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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?"
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.
lol i doubt they have 3 / 3.5g wireless in many places in the us when they are still selling 2g iphones.
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 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.
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?
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
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.
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.
There is a solution no one has yet mentioned, ISDN. All POTS companies are required to offer it, and provide it at a decent rate. It won't compare to DSL or Cable, but it is a hell of a lot better than dial up. (Up to 128Kbps)
Rates for a Basic Rate Interface (BRI) should be similar to a standard phone connection, and with modern dial-up modem banks, just about any company that offers dial-up should offer ISDN access. From there, you would have to purchase an ISDN modem for your parents - I personally like 3Com's Office Connect ISDN LAN Modem for the features it provides. The upshot to this solution is that like DSL your parents can use the internet and receive phone calls simultaneously.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
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.
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.
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...
That was kind of my thought, too. The submitter described running dedicated lines as "prohibitively expensive." "Prohibitively expensive" for people that can afford a 300 yr old cottage on Cape Cod? Day-um.
Times changes. Bandwidth inflation is a serious problem. Web pages don't clock in at under 10k anymore.
"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.
>>>"This is like saying, "My grandpa earned $200 a month, and he got by ok!"
Alright. Well I'm using 56k right now in the year 2008, and I seem to be surviving just fine. (Read my sig now if you did not do it last time.) I also use S-VHS, audio cassette, listen to analog radio stations, and take notes with a pen and paper. They all work just fine for my needs.
I used to think I needed the best, but after seeing minidisc fail, digital cassette fail, laserdisc fail, and so on, I've grown a little more cynical about the "need" for the latest technology. I'm starting to suspect these new formats are pushed by corporations just so they can suck money out of our wallets. Pretty soon (circa 2020) they'll probably be announcing a new format that handles 10,000i video, and why we need to throw-out our old video collection.
BACK ON POINT: Dialup works just fine for surfing the net.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I saw your sig, but it wasn't germane to the point. The point was that your "back in my day, we did X, so you can get by with X, too" is logically fallacious.
To most people dial-up is just not acceptable. You seem to have made it a point to get by with decades-old technology--bully for you--but that isn't what most people want.
Seriously. I'm going to contact *My* senators and tell them that if they wast a second on catering to people with cottages on cape cod instead of the 5 billion other pressing problems in this country they can kiss their own ass goodbye.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I was looking for a whiny post asking the government for help, now you've preemptively shot down those who think it's the government's job to make sure everyone has high speed at some company's (and therefor their client's) expense.
All I can say about your post is f-ing A-MEN. You wanna live a nice, cozy, secluded lifestyle, you have to deal with the drawbacks. Boo f-ing hoo.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Personally, I like having the option to read it on whatever device I have available without invoking a browser or OOffice. I'm not against attachments as such, just against sending a bunch of extra crap that has nothing to do with the information the email is meant to convey to me so it "looks nice". It DOESN'T look nice, it wastes my time and resources and that is certainly NOT nice.
Image you want me to look at? Go ahead and attach it with a quick note in text telling me what it is. Document I need to read? Attach it with a text note. Quick note? If you put it in a Word document and attach it, I'll probably delete it unread.
If I wanted to read your email with a flowery wallpaper background, I'd have configured it in my mail client.
As a nice side benefit to the way I read email viruses, tracker bugs, and image spams don't work at all.
It's email, it's a medium, that's it, there's no higher philosophical value for sending spartan emails, it's just personal preference. (and one linked highly to geekness!) Image you want me to look at? Go ahead and attach it with a quick note in text telling me what it is. Document I need to read? Attach it with a text note. Quick note? If you put it in a Word document and attach it, I'll probably delete it unread. This is really a complete non-sequitur as email attachments have been around a long time--before html email i would imagine. As a nice side benefit to the way I read email viruses, tracker bugs, and image spams don't work at all. I thought pretty much all email readers now didn't load images from unknown senders or spam identified messages?
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
No, not really. Attaching a very large file to an email is an act of desperation, borne out of a lack of appropriate mechanisms to transport the information at hand. I think you might want to rethink your procedures.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.