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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.
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.
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
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
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.
$60 gets you 5 GB (over 1 month) from Verizon. service is not unlimited.
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
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!
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.
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.
Since I am a loser... I checked 90% of the cape cod national seashore is covered by sprint's "Sprint Mobile Broadband Network (avg 600 kbps - 1.4 mbps download, 350 kbps - 500 kbps upload)" with the highest quality signal.
And at 60 Dollars a month you have nothing to complain about.
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
...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.
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.
Oh, sorry, I thought we were on the Rachel Ray forums for a second... :-p
and my wallet is too small for all these $100 bills!
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...
They are also free to contact their political representatives. I don't think anyone needs to protect the poor old telecoms from the oppression of providing universal broadband coverage. The telecoms are doing just fine and benefit much more from government assistance then they spend in compliance with their few remaining service obligations.
That said, Cape Cod is already whipping up solutions. Put the folks in contact with Open Cape, and they will probably be able to find a wifi provider that has or plans to provide service to their area. http://www.opencape.com/
Worse case scenario, they can buy a laptop and access broadband in the city. You don't HAVE to have broadband at home. It's ok to sit in a cafe once in a while, and you could call them instead of emailing.
I wouldn't know myself, but I understand that there are still some people actually communicating in analog. Sounds primitive, I know. I understand ROTFL is actually considered rude, but apparently LOL is still ok in person.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
I was surprised it took this many replies for someone to suggest Verizon or Sprint. I love my EVDO sprint connection, it works great - I even tethered my laptop to my Treo on a recent trip and it worked great going down the road (I was a passenger). We even shared my Internet connection and had two laptops (via crossover cable) connected. Assuming the EVDO svc is available, I think that would be the ideal solution. It is also something they could use while traveling or away from a landline HS connection.
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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!
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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