Did I mention turning off Javascript and plug-ins?
- I guess use of Noscript is a fair compromise
- Take advantage of the ISP's Web Mail service, or read mail on the shell account, if you can
- Then you can delete e-mail messages you don't want
- For example if they're spam, or too large, or you've already read them
- But later download the mail you want to keep on to your local client
- Educate the user to educate his friends not to send too large e-mails
- Quote properly
- I know it's a lost cause, but it'll help
- Teach not to include attachments without asking first
- Teach how to reduce images to 640x480 (or 480x640) first
And, of course, sometime's it's faster to buy a CD or DVD and have it mailed to you than to download something. Dial-up ISPs could consider offering this feature, but perhaps with a customer-supplied harddisk for cost reasons.
Tom
Foret the computer and get them an unlocked iPhone - much easier to use!
I've had mine in Europe nearly 2 months now and find it great to keep in touch with photos, email, web etc. Lately, found I
don't even need a SIM card as fring.com provides WIFI phone as well as easy to use Skype. Better yet perhaps they both would like one.
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
Why?
Email over dialup is fine - suggest webmail or IMAP incase there are large attachments they don't want to download.
disable flash and use adblock. Yes you can actually use the internet at dialup speeds you know.
If you move to the boonies to get away from everything, don't be surprised when it works.
There are several how-to docs on using bare wires from the telco (originally intended for alarm circuits) with special-purpose modems to get internet access in places the "usual" technologies won't reach.
-- If you don't understand it, blame it!
I'm currently running a 57km total (longest stretch 45km) 802.11a link with two relays to my parents house. I have fiber and they can't even get a stable dialup link. I know for a fact that three OC-192s lie less than a meter from the front gate and the local fiber MAN ends just a few hundred meters from there. 300m from 100Mbit Nirvana and unable to get DSL.....
--cros13
They could put a satellite dish on their roof, but it's a 300-year-old house and they feel a dish would be as prohibitively ugly as running dedicated lines would be prohibitively expensive. I've suggested they get familiar with a text-only email client; I also suggested they talk with their senators and local political reps.
(translated) My rich parents can't get broadband in their summer home in Cape Cod because they're too pretentious to use a dish and the mean old phone company doesn't want to spend millions to run DSL out to bumblefuck. Mr. Senator, can you make the taxpayer foot the bill so my parents can have *broadband* in their *summer home*???
Gimme a break. Talk about spoiled. You know, there are people who still use dial-up. Does it suck? A little. But talking about political action so rich people can get broadband in the middle of nowhere where they chose their vacation home? Get out of here.
Try www.onspeed.com for Windows and OSX.
I use it on my MBP with my crappy old GPRS phone when I'm on long train journeys.
It really is an amazing product.
I'm pretty sure Sprint works out there. Just get a USB datacard from Sprint (or someone else) and they're good to go.
Not as fast as DSL/cable, but a hell of a lot better then dialup...
I use dialup and 14.4k wireless a lot when I'm traveling, and I travel to places (national parks) where I have to walk significant distances to get enough signal for a 14.4 connection. That is enough for me to to do my job, read the news, and check the weather.
Identify the functionality they really want. I bet you can find a mix of software and webapps that would scratch their itch over a clean dialup connection.
What about disconnecting? IsnÂt that the point of vacation?
One of the things I love about our cottage is that there is no power, no running water and hardly any cellphone coverage.
If it is dead important I can read mail on my phone down the road.
Do they need to have anything more than dialup? Using mail clients through dialup isn't that bad.
I know this will sound stupid, but really, a text-only email client is pushing it.
:)
We had pathetic dialup lines in India for a long long time, and I still managed to use the Internet fairly comfortably. I used to be online almost 24/7 (except when phone calls whacked out the connection, but there came along programs to deal with that, also) on a dialup line not too long ago.
IRC, IM, E-mail (Webmail, POP3), regular WWW browsing - I did it all. Dialup doesn't automatically mean pine + lynx + bitchX + licq. Thunderbird + Firefox + mIRC + AIM/Yahoo/MSN/Gtalk/whatever works just as well. I even ran an Fserve in mIRC in EFnet over my line. People got pitiful download speeds from me, but it was possible!
In a nutshell: All is not lost, it'll just take a wee bit longer to find
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you're the one who wants broadband access.
I've actually worked on a system like this in the north of Scotland. The thing is, the customer had pretty deep pockets, so you might want to think carefully before dropping this kind of cash on broadband.
The customer had a site at the top of a hill, some sites at the bottom of the hill, and a location 10km away where they could get broadband *and* line-of-sight to the hill. So what they did was use a 5.8GHz fixed wireless point-to-point link (Orthogon Gemini Lite) to get a 10MBps link to the top of the hill, then 5.8GHz point-to-multipoint (Alvarion BreezeACCESS VL) to the sites down the hill.
As I say, quite expensive (the Gemini alone was about £6000 at the time), but this will throw your broadband for a good few miles and is extremely reliable if set up correctly. The outdoor units for the links are squarish things about a foot across (Gemini a bit bigger, VL a bit smaller). If you consult the manufacturer I believe you can paint them to make them blend in.
You could probably do it with consumer-grade wifi gear with external antennas, but 2.4GHz is so noisy these days. If you *really* had money to burn you could use a licensed link and get carrier-grade reliability.
If you have DSL or cable at home and you have a machine you use as a firewall (which is always running), maybe you could set it up as a terminal-server.
Preferrable over a VPN.
You might want to look into which protocols are the most bandwidth efficient.
New things are always on the horizon
How much kicking and screaming have they done? I ask because as a former verizon network engineer, I have routinely found myself putting out work orders to modify plant to make DSL possible. The qualification system used by the call center reps is littered with errors and false positives. With that in mind I would highly suggest that you incist that they put in a ticket to engineering to qulify the loop, or even that they push an order through anyway. If it's not doable as is, the loop assigners will put it to engineering. If its impossible for engineering to do, then it will fall through all together. How far are they from the CO? Have you seen any CEV's around the neighborhood? A CEV is a sort of remote extension of the CO to extend the reach of certain services. For the most part it looks like a big metal door into the ground. If there is a CEV figure out how far they are from that. All in all if they are more than 18000 ft from the CO or a CEV verizon cannot physically provide service. If any neighbors have dsl, that is also a good justification to make them try to do it. Good luck. Hope I helped. --izm
izm
...their time is almost up. Then dial up will be the least of their problems. And if I had a 300-yr-old cottage on Cape Cod, frankly, I wouldn't give a damn about the internet, e-mail, or whether my kid was in my will.
People tend to forget about ISDN. ISDN in itself isn't incredibly fast, but it's dedicated, damned stable and still technically counts as "broadband". Plus if you get ISDN IDSL may become an option. Then you have two ISDN phone lines to play with where you can ditch the original analog line.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
If they're scared of it ruining the house put it on the ground?
signature is pants
In my opinion, ISDN is a better option than cellular or satellite broadband because there is so much less latency.
If ISDN isn't available, the phone company may still let you sign up for several phone lines. You could then use multilink PPP with 2 or 3 modems. (Your ISP would have to support this.)
Have you ever thought of 3G internet?
They should find an ISP that supports v.92 and made sure they're running a good ad filter (and probably something like Flashblock). Dial-up is survivable if you can kill the rich media ads.
Some ISPs also offer a "web accelerator" service that'll repack images and compress HTML for you.
...it was mentioned in another post but I'm gonna add to it.
I work for the federal gummint and am routinely required to provide connectivity in solutions like this. I issue the user with the requriement a cellular aircard and if necessary an aircard router. Several companies make them and right now I'm particularly happy with NexAira's hardware as most other aircard routers are carrier- and hardware-specific.
You still have to check the manufacturer's compatibility list but NexAira's router can move with you between carriers and is one of the few that supports USB aircards. I've got a Linksys PCMCIA aircard router that works well with Sprint also. NexAira's router only has one Ethernet output but does do WiFi. They're not cheap as aircard routers run between $180 and $250 on the street but they've been a godsend to me.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
Why don't you host a VT52 terminal emulator for them and provide their text e-mail interface. They can surf mobile sites for their internet access.
If it worked at 300 baud...Invenio via vel creo
They may be able to get UMTS/HSDPA (high speed wireless through the cell phone).
You can bond multiple telephone lines; 112kbps is a bit better than 56kbps.
No matter what you do, you should probably set up servers, since modern interactive applications try to do too many things in real time: E-mail servers that retrieve and send stuff in the background, aggressive web caching, and RSS readers plus downloaders for the web.
One service that's becoming popular with laptop users would be the EVDO/3G adapters. These allow laptop computers (or, with USB versions, any computer) access to the EVDO (Verizon) and 3G (AT&T, T-Mobile) high-speed networks in most regions. Living in Massachusetts myself, I happen to know that the signal is very strong for both of these services in most populated areas. Basically, you can get broadband access from the cell tower networks for about $60/month (citing Verizon's price for 5GB monthly allowance).
Both services offer speeds that are roughly equivalent to consumer DSL lines. While it is more expensive than DSL in most locations, if they're not going to run DSL, FiOS or digital cable lines out to you, then you don't have a lot of choices.
You may treat all information submitted above as wild speculation.
stupid story to make it to slashdot headlines
An obvious first step is to disable things like automatic image loading in the browser options. Go to some sites that load very slow and troubleshoot them. Try to see what is being loaded that is bogging down the browser. Firefox may have some extensions that help this, and I think Opera is pretty good at listing what is loading and how long it takes. Use an ad blocker. Dialup is often killed by all those fancy ads. Disable flash, javascript, DHTML stuff (where possible) and anything else too fancy. A friend of mine had dialup where he was living a few years ago, and I found that just disabling image loading and ad blocking made a huge difference. Without all the images and ads page loading was pretty snappy. Another option is just to use a text only browser like Lynx. Although it seems it hasn't been updated since 2004. Also, with dialup an offline browser is mandatory. Update all regularly visited sites at night or when the user is doing something other than web browsing.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Get a cellphone connection with an unlimited data plan, and add an external antenna...
http://www.alternativewireless.com/cellular-antennas/connecting.html
Personally, I know about Nokia cellphones and 3G. Personally would choose one with AT command set on the adaptor port (some still do this though some only have USB) and run a long serial cable to a router. You might just go with one of those funny US dedicated EVDO/USB devices though.
"talk with their senators and local political reps?"
Why is it the nation's/Comcast's/Verizon's problem that your parents decided to live somewhere without broadband coverage? They bought a house in Timbuktu and now they want someone else to foot the bill of running cable out to their location. Ridiculous.
Really, 300-yr old? From 1708 or thereabouts? In Cape Cod? I think not.
"I also suggested they talk with their senators and local political reps."
So, you'd like a remedy that's marginal, expensive and materializes sometime after your parents are dead.
How is this something in which government should get involved? And what makes you think their "proposed" remedy would ever be effective. It just baffles me how people have come to believe that governments and politicians can solve problems for which they have repeatedly demonstrated failure.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Fortunately, these small towns were blessed with satellite connections, but choosing to eliminate a solid alternative will cost you. If they hate the dish so much, why not put it 40 yards (or so) off location and provide a radio link or dig down a TP cable all the way home?
If that won't cut it, then look for a satellite dish made out of carved stone.
Full Tilt
I live in Raleigh, NC where there is a lot of effort going into restoring older buildings. However, newer technology is required.
The effort is focused on making these upgrades transparent while allowing for present creature comforts.
Satellite solutions
1) You can paint the dish to match the color of the home.
2) You can typically place it somewhere near the ground and surround it by vegetation. This can have issues with line of sight
Other solutions
1) High speed over power lines. Believe it or not it's pretty damn good for normal use. Gamers wouldn't want to mess with it, but other than that they won't notice.
If there are cell signals in the area, how about a broadband wireless card from one of the cell companies? The cards are free with 2-year contracts, and the plans start around $50 or so per month.
Secondly, politicians can do more that spend money to pay for the infrastructure. Telcos require permission from the government to do all sorts of things and as a condition of putting in service to more profitable areas, they could be forced to service other areas as well. Everybody wins. Unless you think spending an extra 25c a month on your subscription to fund it is the slippery slope to socialism and before you know it we'll all be working for the state and need permission to visit a department store, of course.
You may be right, I don't know, but you should not jump to conclusions until you know all the facts.
I've been using Dial-up since the internet started (I'm 80) and haven't bothered to migrate to faster techs even tho they're available to me. Tell them to use Firefox and make use of the tabs and all the available extensions which take out unnecessary content such as Noscript, Adblock, and Image like opera. When you have 6 or 7 tabs opens at the same time, it's easy to go to go from one to another. While one is loading you read a different one. I'm sure they have more than one site they're interested in. This way they can surf the internet without any problem. It's just a matter of learning to use the facilities available and adapting.
Oh, sorry, I thought we were on the Rachel Ray forums for a second... :-p
I remember that in old times, there were programs to merge the bandwidths of two dial-up connections. It sounds silly now to increase bandwith from 4kb/s to 8kb/s, but, if you have a spare line, you can try this as a last resort...
I have a motorola canopy 20Mbit backhaul that I just recently took out of commission. Find the nearest neighbor that *can* get better service, and point the canopy radios at each other. If they're within 2 miles, you just have a 6"x3"x.5" piece of white plastic, outside of 2 miles, and you have to use a reflector that looks like a DirecTV dish. Hook the DSL or cable up at hte other end, and these act as an ethernet bridge. Wire up everything like you normally would at hte other side. Done.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Why did no one mention WWAN? It's available most places cell service is present.
and my wallet is too small for all these $100 bills!
Wait a minute. Am I missing something or is the OP complaining that rich, white Cape Codders are unable to exercise enough political influence to have things their way? Isn't that one of the signs of the apocalypse?
I kid! Seriously though, no matter how red you paint a school bus it's never gonna win at Daytona, you know what I'm sayin'? The most optimized dial-up connection is not going to get any faster than the hardware allows, and the most ideal scenario is still much slower than broadband. The other option appears to be satellite, which your parents don't like for aesthetic reasons. Well, that's their call, but there doesn't seem to be a viable third option. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that your parents are not especially tech savvy, so any options more technical or creative than what you could find in a phone book probably aren't on the table. Part of the package when you buy those nice, expensive, quaint, historic old cottages is that they tend to be in out-of-the-way areas; that's the selling point, in fact, for a lot of people. At the risk of sounding a little too much like a class warrior it's really an issue of trying to have your cake and eat it too, I'm afraid.
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If Dialup is truly the only option, try a Shotgun Modem. This requires a few things: A special "shotgun" modem, a service provider who allows shotgunning, and at least two phone lines.
This will give you service similar to an ISDN connection -- a Shotgun Modem typically allows you to pick up the secondary connection line (primary phone) and will suspend that connection while you place a cal. I'm unsure how it works with incoming calls.
If I only had a moose...
um, ev-do cell modem.
what is the problem again?
... but they chose to and live in the middle of a medium sized city.
They use it for web browsing, email and even stock trading. Its cheaper and does the job. They don't see the point of paying for something they don't need.
I wonder why the posters parents "need" broadband?
We like to rent vacation homes in out of the way spots, but still want our connectivity. We've found our Verizon EV-DO card works in 99% of the locations, and where it doesn't an AT&T card will normally work; just at EDGE speeds rather than 3G. Even at 1xRTT or EDGE speeds they are still faster than dial up and with a small cheap router can be left on 24x7 and rebroadcast over WiFi. It's also easy to test, if a cell phone works a card will work; if it's a weak signal you may be able to get more speed with a small antenna pointed at the tower.
If those options really don't work, then Satellite may be your only option for high speed. If they are really that far out then I don't think the looks of a dish are really a big detractor if it's placed in a good location on the house. Often tucked behind a chimney or similar they are virtually invisible. Yes, you'll have to pay the installer more to put it there, but nothing is free. If you google "satellite dish camouflage" you'll get a bunch of ways to hide them too, fake plants, rocks, fabric covers, etc.
he lives in wexford. rural area in a valley with no broadband or wifi coverage. they've been promised broadband sometime in the next 2 years maybe. satellite is out of his price range. he had a pc and with dialup he was barely getting 32kbps. when ever he connected to the web the antivirus would then try and pull down a few megs of updates which took 10-15 minutes. this was usually cancelled as they wanted the web to go faster leaving the system open for viruses. i went there every 2-3 months to fix the system.
i finally talked him into getting a mac mini. added a modem and give him updates on cd every few months. now all his bandwidth as little of it as there is is now used for web and email. the system is secure and i go down there about once a year now just to check on the system.
i'm sure linux can do the same. it is just windows that needs daily anti virus downloads that will hog your limited bandwidth. it is possible to use windows without antivirus but not for non technical person and his kids.
showing him all the mobile news web sites and rss feeds also allows him to access the web with out having to suck down 500k web pages for a list of headlines.
the macs friendlyness has been a real sucess for my brother. he now convincing his mates to switch over. recently when his printer died he bought and installed a new one without calling me. he never managed that with any version of windows.
shoot wifi at the nearest thing with cable/dsl, relay if you have to. otherwise im sure your folks will do fine with dialup, old people can't click fast enough to top 14.4 anyway.
OK, here are my ideas, in order of what I would do.
First, install Firefox and the Adblock Plus extension. That will help your speed a bit.
As for the Internet access, they need to decide if they want fast Internet more than they want a dish-free yard. IMHO, get the damn dish and conceal it. Several folks have offered suggestions on how to do this. This will get them reasonably fast Internet without a lot of hassle.
If they refuse to do this, then see what cell companies put good signals into the area. At least one should. Find out what they charge for unlimited data. Just make sure that the data plan you choose allows for tethering to a computer. These plans often cost more than plans that can only be used with a wireless phone. Also, check out data technologies they're offering. For a GSM carrier like AT&T, you want to see if they offer HSDPA, which they will call 3G. For a CDMA carrier like Verizon or Sprint, EVDO is what you want. All these carriers will show you what you can get via their coverage maps.
ISDN might also be an option. It can be relatively cheap or insanely expensive, depending on the location and telco. Also, when you call to inquire, be prepared for some puzzled responses from some reps, especially the newer ones. Not many folks order ISDN now. Also, many phone companies will sell the ISDN circuit separate from Internet access. In fact, some telcos may not even sell you ISDN Internet access. You may have to find an ISP that will sell you the connection. Also, don't forget to purchase a Terminal Adapter, since I doubt the telco will supply one.
If all that doesn't get you anywhere, I guess you could try the multilink PPP approach to bonding several phone lines. Just don't expect many ISP's to offer it, and don't expect a lot of support. IMHO, this was always a kludge. Kind of the solution of absolute last resort.
IMHO, just get the dish. You'll be much happier.
I surely hope that your parents are not sitting inside on the computer wasting the beautiful Cape Cod scenery.
If they must be connected, I would suggest eohio.net dialup service with their E-Z Blaster. It makes dialup very bearable.
One other option is Phone As Modem from the cell phone company. Just tether your phone to your PC and use the phone as a modem.
If I had a 300 year old cottage on Cape Cod, internet connection would be the last thing I would worry about. Actually, scrap that, most technological gadgets would be off my mind and the cell phone would be turned off as well. Sounds like a vacation cottage, make it a vacation and stop your whining about dialup.
If your parents have surrounding neighbors, you could possibly create a WiMAX Mesh Network with something like Meraki. Meraki's mesh networks cover dramatically more geographic area and reach more users than other wireless networks by relying on sophisticated mesh routing technology to increase range and network capacity.
Site: http://meraki.com/
If they get a decent cell phone signal perhaps a wireless usb car for their computer from Sprint/Verizon/ATT is the way to go. Some of these cards hook into wireless modems so you can get 3G speeds for all the computers in the house.
Are there any wireless Internet Service Providers/WISP in that area?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I need fast connectivity all the time. I live in a cabinet in NYIIX and have a GigE cross-connect to a large multi-homed web 2.0 customer that I consult for. You'd think it's not possible to sleep vertically and with all the noise, but actually, I have. I got some really cool sling gear from REI that makes it comfortable to sleep half-sitting. The free coffee in the break room is actually quite good, but the food in the vending machine got old a long time ago. They don't deliver pizza here, though, because the guards keep chasing them away. I've been able to maintain several level 70+ characters in WoW when I'm not working. Let's face it, at $2000/mo (includes rack, cross-connect and power) in lower Manhattan, it's quite a bargain. I regret having to give up my dog (no pets!). He stays with my parents now in their 300-year-old-house near Boston. Things are looking up, though. Looks like some girl has moved into cab J19.
You do have to slightly adjust your usage patterns, but it's not a very big deal. Some general tips:
* Learn to use a downloading tool that knows how to automatically retry and resume where it left off whenever the connection has to be redialed in the middle of a download. If you're comfortable with the command line, wget is awesome (I once used it to download a three-CD set of ISOs for a Linux distro over a shared 33.6 dialup connection; it took a few days but it worked), but if not, I'm sure there are more GUI-oriented downloading utilities available. Get one that does automatic retry/resume, and use it for all downloads of any significant size.
* Get an offline mail reader, such as Pegasus Mail. Forget about the text-based criterion (for email, that really doesn't have any significant impact on bandwidth requirements) and worry about getting one that is designed under the assumption that the incoming mail is transferred one time from a POP3 server to your PC and then stored locally forever, and the outgoing mail is queued up and sent in a batch later. Dialup, even 28.8, is orders of magnitude more bandwidth than you need for sending and receiving email, but you don't want to have to start over if the connection drops while you're reading or composing, so a mailreader that wants to read directly out of a mail spool (like a lot of older Unix-oriented text-based ones) is highly undesirable. IMAP is right out. Don't even think about webmail.
* Learn to use tabbed browsing as a queue. You don't left-click links. You middle-click them, which appends them to the end of the queue (i.e., opens them in a new tab at the end of the tab list, where they start loading). Then you go on as you were, reading the page you're currently looking at. When you're done reading the current page, you close the tab, and the next tab to the right becomes current automatically. First In, First Out (i.e., the first one that loaded is the first one you read, then the next, and so on). This system takes a little bit of getting used to, but once you become accustomed to it it actually works very very well.
* Learn to use bookmark keywords for reference situations. The traditional workflow for looking up a word on dictionary.com (just an example) is to open a new window or tab, click the bookmark, *wait for the page to load*, type the word you want to look up, *wait for the page to load again*, and read the definition. You can cut your waiting in half, i.e., only wait for one page to load once, by using a bookmark keyword. Even better, if you hit Ctrl-tab once after starting it, you don't have to do nothing while you wait: you've just appended that page to your queue (see previous tip) and gone back to the first page in the queue, which you can continue reading while you wait.
* If you don't already have the FlashBlock extension, you need it. (Either that or just don't install the Flash plugin in the first place.)
* If you read usenet, you need an offline newsreader.
* Grow a backbone and learn to say "no" and make it stick when people tell you you just *have* to see this hilarious thing they found on YouTube (which in fact is not actually funny at all just stupid).
* Grow a backbone and learn to say "no" and make it stick when people want you to try out this great new social networking service that tells your friends whenever you're online, sign up for an "instant messaging" account, or cetera. Give them your email address, your postal address, and your phone number. If they actually want to get ahold of you, they'll be willing to use one of those methods to do it. You ABSOLUTELY do not want instant messaging software installed, because it consumes bandwidth all the time, even when you're not actively using it, and on narrow pipes that can cause real problems. If your operating system comes with instant messaging software out of the box, disable or uninstall it.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Until last year my miserly parents insisted on painfully slow dial-up at home (even when I offered to pay to upgrade the home internet). I ended up only using the home internet for unavoidable essentials, and doing most of my internet-related stuff on my laptop then USB-ing any downloads over the home setup, after using the hundreds of unprotected wireless networks lying around even my small hometown.
Agreed. Satellite dishes can actually be hidden pretty well by some well-placed landscaping. Today's dishes are small and putting it on a small pole or stand low to the ground and surrounding it with some nice shrubs will hide from everyone who's not in an airplane. This is on purpose -- the dish needs a clear view of the sky, but the shrubs will blcok it from people on the ground.
Get over it and get a life. If you can afford to live on an island in Nantucket sound or whatever you can afford to hire a good landscape architect.
Piss and moan all you want, I have no sympathy whatsoever.
My blog
(translated) My relative impoverishment in imagined comparison to the parents of a Slashdot poster who I know nothing about gives me a sense of entitlement as big as any Harvard legacy nitwit.
Boo-hoo, and cry me a river. The OP asked a legit question, and even though the answer is trivial (cellular broadband), it provoked a couple interesting responses. Your witty retort not only missed the point (besides political action, what can I do?), but also marked you as a twat.
We recently purchased a house out in the woods and ran into the same issue, no high-speed connectivity. The jist of it is take a 3G signal and convert it into a WiFi signal. There's a number of ways to accomplish this, but for mom and dad, the Linksys wireless router may be the best way to go.
it destroyed my life
atleast in Europe and the Nordic countries it was a lot of talk to get Internet trough the electrical network..
You do have a plug in the cottage even though it is old right?
Try that..
Holy batman luxury problem. May i suggest a tag "snob".
Can I light a sig ?
is definitely something you haven't experienced..
A dollar an hour, 24 dollars a day, 720 dollars a month.
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
If they're unwilling to put a dish on the roof because of looks, and unwilling to pay for a dedicated line (you don't say what kind, but I'm guessing just a second POTS line) then I wouldn't guess that Internet connectivity is a terribly big deal for them.
There are alternatives, like ISDN, that would be faster than regular dial-up... But if they're not going to pay for a second line because it costs too much, they won't be paying for ISDN.
Email is the least of your concerns. I'm not sure what you mean by "text only" email... You certainly don't need to use something like Pine. Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Eudora, or any other offline mail reader will work just fine. That's what they were designed for, after all. Dial up, download the email, disconnect, read/reply at your liesure. The same thing goes for Usenet - there are plenty of offline newsreaders available.
The biggest problem is going to be the web. If they've gotten used to downloading movies/music on-line, always having access to Google or Wikipedia to answer questions, watching things on YouTube... None of that is going to work terribly well. And, short of spending the money on a dish or ISDN or whatever, there really isn't much they can do about it.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Your parents are whiny cunts! OOOOOo I have to live with DIALUP on my $2 million dollar historic house on the ocean! oooooo pooor poor you, you better call your senator and complain, oh my oooo this is fucking injustice!
And they all involve money. Try the US-CCA for funding models at http://www.us-cca.org/ for community networking help.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Ohh, the pain! Now they won't be able to get 1.2M photos, and it'll be *so* much harder to read and click on spam, viruses and trojans....
mark, thunderbird, PLAIN TEXT ONLY, like this post
I just set up a new computer for my uncle, who isn't a power user and sticks with dial-up out at the farm. The new computer was a gift from his siblings, and runs Vista. Vista and dial-up are apparently not compatible. Anything that requires downloading other than through the standard IE http downloader (Live Update, Windows Update, Yahoo! Messenger installer, Live Messenger installer all did this) will fail miserably after downloading many bytes.
Furthermore, once I got everything installed through my own broadband connection after numerous failures of all of the above, Yahoo! Messenger won't stay connected for him (whereas Windows Live Messenger apparently will).
You also apparently can't make a desktop shortcut to a dial-up connection, so his connect/disconnect process is more involved now than it had been with Windows 98. So now I am probably going to end up trying to buy a copy of XP, driving the 3 hours home, and spending my weekend doing what I thought I could effectively do last weekend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isdn
If your parents main concern is email, they can still use the standard GUI Email clients like Apple's Mail or Microsoft Outlook Express. It isn't like the old X11 clients where the server is drawing the graphics. The local computer does most of the work to make it all nice an' look purty. The only delay is the transfer of the email across the network. This would be the same for a text email client or Microsoft Outlook Express. There are some settings in most email clients not to download large emails or not to download graphics. Email download is slower over dialup, but it really isn't that painful compared to Web browsing.
If you want to browse the Web, you can turn off the "Download Pictures" options in most Web browsers. Unfortunately, pages like http://www.apple.com/ will display practically nothing. Another possibility is to get a browser like Firefox, Safari, or Opera that allows you to set the web client to appear as if it is another browser. Set the browser client to appear to be a typical web-enabled phone, and you'll see text only webpages. Not as pretty, but it will allow you to view the news from Yahoo or the New York Times.
Did you read the link you posted?
I remember using shotgun modems (and 2-channel analog routers) to double the bandwidth of a single dial-up connection. Yes, you have to have a second phone line, and yes, your ISP has to support two simultaneous sessions on one account, but, since they are living the good life far from the hustle and bustle, I suspect they can afford it.
It's my understanding that FairPoint will be addressing this. I met with a FairPoint rep around an MPLS solution and, according to him, Verizon has been and will continue to only be interested in major metro areas. FairPoint is supposed to be focusing their upgrades on more rural areas.
Ask a question via ask slashdot because you honestly need some help.
Get lambasted for asking a dumb question (even tho it's the general idea of ask slashdot)
???
Profit!
They should not be concerned with the look of the house or property value. On Cape Cod National Seashore you either pass the house down to a family member or the government takes the land and destroys the house. Dialup stinks but your alternatives are either cell-based or satellite based.
have your parents switch houses with me.
Suprisingly using dial-up for web browsing and for web interface email was acceptable. Granted this was in New York City.... But the phone line quality was poor, only receiving about 35k Lesson: get the best quality inside wiring you can (a cat3 cable from the phone box (NID) wired to a dedicated jack) and you may just get acceptable dialup. Modem shotgunning - maybe they can get 2 modems and connect to their ISP to get double the speed: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,1406254;root=dialup;mode=flat Some ISP's used to off it - i.e. Earthlink (no endorsement intended) and may still do so
Interesting, since all the telecoms ansd ISPs are trying to justify high prices for shitty service as necessary to re-invest.
Look for a local wireless 802.11 provider. We're in the same boat as my father has a house on Lake Erie, and my sister lives there year round with her husband (both on the lake in a rural area). The local cable company ran cable to a bridge across a marina c. 2m away and had no plans to expand coverage. Distance to the CO, etc. for DSL was also not in the offing, however an enterprising local (that my brother-in-law slightly knew, apparently) started a wireless ISP in the area and is now covering all of the houses and farms that would otherwise have been stuck with dialup.
The wireless antenna is very small, but would likely have to be mounted fairly high up as you would need a direct line of site to the transmitting tower that the ISP presumably has or will setup. As a matter of fact the first that I read about using 802.11 wireless networking was in applications in Alaska for more remote communities and longer hauls over rough terrain many years ago.
It won't be as cheap as dialup, but I really doubt that it matters.
If you have the money, a T-1 is *always* an option. Not cheap (I pay almost $700 USD a month for mine), but plenty fast. I'm running a business from my house, and tried all the other options. Satellite is great for email and web browsing, but the latency kills a lot of VPN sessions and can be difficult if you need to access web clients with a lot of little widgets and individual image files (hey, the customers pick 'em, not me).
My Mom lives in Foulmouth, and my Sister lives in Mashpea - both of which have cable internet. I know my business wireless internet card (from Verizon) works up there .. There is internet and cable all over the place in both P-town and the Vinyard .. so if its just a matter of coverage in your area due to bad equipment, you can always fork over the $60 a month for a wireless broadband card.
.. chances are it will have wireless internet now adays.
Otherwise, what about ISDN ? or possibly a wireless directional antenna ? (a can) if there is anything tourist related near them
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Depending upon where they are, they likely
have EVDO speed access to Verizon's cell network. They might want to consider going the cell modem/cellular broadband route. It is substantially
faster than dialup.
yankees move somewhere to get away from it all. Then when they get there they are pissed because they got away from it all. Dumbasses!
The only thing most people living on the Cape and islands care about are eyesores. Just ask the Cape Wind people. Massive public support within the state, multiple environmental impact statements that conclude that nothing dire is going to happen as a result, and it's derailed for years because a bunch of very rich and very politically connected people think it'll look ugly.
I worked for a energy (natural gas) company, and we used these quite alot at remote sites in LA. where there was not even dial up. Of course when you go to SSL or use a VPN connection, it will slow down due to the type of compression used, but it works very well nearly anywhere. http://www.techonweb.com/products/productdetail.aspx?id=D02150&src=FG
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
Spring has unlimited broadband anywhere you can get the EVDO signal. This is probably your best and cheapest bet. As far as dishes go I recommend checking out Wild Blue (www.mybluedish.com). The dishes are smaller and much less ugly. They also have slightly higher bandwidth caps than HughesNet.
Some people just need to suck on the muzzle of a gun.
There is a slim chance that these are not rich folks - back in the 60s there were a lot of poor artists and fishermen with shacks on the cape, mostly gone now of course.
Simplest thing is just to use a 3G mobile account. Here in the UK T-Mobile do a £5 a month deal for up to 2Gb of data transfer, and although you can buy a USB 3G modem if you have a smartphone with bluetooth then it's fairly simple to configure a PC with a bluetooth dongle to talk to the phone and hence onwards by 3G and save yourself that cost - hence getting household broadband in with your mobile package.
of course 2Gb isn't a lot for any self respecting geek as a main connection, but it's more than adequate for casual web surfing and email as your parents seem to require.
The other alternative is satellite of course. I live fairly remotly in the Scottish Highlands and before we got ADSL at our (very small) local exchange I used to run a 512Mb sat connection at £100 a month and share it with the immediate three neighbours. We used cable rather than wireless and buried a small network between our houses. Sat broadband has limitations, but at £25 a month with a 4:1 contention ratio it worked out pretty ok.
We now do have ADSL broadband, and excellent quality too. Despite living 3.5 miles from the local exchange the line quality here is excellent (probably because lines do have to run a long way) and the contention is very low (~120 ppl on the exchange) so is see 6Mb adsl routinely, topping out at 6.8 on a good day, which is much better than UK average - so when they do eventualy get on the grid it may be better than your connection!
"DIAL UP IS NOT THE END OF THE WORLD." - by Shivetya (243324) on Monday May 12, @05:46AM (#23375698) Homepage For websurfing @ least (HTML data only)? I'll agree... & here is why/how I say that (been there myself):
Use of a custom HOSTS file that blocks out adbanners (which even those have been shown to harbor bad javascripts for exploits more than a few times the past few years now), IS the ticket for faster (and, more secure) websurfing on dialup, especially (& broadband also)!
(I used to have dialup for a brief period in 2002 to save money (& yes, to experiment with it again also via registry hack settings for Tcp/IP in Windows as well), this worked for me @ that time (back on broadband again since 2003 or so though)).
For HTML pages, in addition to the compression that happens ISP side many times? It helps... downloading binary data however, is STILL slow (doesn't compress as well), like for program updates/downloads, etc.
APK
P.S.=> Put it this way: For myself @ least, when I used dialup (again, after years of doing broadband via cablemodems or DSL) it made dialup websurfing bearable @ least & gave me an "HBO style/no commercials" F A S T E R & S A F E R internet experience, period/hands-down, no doubt about it!
(Now - webmasters & certainly advertisers may not like it, but, I am the one paying for my linetime, & I don't want it eaten up by folks trying to get me to buy stuff I don't need (ala Tyler Durden in the film "FightClub"), & all the while tearing up my bandwidth calling out to their adbanner servers, which MAY be infecting me with bogus javascript code, no less!)
Speaking of which:
Also, by turning off Java/JavaScript/ActiveX/ActiveScripting on sites that do NOT "absolutely need it" (ones that do are usually along the lines of banking &/or shopping websites online, for data access & tracking (practical, in THAT case, absolutely & needed) in combination w/ cookies usage)?
You'll save CPU cycles, disk & memory I/O, & just go F A S T E R + more securely, simply by doing that as well... apk
In Finland you can get wireless internet using Flash-OFDM on 450 MHz band that was used with the first NMT cell phones. Speeds and latencies are supposed to be a lot better than with 3G and prices are relatively cheap: 1 Mbit/s for 40 euros.
I used to have by satellite dish on the side of the shed at the bottom of the yard. Almost invisible.
As long as it has a clear line of sight to the satellite you are fine.
Ask your ISP for the lat and long, or just ask them for the bearing and azimuth from your location.
Go into the yard with a compass and protractor.
http://www.ossmann.com/protractor/
There is no reason to use a text based email client since all graphical ones are fine with Dial-up. Email is just text, even the ones that contain html. Thunderbird and Outlook allow you to not display graphics by default. Surfing the web is fine on dial-up too. While broadband is faster, and web designers are loading sites with junk, a 100k home page would still load in reasonable time. Furthermore, to speed up web surfing, install Mozilla prefbar so they can turn off images and flash with radio boxes, and turn them back on as desired.
Mount the dish at ground level and put a fake rock over it. This has been a very common solution, and the rock-like covers are available from several sources for a few hundred dollars.
Dude, you live in a free market economy. Deal with it. No one can be bothered to deploy DSLAMs or upgrade the copper ? Tough luck. Meanwhile, back in Europe...
EVDO or GPRS card for the computer. EVDO will get around 300kbps -- more than enough for web and webmail.
You can also hide the satellite dish: http://www.dish-rock.com/newrock.htm
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
If they have a good cell region you might want to look at verizon or sprint network cards. They also have wireless routers that accept these cards as their gateway connections. Install wireless router (if needed) add sprint card and bam you have a small wireless network that can support up to 5 people for basic web / email internet.
love the taste, hate the texture
Some of the most expensive real estate in the country. Makes the Bay Area look cheap.
*Inside* the National Seashore? That's MY land. Shame on them for "owning" it.
As I have family (That I stay with fairly regularly) who also cannot get broadband I have just invested in a 3G Broadband Modem from Skodafone. It's actually quite impressive as long as you have a reasonable signal (Downloaded a gig in 3 hours). However if it has to step down to GPRS then you are f****d. HTH Mod me down if you want I'm not going to hang around to find out.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Your silver spoon should make a great antenna.
Oh, these poor wretched creatures. Having to resort to dialup services in their summer home on the Cape Cod National Seashore. How could anyone be expected to live in such inhuman conditions? Is there no justice in this world? I feel so sorry for these unfortunate people. Fortunately, there's something we can do to help. Send your donations to Rich Bastards Without Internet. RBWI will use your funds to bring web services to those unfortunate souls spending their summers in remote locations, away from the common population. With your help, we can place hope back in the lives of rich bastards everywhere.
I use these for commuting, and even the Edge cards are faster than dialup (although there is a longer lag time, the actual speeds seem to be faster). We just upgraded to a 3G card through AT&T, and it is noticibly faster. It they have a desktop rather than a laptop, most of the major cellular providers do offer USB devices as well.
I will point out that you are looking at spending around $50-$60 a month for unlimited access for speeds that hover around 200k-300k a second. Its fine for using HTML e-mail, and most websites. Even using VPN, having Outlook sync up with my RSS Feeds, Exchange Server, and GMail account, only takes about 45 seconds over 3G (I have a LOT of RSS Feeds), and that is only when you first launch the program, of course once launched, it constantly checks mail, so its not that big of an issue.
I should point out that VPN over a cellular modem is flaky at best, and practically useless if you are moving in a vehicle.
Dial up is sufficient for most things on the internet if you have one vital thing - patience. I was on dial-up till 6 months back, and did everything, from downloading operating systems (freebsd,linux,to quote a few) to p2p file sharing on direct connect (managed a statistic of 60 GB download) and yes you need the right tools, most of the cases wget and bash will do... and though I am on DSL now I still don't pay for bandwidth (its useless for me beyond a certain amount) so I pay only for 128 kbps and instead opt for no caps on the data...
"It looks like my parents may end up stuck having to use dialup to access the Internet from their cottage inside the Cape Cod National Seashore."
My heart bleeds.
"Neither Comcast nor Verizon want to bother upgrading the hardware required to get them faster service."
Surprising, since I'm sure that Comcast and Verizon execs as well as major stockholders are among their neighbors.
"They could put a satellite dish on their roof, but it's a 300-year-old house and they feel a dish would be as prohibitively ugly as running dedicated lines would be prohibitively expensive."
Uh-huh. Guess what: they didn't have cable television, central air, electricity, gas or probably even running water 300 years ago either (let alone the telephone lines used for dial-up). But I'm going to guess that since you're asking about internet access, you've already got all these modern amenities duck taped into a structure that wasn't built to accept it. I'd bet the precious aesthetics were lost about the time that flush toilets were installed.
"I've suggested they get familiar with a text-only email client"
I'd suggest their pretentious rich asses get used to doing without for a while if they insist on deliberately spending their summers away from civilization.
"I also suggested they talk with their senators and local political reps."
i. e. their next door neighbors...
"Are there other ways they can increase the functionality despite the pitiful bandwidth?"
Yeah, get over yourselves. After having all the latest Nineteenth and Twentieth Century amenities stapled onto the outside and inside of your "summer cottage," a one-meter satellite dish isn't going to be the end of the world. It won't be as bad as, say, the windmills your parents refuse to allow to be built anywhere near their precious cottage for fear of ruining the view.
"Any other good ideas? Any success stories you can share where people have finally got the bandwidth they crave?"
Crave bandwidth? Summer in a modern condominium instead.
Get a mobile broadband card from Sprint, AT&T or Verizon, then get the appropriate linksys wireless router designed to interface with them (they make them specifically for Verizon, AT&T and Sprint cards). I recommended this to a co-worker of mine that lives in the f'n sticks, and it works really well. Not screaming fast, but a shit load better than dial up.
Youtube-dl, using the -s option will give you a video URL you can download with wget.
http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/
Also usefule on non x86 Linux without Flash itself, but with the ability to play flv.
I have satellite television, and the dish is certainly ugly. However, mine is mounted on a metal posts set into the ground behind a large flowering shrub. This keeps it hidden from the street view, and it still function just fine. They could do something similar.
If the main problem is access time to emails, and if most of the browsing they are doing is on a limited amount of website, a local mail server and a good proxy will help a lot. My university department was connected to the main network with two 36kbauds modems 10-12 years ago. With some pretty aggressive caching and some QoS on the mail delivery, the setup was pretty OK.
...
Also gives you another solution: the good old modem farm
you don't have to put a satellite dish on the roof; you can put it on a pole in an inconspicuous part of your yard. I live in a 200 year old cottage in a national forest and have done just that...
Dude, here on Brazil, a lot people have the same problem.
The one way to access the Internet is by Dial Up
OMG, me too! Finally, it seems like I am not alone at all. Are you also stuck with no graphics card because you can't get a decent one for AGP and would have to buy a new motherboard? Do you also only have 40GB of hard disk space? Do the cool kids at school laugh at you? Will you eventually take revenge on them all, some day? I knew it! Join me, brother!
Hi,
I had a similar problem @ my parents. To make the analog modem experience less painfull I installed OpenSuse Linux, and turned off updates. This is not very secure, I know, but the setup of the box was quite secure, and btw, who got the time to root a box on a 64k line? I also brought all software needed on a DVD. I installed Opera, and maximized its cache size. An other option would be to install an internet cache proxy. I'm sure with a little more searching you will find more tricks to get the most out of the 64kbs line.
Anyway, at least, here in Norway, we got a provider that sell a low frequency radio
internet. It works quite nice, and I get about 750/750kbs from where I live
in the forrest. http://www.nmt.net/Business-674.aspx
"The CDMA2000 technology employed at the 450Mhz band, called CDMA450, offers the best from two worlds, all of the features from a leading 3G technology and the coverage advantage of low radio frequencies. The CDMA2000 technology is at present the largest 3G technology in the world with over 375 million subscribers securing product development, economies of scale and continued technology evolution. The physical properties of low radio frequencies enable NMT to cover a large geographical area at a significantly lower capex and opex compared to UMTS (WCDMA)."
Good luck! Eventually we'll all have 100mbs!
The lack of broadband service by the major media conglomerates is a good thing. Get them to work with locals to install their own fibre backbone, install a wireless infrastructure and bid adieu to the verizons of the world.
Salut,
Jacques
If you use a wireless transmitter, like something from Tranzeo, and a yagi antennae, you can get up to 25 miles at high speed (1.5-3.5Mbps up to 54Mbps). This doesn't have to be set up on the house, you can put it on a 25' to 40' tower. Check out their website and see if they have a solution.
Tell them they can write all their pr0n on DVDs before leaving, so there will be no need for a fancy Internet connection once they reach the spot.
Why make up an entire cover story when the solution is so simple?
Seriously go with Alltel, Sprint, or Verizon. They all have networks that are faster than 3G depending on where you are (CDMA rocks). In the right cities I can pull 2meg from my Treo on Sprint's network.
Use your Cell phone's digital services...
Use a PCMCIA card w/Linksys WRT54G3G wireless router .
Faster than many of the alternatives raised, flexible enough to bring home when they aren't at the cottage.
Get a T1 to start, and open up a small neighborhood ISP. Then expand to a T3 if you get the cash flow. If you can't make a business case for it, neither can the telcos.
If it is a long ways to any broadband, ie. out of range of a Wifi
bridge via yagi antennas you might try having the neighbors
setup a locustworld setup and you can share multiple dial ups
via MESH topology Wifi.
http://www.locustworld.com/
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Granted I haven't been on the Cape for maybe 4 years now, but when I was living in Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod (great place to pick up college girls or Lithuanian girls working for the summer... since most of the men in town are gay) I had DSL for years. This article confuses me because am I to understand that DSL is NOT offered on the cape anymore?
My boss (the owner of the T-Shirt shop I worked for) got his internet via a cable modem... I can't remember if it was Cox or Comcast or whatnot... so I know that cable internet was ALSO available on Cape Cod. Is this also something that is no longer offered out there?
Sounds like it is not just about these companies refusing to upgrade their hardware. Sounds like they have removed services that were there, altogether.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
Well, assuming they get a reasonable cell phone signal there, why not use something like Verizon or Sprint wireless broadband? I get almost DSL speeds from Sprint using a USB cell modem that can go on my desktop system or laptop when I travel. Basically, it works wherever there is cell phone coverage.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Looking at Verizon's coverage maps, EVDO is available now across virtually the entire Cape (including pretty much the whole Seashore) and most of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket as well. Until this year I've always planned my annual Vineyard trip to only rent places where there's Internet access available - this year I can just use my EVDO card, which is a big plus.
They only got EVDO on the islands last fall.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Text-only email client? Seriously? Email is practically the original low-bandwidth application. You're not going to be saving any bytes by displaying it on a terminal instead of downloading it locally.
Moreover, I imagine your parents are not technically inclined and would be more comfortable with a GUI application than with learning the ins and out of putty and pine.
They generally won't even notice the speed, as they can leave it on and have the messages already downloaded and ready for them. Whereas they will notice the pokey ping times that modems tend to have (especially on old phone lines) when using a text client over ssh.
I've nothing against text email clients - I use mutt quite frequently - but it just doesn't make sense to recommend it over a normal client in this situation.
A dedicated line can be expensive, but if your parents have the problem, then so do their neighbors. Any chance of setting up a co-op mini-WISP? Antennas for 802.11g are a lot easier to hide.
Personally I appreciate the anachronistic look of old construction with a dish on top, but that's just me. :-)
Part of the difficulty is that websites today, are being built substantially larger than they used to be. People used to try to make websites that were only 30K big. Many websites are easily over 200K. Not much you can do to speed that up with dialup.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Come on.. dial-up sucks, but it's not as bad as you make it out to be. For most email chores (html included) things will be just fine unless you have one of those stupid relatives that forward you all the jokes with jpeg attachments they can find.. and if those relatives don't get the hint when you tell them not to send you that crap, well then you just block em... I have one such relative, and communication by email with her was pointless because it was 99.9 percent crap.. I don't need crap, I can find my own crap.. so she's filtered out, and has to communicate by phone.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Options range from bushes, to fake rocks, to a small 3'x3' wooden enclosure.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Oh dear, those horrible satellite dishes are just so last year, don't you think Buffy? For sure, Richard. I mean what would the neighbors think? A satellite dish on our 300 year old cottage. Psshaw!
EVDO from Sprint or VZW with an external YAGI antenna. Leave it inside and point it out the window...
Back when I was using dialup I tested a default install of Windows and a default install of SuSe on my ISP connection. I was surprised to find that on average my Linux box loading up MSN.com beat out my Windows box. I tested Windows using IE, Netscape, and at the time the upstart Mozilla. On Linux, I used Konquerer and Mozilla, Konquerer had the fastest load times of all browsers I tested.
With the point n click ease of Linux these days, if all they do is send email and chat over the web, this may be the way to go. With the ease of running dual boot as well they could keep Windows just for those things, they feel they can't deal without.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
My parents were in the same boat, so they got a plan from Sprint for something like $100/month. Works great for them, fast and they take it with them while traveling.
I hate ethics, I avoid them on principle.
Instead of suggesting ways to get more, I suggest making the most of what you have.
Give them bookmarks for mobile sites that force feed fewer graphics.
twp.com
m.ask.com
http://mobile.boston.com/
etc.
Assuming you could get someone like WildBlue to provision it & you had the necessary (Cisco?) hardware to actually DO the deep packet inspection and convoluted routing, try THIS on for size:
* one-way (downlink-only) satellite
* EV-DO, for uplink AND for latency-sensitive downlink
Here's how such a system might handle a browser request:
* User navigates to a web URL somewhere
* DNS lookup is routed entirely via EV-DO. It's not a lot of data, but delays at this point are going to really, really hurt badly.
* http request is made for what appears to be html, css, xml, javascript, or something else that's text-based. It's sent out via EV-DO, and routed so the return comes via EV-DO as well.
* The browser receives the page, parses it, and discovers it needs 47 images. The http requests for the 47 image files go out via EV-DO, but are routed so that the response comes via satellite. The requests are parallelized as massively as possible to get the requests in the distant web server's response pipeline as quickly as possible. There's a delay of about 2-3 seconds from the moment the browser makes the initial request, but once the data starts to arrive, the page completes loading almost instantly.
Things like email would use EV-DO both ways for SMTP, but might use EV-DO up and satellite down for POP3 and/or IMAP4 (particularly if multiple incoming emails can be downloaded in parallel). Games would use EV-DO both ways, as would things like VNC and RDP.
Of course, at that point, it would probably be cheaper and faster to just get a T1 & use directional Wi-Fi antennas to split the monthly cost and share it with a neighbor or two...
Riiiight...
Their POTS support up to 28.8K now.
I know it's the winmodem issue with proprietary chipsets with typically windows only drivers.
But what about using something similar like ndiswrapper to actually use the windows drivers? Or, I can't imagine there are that many new modems/chipsets, it's not like dialup modems are a booming industry.
After this many years I would think some would be reverse engineered or something? But from what I've read it's still choose from the 3 actual hardware modems or get a external modem.
I actually have a friend on dialup (which for him, he's happy with given the price), I was going to setup him up with linux but realized he had a dialup modem and decided it wouldn't workout.
Old school broadband. Latency still sucks, but you can't have everything.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Check EVDO forums here
http://www.evdoforums.com/
and check out this Linksys Wireless router that allows you to chare your cell tower connection with other PC's on your network here:
http://www.evdoinfo.com/content/view/553/40/
Why not WiMAX, It may be your best bet. Or the Intel one.
If you live in the middle of nowhere, you obviously want to move away from people, otherwise you'd live in a city. Why should companies spend millions on a few individuals, when they can provide more efficiency in cities where population density is higher. If you want to live away from people do not expect to have same communications even in the 21st century. If they want decent access, they should move. If they don't want to move, it's their choice. Do not blame companies that don't want to spend money on something unprofitable.
-Palal
I use a sprint worldconnect blackberry 8830 bluetooth-tethered to my ubuntu laptop and it works great. You can use the USB tether as well, although it only works w/ windows afaik. it's speedier than dial-up that's for sure. good luck and guys/gals who are getting up in arms about this thread, chill the f*ck out, it's only monday. forums like this are for asking and learning, not for acting like a spoiled little kid.
If they're willing to deal with the cost of a satellite dish in the first place, there's no reason it has to be mounted on the house. It could be mounted on a tree or a pole or a small out-building or something like that so as not to bother the integrity of the house.
Several of the major cell carriers which cover the Cape Cod area offer high speed data PCMCIA cards. If they don't have PCMCIA, they could get a router that will accept the card and output wifi, for a few hundred bucks.
Where abouts are thay located? Orleans? Turo?
EVDO w/an external antenna works out there. I actually perfer the Cape Cod seashore to have no access because that's where I go for vacation and I don't want work to be able to reach me.
Your parents can split the cost of a dedicated line with neighbors. A dedicated line to a home in the middle and you share the signal with wifi.
Man you are very fortunate to stay in such a beautiful place during the summer. I'm a computer scientist and spent all my childhood summers on the Cape. The summer is only two months in the Northeast, so it may not be worth putting up a satellite dish (one of the only available options for you). I suggest taking advantage of the summer and if your bored, read some technical books. Maybe try some development on your workstation. Maybe digital amateur radio (D-Star) is interesting to you and the Cape is a great location to try it. Go sailing. In a few years when you start working full time, you will wish you did this. If you really need the bandwidth, I suspect there are coffee shops in the area that offer it. You can bring your laptop.
My wife and I are fortunate enough to have a close (and quite affluent) friend with a beachside house in Mexico. It's only a couple of in the car to get there, so we go frequently.
On vacation, I have little use for the Internet, although admittedly I do check my email several times a day. I'm self-employed, so when I'm out of town, there's no one answering the phone.
It used to be that we had to visit the town's only cybercafe (2 PII 200 boxes running Win98) to get online on a shared (I think) 14.4 connection. Not too bad for checking emails, weather forecasts and baseball scores.
The guy who owns the house is increasingly spending more time down there, so he paid to run a cable out to the property to get a modest broadband connection. It cost him about $15,000 to do. He will, however, likely make that back in the first few months he is able to fully telecommute from the beach palace.
Although it's nice having a US telephone number in Mexico via VOIP, and a pretty reliable in-home method of getting to my email, having the connection in some ways sucks.
I'm one of those guilty people who will work on vacation (after all, it's a one-man op), and I'll find myself reading the news online in the house's office rather than sitting on the beach with the paper and a michelada.
The point of this diatribe is that for people needing to get the news, email and weather, dialup is more than sufficient.
In fact, for running a non-IT business remotely, dialup should also suffice.
I'm a professional photographer, and I frequently file photos for print distribution over slow-ass dialup when I'm on the road. Sizing the photos to 10 inches on the long axis @ 200ppi and a quality of '9 or 10 out of 12' yields a 600kb-900kb photo that can be run sufficiently well in any newspaper and even some magazines.
My advice: Sack up and pay for the more expensive satellite or buried line connection, or sack up and deal with not being able to watch crappy YouTube videos while on summer holiday.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
I would be careful with satellite. I'm just now canceling my Hughesnet account after 3 years because of unacceptable speeds which started cropping up in early '08. I'm on the ProPlus plan for $90.00 per month and supposed to get speeds up 1500down and 300 up. Because they have oversold their pipe, Hughesnet is only getting me 100down/50 up (and worse) during peak hours. I'm not the only one, either. On the dslreport.com site, many others are venting their frustration about a sudden drop in performance.
After 2 months of horrible service (not to mention a completely useless tech support staff out of India), I've purchased a T-1 for home. Pricey yes, but at least I know what I'm getting...and it'll work when it's snowing/raining out.
Why not make the most of your dial up. Your options are limited but you can:
1) Use Firefox and enable pipeling.
2) Use Adblock to block all ads and most images. Adblock will prevent images from download. Text downloads on pages will be pretty quick.
3) No script will block ads that are JS based.
4) Use adblock or noscript to block flash. There are some other extensions that cater to flash usage.
Make the most of dial up.
PS: I am on broadband and for a period I was out of luck for high speed. So, I made the most of dial up.
PSS: Do a google search for Firefox Performance Tweaks.
Regards,
Anon Coward.
And why did the company wire to the curb? Because they were required to by law. I'd love to have the local ISP "wire to the curb" and I'll take it the final 1000 feet. But that's never going to happen. If the same laws that apply to telecom were in effect with electrification, then half the rural houses would now be condemned as unlivable.
Remember that not everyone chose to live in a place with no internet. We lived in a house with all services, then 20 years later, it's market value dropped to zero since the current popular solution to "no internet" is "move out." And we're supposed to be happy, and not seek redress, now that we've been essentially forced from our homes like refugees with no hope of recouping costs as the market value is now hovering around 0.
Profit is evil. Verizon has fiber running some three hundred feet from our small community to go feed two other small (bigger than us) communities. They know that they will not make enough money back if they put DSL in our small community, so they don't. Oh, also WildBlue == evil because they have a fair usage policy (and because satellite has such awful ping times).
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
Now it is without usable internet. But that's my fault because in the seventies, I should have guessed that there would be such a thing as internet, then I should have divined there would be no service to my area. Of course, it's so obvious! What was I thinking?
why not put the satellite on a 4x4 or 6x6 and run a cable to the house. I understand of not putting marks in a beautiful house that old.
What if you didn't move there? What if you already lived there with all the regular services before the internet was invented?
Now, the solution that says "just move" is actually forcing people out of their long-time homes. And, since any network increases in value as more people are on it, you're admitting you've given up on adding value to the internet. Sounds a lot like "I'm on the network, you can stop building now."
I am sure that there are other services, but I haven't used dialup for years. I have been using fastmail since I had dialup.
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
One thing i like with DSL is the added security (yes i know it's not perfect) of router NAT. when you have an OS that you know needs securing, like WinXP, spending all day downloading patches over a modem just leaves you vulnerable. If someone made a matchbook sized computer with an RJ11 on one side, an RJ45 on the other, and a very simple distro that knew how to do dialup in the middle, i'd recommend and buy for anyone i know who still used dialup.
Thank being said, anyone have any tips for security?
I get all updates (slowly) and even have Vista SP1 installed now. One hint, you must eliminate all desktop gadgets (which are unconscionable bandwidth pigs).
You can connect to a remote computer and use the remote computer to do all the surfing. I think that the majority of the time on the dialup or satellite would be the lookups if you could keep the connection open to another computer that would simplify all the dialups end I would think. Use something like logmein its for free for standard usage.
Took my parents years to get off dial-up and move to Comcast. But I really want Verizon, but those damn idiots told me it will be aviable in my city within 6 months... 3 YEARS AGO! Every time I called they said the same thing, until I figured out that the reason is because our city doesn't have fiber optic cabling and they are to damn cheap to fix it. So we got tired of waiting and got Comcast, but then the whole censorship of BitTorrent started! FiOS is STILL not avaiable in our area yet!
BTW Cape Cod isn't the only area in MA that has no Internet, about a year ago Comcast refused to renew their license with Nantucket (an island off of the cost of MA), so guess what? NO Internet, phone, or cable for the entire island!
And you've been trolled! I can't get federal funding for broadband at my little cottage in Cape Cod??!?
When I built a cabin in the woods in the seventies, we had phone (which was difficult). Being stupider than you, we assumed this meant we had modern communications. But you already divined the invention of the internet! Wow, with that kind of foresight, you must have billions in your stock portfolio. Congratulations!
Oh, you mean things have changed and now we "should move." I bet I can guess your solution to starvation in Africa. After all, there's plenty of food in Kansas.
Find some way to mount the satellite dish next door and use a point-to-point WiFi link. WiFi range can be greatly increased with a homebrew tin can antenna or Cantenna.
You might even offer to split broadband costs with whoever hosts the dish. If you have a yard, then put it in a shed out back.
That's a fair point. Where I live (Maryland) the southern part of the state used to be pretty rural and out of the way. Now a lot of people are moving down there and commuting to DC. Problem is that broadband hasn't followed yet, so people (new and old) are either dealing with dialup or no internet access at all or they're suckin' it up and getting dishes. It makes absolutely no sense to move for more attractive internet access, you know? I mean, the internet's cool and all, but...
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
on the sea shore? Those have always fascinated me.
If your parents don't want to look at it, that is one thing. But if your neighbors don't want to look at it (planning ordinances) that is just too darn bad. FCC says devices used to receive TV signal can not be restricted.
I ended up placing the dish well away from the main house (with a nice fence around it, you can't even see it from outside the property), and using a wireless repeater to get a decent signal at the house.
Or do what I did for several years, which is accept that living in some nice but somewhat remote/restricted, has some downsides, 56k dialup being one of them.
NO DIAL UP - Hide the Dish. There are many solutions to hide the Dish so that it will not impact the look of your parents place.
Here is one - http://www.dish-rock.com/
Hide it in a tree and open the limbs to expose the sky.
Hire an artist to paint the dish to match the background it's on.
I've heard of putting them in skylights as well.
There has to be a way to make it look aesthetically pleasing and avoid dial up.
Get cellular broadband. Sprint, Verizon, etc all offer some solution. It is actually pretty sweet. Not broadband (or even DSL) fast, but plenty fast enough, and better than dial up or ISDN. You can get a USB modem (desktop) or a PCMCIAA modem (laptop). My company provides us with a Verizon card for when we are on the road, and I encountered some speed issues up in the Saratogoa Springs area (northern NY). Otherwise, it rarely dips below the 300 range.
;)
There is no costly destruction of rooftops nor construction of sheds with magical rooftops.
And, when they want to stroll down to the beach, just pick up the laptop and go.
Simple, inexpensive, and portable solution.
p.s. I hate the freakin cape, but I'll help you with your problem before dissin' it
I live in a broadband no-man's land but have multiple computers, and here's my solution. Warning: my primary machine is an Ubuntu box and I'm going to go light on details because I'm at work and don't have the details memorized.
First of all, I have my wireless router set up in "bridge" mode and let my main Ubuntu box handle DHCP and DNS requests. dhcpd and dnsmasq to the rescue. I had issues using dnsmasq's built-in dhcp server so I use them separately. Plus I use Firestarter for convenience's sake and Firestarter handles setting up dhcp just fine.
I have dnsmasq set up to hit OpenDNS's server rather than Earthlink's. Much faster, and way faster if the name is already cached.
Since most the internet traffic in the house is Web-based (even mail; I use gMail and my wife used Yahoo! Mail) I have squid set up to be a caching proxy.
You'd be surprised what a huge difference it's made. I mean, most the time you're visiting the same websites anyway, and when you do from multiple computers and multiple logins, it just makes sense to use a caching proxy.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
ATT and maybe some other companies offer tethering for cell phones. If they get the tethering service, they can connect through their cell phone as long as it is within blutooth range.
Use Opera Mini, meant to use on phones, but should be even more pleasant on an actual computer.
The key here is that remote proxies digest the content for you first, so that way you're reducing your actual consumption to the essentials.
In Costa Rica you see these 2-3m+ size dishes at the end of gardens. They are mostly for TV, but the point is the location. People do not put them on the roof, where winds and maintenance both can become a problem. They just put them on a pole at the end of the garden, so they do not really bother the house in any way.
....
Just an idea..... I assume a cottage has some land next to it, so it might actually work
On the text based email: mutt is OK Pine is king !
You can increase the functionality (but of course not the speed) by using a WiFlyer or similar so that you at least have wireless access for laptops even if the actual connection is by POTS.
:-)
Learning to use Elm/Pine, Lynx, etc is one way round it. Here (Ireland) the remote islands and other inaccessible places got special govmnt money for broadband access, so a former colleague who lives in retirement on Sherkin Island had for a while better broadband than I did in the burbs or a major city. My subdivision's POTS cable won't handle broadband, so I'm using a 6Mb/s line-of-sight radio connection from a local ISP. If someone plants a tree on the near-intervening hilltop, I'm sunk
Fer heaven's sake !
There are plenty of folks using dial-up and still being able to do email, surf the net, all that good stuff !
Think outside the box. Close the Windows and keep the bugs out. Windows slows everything down.
Run DOS !!!
http://www.cisnet.com/glennmcc/Arachne, fully graphical browser for DOS does internet and email. There are other browsers that will do SSL and javascript. MPlayer has been ported to DOS.
There is a widespread base of folks still developing stuff to run in DOS.
Hell, my business runs in DOS. I also run Linux, and even a slim Linux, with gui and all, will run wonderfully well using dial-up.
large metal trashcan, somewhere inconspicuous with a 4X4 centered inside and filled with sand or cement Anchor the dish to the post with U-bolts, at 400 lbs it should damp out most vibration in a (relatively) sheltered spot.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Really, it's not that bad. I have it at home. The only things it actually prevents me from doing are a) large downloads/torrents and b) most (although not all) online gaming. Oh, and youtube doesn't work too well either.
But other than that? Really, it works just fine. And I don't limit myself, at all.
There are a few things that come to mind. Not all of them may necessarily have any benefit.
1) Bond two or more dialup modems. Find an ISP that supports MLPPP for dialup modems. Typically requires a second phone line, which is not usually super expensive.
2) Stick to only hardware modems (not WinModems). While this may not be true today, last time I was using dialup, winmodems tended to add 50-100ms of extra latency.
3) Use a local caching proxy. This provides a greater benefit when there are more than one computers being used, although I doubt that's the case here. Still, this is better than a browser cache, which might expire older data that is still perfectly valid (ex: slashdot's logo, if you visit once a month; it doesn't change very often).
4) Use a remote "accelerator" proxy. I can't point you to any specific examples. Such things typically compress text (not sure if that's more efficient than dialup's hardware compression), recompress images (gif->png, jpeg with lower quality), and reduce the impact of multiple round-trips (if you choose one that is close to your ISP).
If you combine all these steps, you'll have an actual 112kbit connection that feels more like a 256kbit connection when surfing the web. It's still not quite fast enough for stuff like YouTube, though. You'll need at least four bonded lines to do that.
Call your Congress people for WHAT? What has this country turned into.
We have the same issue where I am moving (Lack of Cable networking due to lack of people living there, and verizon refuses to update its lines for DSL) We posted a Satellite for TV in the back yard in 2002 and for us the cost of satellite internet (and the quality of the signal for me) isnt an option. However a local company that handles Motorola Radio Communications has released a new technology that uses line of sight towers in the area to provide service at 1 MBPS for home or 1.5MBPS for buisness (that is both up and down stream traffic). that company is B2Xonline and is local to us in the SML area of Virginia but there may be a carrier in your area, or if all else fails try the Moblie Phone companies wireless cards
who are too f*cking cheap, too uppity for worrying the look of their house ruined by a satellite dish, and too stupid to just hide the dish in the 300-yo attic can kiss my a55. These are probably the same a55h0les that blocked the wind farm off of Nantucket sound because, oh no, it'd ruin their view. They deserve to live without the internet.
>>they feel a dish would be as prohibitively ugly as running dedicated lines would be prohibitively expensive
What kind of weird new-age snobbery is this?
They live in a 300 year old house and they ARE USING THE INTERNET??
Perhaps they should prohibitively be burnt at the stake!
Salem witches indeed! (yes I know they were not burned- but perhaps the practice should be resumed for dilantettes)
I live in a 150-yr-old log cabin in the woods. And I have a sat-dish outside, nailed to a 300-year-old maple. But it is discreet. And "outlaw", WoteverTF THAT means. But it is NOT two-way.
For that, alas, I am forced to use the dreaded "dial-up":
More info at The rural BELL-CANADA nightmare!
Anyone who installs one of these cheap two-way internet sat systems is truly desperate!
Further info - Don't buy Sat-Internet!
See the sentence on why you shouldn't
Wish you could sign the petition, but alas- ya gotta be in Quebec.
Anyhow- Sat service is good ONLY AS A LAST RESORT!
802.11 microwave, (oops that might involve an UGLY antenna!) or better yet, an underwater FiberOptic cable should be available to EVERYONE in a case like this!
Migod! - They are afraid to destroy their 300-year-old house? Helloo..! Are they still using candles? No 220 or 110 volt lines sacrileging their hoity-toity house?
Migod- what hypocrites!
.
- aqk
F U
Sprint Mobile Broadband card and a (rather expensive) WRT54GSG-ST Linksys router.
Real-world speeds around 1.1 megabit.
Somebody should put a Wireless Local Loop, it is actually thought out for this situations. If your parents and some of your neighbors unite, put a central reception place, they can share bandwidth. You will not get 10MB connection, but with a 256kB all time on connection is more than enough to surf the web, read email and use skype with video to chat with far away relatives.
Let's think about this. Your parents live in a 300 year old house and don't want to add an internet satellite dish because it would be "ugly". Does that house have electricity, plumbing, indoor toilettes, central air and/or heat? Was it modified over the last 300 years to accommodate the comfort of the owners? Yes? Tell your parents to get over the "300 year old house" and install a satellite dish - or shut up, rip out all the modern amenities, and learn to use the post office.
yeah
> Youtube-dl, using the -s option will give you a video URL you can download with wget.
Yes, but by the time you have the whole thing downloaded three hours later, they will have sent you links to six more of the blasted things.
You have to just learn to say no. They're never actually funny anyway.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I never got around to setting it up, but I often wondered if a caching proxy (like Squid) would help with web browsing, especially in situations where you often visit pages from the same site (like reading slashdot).
Anybody have any experience?
Maybe you'd have to do something to fool some of the timeouts (can that be done)--I mean the things that say a page (or image, or whatever) has expired?
Randy Kramer
If you'd bothered to read past "Cape Cod" and "ugly" you'd realize that it's the parents (homeowners) who think a dish is too ugly and the kids (visitors) who want the high speed internet. And nobody's demanding a free lunch, they're asking (as in, they don't think they already know everything like you do) if there are any alternatives.