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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?"
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!
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.
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.
Or someone who doesn't have broadband but *can* get it...
I used to live just out of range for ADSL, so i found someone down the street who could get it and offered to pay for it and give them use of it in exchange for wireless access to it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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 didn't realize that that was why I haven't seen AC posts by myself or others modded up. Thank you though; it drove me to the final step after lurking for, oh, three years.
There are plenty of working class folks on the cape,
many of whom can barely afford to live there. Many of
them grew up on the cape and can't afford to raise
their own family there. The next time a pipe bursts
and you have to call a plumber from over the canal,
you'll get the picture.
Some of my family members had to foot the bill for
the last thousand feet, but they were able to get
Comcrap to drag their signal a mile from the main
drag once they saw 8 houses that were interested.
I don't know if the OP could get enough families to
band together to interest Comcrap, but it's worth a
shot.
Are you sure about that? My boss has a Verizon Wireless EV-DO data card. He heads down to Myrtle Beach every few months (roughly 13 hours away) and works on his laptop pretty much the whole way. He's never complained about having issues with our VPN -- and he's using it to connect to a Citrix server, which is a pretty interactive application and would give him fits if the connection was flaky or spotty.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I find adblock to give the biggest boost in page-load speed compared to anything else. Just the mass reduction in server calls for 30 different webmetric and add servers and whatnot just for a single front page is insane. I spend more time waiting for servers to respond than for the page to download
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido