What To Do When Broadband is Not An Option? 577
professorguy writes "I've been on the internet since 1984 (back before email addresses had @'s). But it looks like we're coming to the end of an era. From my home, I have 26.4 kbps dial-up access to the internet (you read that right). Since I am a hospital network administrator, it would be nice to do some stuff remotely when I am on 24/7 call. However, no cable or DSL comes anywhere near my house and because of the particular topography of my property (I'm on a heavily-forested, north-facing hillside), satellite is also not available. Heck, cell phones didn't even work here until January. So far, the technical people I've asked all have the same advice for reasonable connectivity: move. Move out of the house my wife and I built and lived in for 20 years. Has it really come to this? Am I doomed to be an internet refugee? Is this really my only option? Do you have an alternative solution for me?"
You mention cellphones (Score:2, Informative)
Do you mean GSM cellphones? You might be able to get GPRS in that case. (EDGE would be even better!) That should be between 60kbps and 80kbps, which is equivalent or faster than ISDN. It will be more expensive, but since it's for work, you might be able to offset the costs to your employer. Also, did you look into ISDN offerings? Back in the early nineties, we switched to ISDN and it was a different world from dial-up. Frankly... I know some people do not see ISDN as broadband because of the speed, but well, it would improve your connection a lot.
Finally, you say sattelite is not available... How is that possible? Sattelites are are accessible as long as you can position your dish correctly. I have no experience with it, but I don't think you're bound to your local ISPs for that.
For the "selfmade" option, you could perhaps ask a friend in vicinity that has broadband and make a point-to-point connection between his place and yours. That's of course assuming you have a friend in vicinity that has broadband....
Otherwise, yes, move.... But I wouldn't do it either.
cellular internet, or pay out the nose... (Score:4, Informative)
If you don't want to do that, you can pay out the nose and have a cable company or telco run out dedicated data lines. They may say they're not willing to do this, but if there's enough technophiles in your area, then you may be able to get them motivated to wire up your area for free, or you can get your neighbors to chip in.
Or perhaps your employer could run a private link to your house and let you use that. Depends on how much they like you and what their IT budget is.
Packet Radio (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cell? (Score:5, Informative)
I live in a fairly remote area, no cable or dsl. I used 26.4 for a decade and was finally able to get sat last xmas and now wireless is available and I'll probably switch to that - faster and cheaper.
But, if I was still stuck in dialupland I'd get a, 2, or 3 more phone lines and bond them together. The latency will be no better but the throuput is better.
I checked the (competant) ISPs around here support this. Yours might.
If you're in Canada look at a "4 wire unloaded circuit" - it's about half the price of a regular phone line. Bell might say they don't have it, but it's a tarrifed item. They do, and must sell it by CRTC regulations.
Put the satellite dish at the top of the hill (Score:2, Informative)
Re:You mention cellphones (Score:5, Informative)
ISDN, your friend from the past (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is finding decent ISDN equipment. I just threw out my old ISDN modem (I'm moving and I have DSL now). It took me forever to find it, but it was really useful. Little 3COM router with auto-dialing of the second line on demand. I used it for my voice and data for the first 2 years and then realized it was pointless and went with iDSL. It was pretty expensive, but got me even more bandwidth (144 up and down instead of 128 if I remember right).
If you really are as remote as you say, there's going to be a telco engineer somewhere who knows how to help you. You just have to find him.
*If* you have enough neighbors, you can start petitioning your telco for DSL. I live 5 miles up a road leading to a national park, well outside the range of DSL. They put some "magic box" in at the end of the road to serve me an my 20 neighbors. I get 1.5/768 now. Life is so much better
Re:Buy a faster modem (Score:3, Informative)
Satellite Reception (Score:4, Informative)
I have 5 dishes including one from the 'dark ages' of the 1980's (I still have my old 'BUG' dish). I've been playing with satellite reception for quite a few years. If he lives on the north side of a hill or mountain, the signals would have to travel through the hill, which they don't.
My girl friend tried to get satellite where she lives. It actually does have a southern 'view', but a neighbor's tree is in the way. It's a big tree, but none the less it's enough to block reception. While it is possible that in the winter when the leaves are off the tree she might be able to get decent reception, in the summer there is no way she could get the signal through the leaves on that tree.
It is not simply a matter of aiming a dish. You have to have a clear, unobstructed line of sight to the satellite (which are all equatorial, so in N America you have to have a southern view). This is more problematic the further north one is. The dish has to be aimed lower to catch th satellites so obstructions are more of a problem than in the south.
Can you get a T1? (Score:2, Informative)
You don't want to go to your local telco directly with this request; they probably don't even know how to spell T1. You want to go to one of the resellers like Speakeasy or one of the other providers whose ads occasionally appear in the Slashdot banner ad space. In fact, I'm sure that several of your fellow state residents will chime in with their opinions of local T1 providers.
Good luck!
Re:Buy a faster modem (Score:4, Informative)
[1] The Telebit Trailblazer can still do better over a very bad phone line than the Courier but to do so requires you to use the Telebit PEP mode, so there has to be a Trailblazer on the other end.
Re:Here was my solution: And it's likely illegal (Score:2, Informative)
In fact, your announcing this in a public forum may make hams local to where you live rather suspicious. They, and the ARRL, may be on your case sooner than you think.
Re:Fixed wireless? (Score:5, Informative)
Remote access (Score:3, Informative)
High latency is pretty terrible for command-line access too, but not quite as bad. Your solutions:
GPRS (cell phone) - 64K, but generally very poor latency. SSH is barely tolerable over GPRS. Forget GUI access.
3G (cell phone) - megabit speeds possible, but still with ghastly latency. SSH is tolerable. GUI access is probably frustratingly laggy. Exhorbitant unless you can get an unlimited data plan (and these typically are pretend unlimited).
Satellite (which you've already said you can't get) - latency is so bad that remote access either GUI or SSH based is impractical. Good job you can't get it or you may have spent a wodge of cash coming to this unhappy realisation.
You may be in with a chance if you can cobble together some "cantenna" style wireless access (or spend a lot of money on a microwave link).
Or you can spend lots of money on a T1. That will give you proper, solid broadband speeds not just downstream but upstream too, low latency, will work very well for remote access, and you'll have an SLA so if it breaks they should fix it quickly, instead of "when we get around to it" as for DSL. But I bet the setup fees are some thousands, and monthly charges are $hundreds. (Would your employer chip in?)
Perhaps ISDN? You can get 128kbps if your ISP supports bonding the two 64K channels. Not high speed, but low latency and it may be tolerable for GUI remote access.
Re:You mention cellphones (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Packet Radio (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What my uncle did (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe once he gets that T1 installation paid off he can put in another one.
Re:"4 wire unloaded circuit" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You mention cellphones (Score:5, Informative)
Also the latency while high is not unusable for everyday usage and only games are really affected. Also a number of satellite providers use dial up for outbound traffic to mediate the problem.
The biggest problem with satellite internet isn't the latency but the relatively low bandwidth and indecently low download/upload caps.
Re:ISDN, your friend from the past (Score:1, Informative)
Re:+1, Funny (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sorry, but the RFC states the following:
This evidently excludes 4GB flash disks. It might be an interesting extention and I propose to make this RFC 1149.n ;-)
Re:"4 wire unloaded circuit" [was: Re:Cell?] (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Here was my solution: (Score:3, Informative)
Cellular Data Latency (Score:3, Informative)
Of course I'm spoiled, by some fluke I get 10-12ms to my data center over Comcast cable.
Re:Here was my solution: And it's likely legal (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cell? (Score:3, Informative)
AT&T/Cingular does support 3G, it is the second best 3G network in the US, behind Sprint..
Re:Cell? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"4 wire unloaded circuit" (Score:1, Informative)
In the past, there was some electrical voodoo performed where only two wires were required. Both the microphone and the speaker were both on the same circuit - but with the right use of capacitors and resistors between the two, the feedback could be cancelled out. This was known as a two-wire circuit.
There is a certain amount of capacitance in the wires because they are running together all the way to the exchange, so the circuit is "loaded" with some other components to block out high frequencies. Unfortunately, this really does not work well when you start trying to running high bandwidth data across the line ie. ISDN, DSL or ADSL. So you can get the line "unloaded".
Re:What my uncle did (Score:5, Informative)
Most dial-up ISPs could run a town with 500 subscribers off of one DS-1 circuit and a bank of 64 or so DSP cards in the access concentrator. Not everyone was online at the same time, and not all of them were using all of their bandwidth when they were. 6 customers to a modem was considered extravagant over-building by many in the days of dial-up. In fact, the BRI or channelized DS-1 lines that customers dialed into were often more expensive than the backhaul lines, since one can fit more than 2.5 DS-1s worth of call terminations into one DS-1 worth of bandwidth.
Now, things might have changed a bit with more people being somewhat Internet savvy and with broadband penetration having risen, but the users probably haven't changed _that_ much since the days of dial-up, especially those that are still jsut coming from dial-up.
Yes, 1.544 Mbps divided by 64 is about 2.9 kbps. No, the customers would not generally notice a thing, because only about 1/6th of dial-up users were requesting anything at any given time. If half were, it was still 49kbps. It used to be quite safe to oversell bandwidth by at least 3 to 1 and often 4 to 1 or slightly higher even on fixed DS-1, SDSL, or frame relay. So 1.544 Mbps / ( 25 / 4 ) is kind of like 1.544 Mbps / 6.25, or about 252k per person average. 27 users is about 232 kbps. That might not be as accurate these days as it was when I was in the ISP field, though.
Even if you about half your oversell, 1.544 Mbps / 13 is 121 kbps or so, which is much better than the 26.4kbps to 41kbps most people end up getting for rural dial-up.
That's all your oversell to the ISP. You can generally "over apportion" internally between your NOC and those POPs if you run central bandwidth lines and have a star-pattern network of backhauls. Not all ISPs did this, because it's often cheaper in a particular area to have a local loop with bandwidth than to have a point-to-point between towns plus the extra bandwidth centrally. In those star-shaped, centralized uplink situations, though, you could save bandwidth lots of ways besides just plain overselling.
You often had P2P among your customers (some amount of this helps the local bandwidth plan, too, but only if the P2P never leaves the POP). You have the users connecting to your mail server a lot and the ISP's web site some. You can cache DNS lookups, which cuts down a little bit of traffic lots of times over. Mail that never leaves your domains need never leave your network, and lots of mail is sent to people your customers know locally. If the sender and recipient are both customers, you never route that mail outside your network. If you do web hosting besides just connectivity, anyone using the websites you host from your network never hits the public Internet. In crunch times for bandwidth upgrades, some ISPs were even known to give big price breaks on hosting the websites of popular local businesses, as bringing popular sites in-network saved on lots of bandwidth. Some found that being a mirror site for TUCOWS or such actually saved money, because the mirror updated during slow traffic and the end-user downloads then hit the local server. ISP-sponsored chat servers and ISP-run gaming servers were sometimes used both to better serve the customers and to keep the traffic local, but the extra maintenance required often outweighed bandwidth concerns. All of this adds up to many ISPs using far less bandwidth to the public network than what they sell to customers.
For one example, I once had a star-shaped network with more than 30 DS-1 equivalents (coming from DS-1s, PRIs, Frame Relays, frac DS-1s, BRIs, dialup POP in that NOC, etc.) of bandwidth fed into a NOC using a burstable DS-3 for main bandwidth. We paid for up to 6 Mbps all the time, and paid extra for 95th percentile usage over 6 Mbps. We rarely hit over 10 Mbps, and we rarely hit over 6 Mbps outside of the 3 PM to 11 PM window. I don't think we ever hit over 15 Mbps o
Re:"4 wire unloaded circuit" (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, all that mumbo jumbo which I've also found posted numerous places (as you probably did) was wrong - though I have seen it posted numerous places. A standard POTS phone system uses TWO wires. The phone company ran FOUR wires because TWO were backups (rarely used in that fashion anymore for POTS) - OR were/(rarely)are for providing additional power from a transformer to certain devices (alarm systems and such) - and way back when, used in the rotary dial days for similar functionality. That was for the standard RJ-11 setup.
A telephone only NEEDS 2 wires - and only USES two wires. Often two line setups were ran through (in the house/office) all 4 wires and then split into two jacks (erroneously or otherwise). Often (erroneously or otherwise) when installation done in this fashion (often by Verizon), certain other things that conformed to the old rarely used spec would no longer work - such as modems and faxes - as well as certain phones - while on the other hand, many two line phones were set up to work using a standard 4 wire cord that plugged into a standard outlet and supported 2 lines via the standard pair for line 1, and the backup pair for line 2). This is also (among cost savings reasons) why some phone handset, modem and fax machine companies shipped a wire with a single pair (2 in the center) - to ensure that whether there were two lines or one, backup or none, the phone/modem/fax would work.
Check out these links for references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POTS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJ11%2C_RJ14%2C_RJ25
Most POTS are one-loop/two-wire. (Score:4, Informative)
The phone's speaker and microphone are both in the circuit (plus the bell or ringer); the "sidetone" (your own voice as heard through the speaker) elimination is done in your telephone. In fact, some telephones let you adjust the sidetone up and down. When you install multiple telephone handsets on one line, you're basically just hanging multiple sets of microphones, speakers, and ringers off of the same two-wire balanced circuit.
You're right that a normal POTS line has stuff applied to it at the CLEC end that attenuate high-frequency signals, but they're not there to eliminate sidetone.
To a telco person, a 'four wire' circuit is going to be two unloaded loops, because telephone people tend to think in terms of 'loops' or 'pairs,' one loop per phone line/number.
Most modern homes are wired with Cat 3 wiring, which includes 3 discrete pairs, but unless you order a second line from the phone company, you probably only have dialtone on two wires (one pair), and only one pair comes out from the pole to your house. (Which is actually cool, because if your house wiring is done in a star configuration instead of daisy-chained, you can use the two dry pairs for 10BT Ethernet, in a pinch.)
Slightly OT but cool: Anyone interested in POTS phone technology might want to check out this page (http://home.utah.edu/~nahaj/cave/phones/ [utah.edu]) which explains how to build a very simple one or two-wire field phone system just with phone handsets. Apparently they are used in cave rescue and other applications where radios don't work. It's a good introduction to how POTS works, though, since it doesn't introduce the complexity of the ringer, switching system, etc. It gets into sidetone and sidetone-suppression a little.
OT: Balanced audio. (Score:4, Informative)
The way balanced audio works is via two signal conductors, and then a separate ground. That's probably the three wires that you're thinking of. Really the ground isn't part of the circuit (and sometimes the ground is intentionally broken to prevent loops), but it's why you have three pins in an XLR jack.
Basically, a balanced audio source will act like a 'push-pull' current source. Rather than simply having a voltage on a wire that varies in time, you have a continuous loop, and you 'push' down one side of the loop and 'pull' up on the other, or vice versa. If you were to hook an oscilloscope probe up to both sides of a balanced audio circuit while something was going down it, you'd find out that the signals on each side of the circuit are 180-degrees out of phase wrt each other. By convention, one of the signal lines is usually called the '+' side and one is called the '-' side,* with the '+' side usually being in-phase with the actual microphone input.
The advantage of this, over an unbalanced line, is common-mode rejection. If you use a transformer (or some type of modern transistorized circuit that simulates a transformer; op-amps acting like difference amplifiers also work well) on the receiving end of the circuit, you can basically 'throw away' any signal that's the same on *both sides* of the circuit. E.g., lets imagine that your balanced audio line is right next to a 60Hz power line. The 60Hz is going to get into the balanced line, but it's going to be the same on both the '+' and '-' sides, while the actual audio is going to be 180 degrees o.o.p. from one side to the other. This makes it easy to reject the interference: when you run the balanced audio into a 1:1 transformer, the 60Hz doesn't produce any current actually moving through the transformer's coils, and thus no output (or very little).
I'm not sure where balanced audio circuits originated. I think that it probably started with the phone company (which has been doing balanced loop circuits practically forever; in telco parlance the '+' and '-' are sometimes called 'tip' and 'ring' respectively, after their placement on old 1/4" jacks) and later migrated to studio audio and sound reinforcement later, rather than the other way around.
Some further reading on balanced audio:
http://www.videomaker.com/article/9732/ [videomaker.com] Good basic article, might make sense if my explanation doesn't.
http://www.tvtechnology.com/pages/s.0071/t.1585.html [tvtechnology.com] Also good, assumes more knowledge of electrical concepts (i.e. impedance).
* Some audio people insist on calling the '+' side of balanced audio connections "hot" and the '-' side "cold," which I think is stupid since they both carry signal (unlike, say, the 'hot' and 'neutral' in your power socket), but you hear it tossed around.
Re:Cell? (Score:3, Informative)
Re: "4 wire unloaded circuit" (Score:5, Informative)
I'm really trying to figure out what you're talking about, and where you got the idea that the second pair is for daisy-chaining.
The red/green (or blue/blue-white) pair is for the first phone line; the yellow/black (or orange/orange-white) pair is for the second phone line. See the RJ11/14/25 [wikipedia.org] standard.
Standard RJ11/14/25 jacks and plugs can support up to 3 lines on up to 6 wires. These days, some houses just use RJ45 throughout the house, which means 4 lines are possible (8 wires).
Many phone lines are run in a star pattern from the network box, not daisy-chained at all. Where multiple jacks are connected to the same wire run, the red is connected to the red, black to black, etc. There's no crossover between the two pairs.
Problem is the encryption, not Amazon orders. (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with extending this to the internet is the prohibitions on encryption. Even if your Amazon order is acceptable, the encryption it uses to make the transaction safe is NOT OK. The FCC has not granted any exceptions to the encryption/encipherment rules, except for the very narrowly defined case of satellite command-and-control. They don't even let people encrypt traffic in order to comply with HIPAA rules in disaster/medical situations.
So, the way the rules are now, if you did have an 802.11 link operating in the section of the ISM band that's also an Amateur band (which is only a subset of the channels that most Part 15 devices use), you could legally operate under Part 97 rules, including power up to 1kw ERP if you really needed it, BUT you'd have to find a way to disable ALL encryption. So no SSH, no SSL/TLS, nothing: probably not even encrypted password handshakes. Everything has to be plaintext or you can't operate under Part 97, and you're back to Part 15 and its measly 100mW limits and antenna prohibitions. (Though I'm not sure where they draw the line on cryptographic authentication, since it's not really designed to obscure the meaning of anything; that seems like it'd be OK.)
That's the thing that makes using a highpower 802.11 system unattractive to me, at least as an everyday Internet connection.
Re: "4 wire unloaded circuit" and wideband LAN (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Here was my (wireless) solution: (Score:2, Informative)
This is a good advice, my experience tells me that very good link from point A to point B can be achieved using 802.11b/g wireless.
For example - use 2 or more sets of the following:
Waterproof casing - $10-30
Parabolic antenna 24dBi (N female connector) - Hyperlink, PacificWireless, Andrew - cost about US $75
LMR195/240/400 (rpSMA to N male) pigtail, 0.6m, 3m or more in length - cost from US$10 to US$20(3m)
Wireless router - Buffalo, Linksys - and put DDwrt in them they are about 50-70$ each (http://www.ddwrt.org)
Ecellent alternative are Mikrotik routers, a bit more expensive ($100) but much more flexible (http://www.mikrotik.com) they also sell complete devices integrated in antennas)
Then find any location in the range of 50km with faster internet, setup all in your home, put it up and use. These devices use small amounts of energy (5W) and work reliably. You can even connect from your home to such device using normal wireless card in your PC. Line of sight is a must for such distances. Having two hops is not a problem, only more expensive.
I have seen effective speeds of 17mbps and more on links with more than 20km, working for months without any human intervention.
rural internet.. (Score:2, Informative)
Depending on the terrain and distance to the closest place with DSL/cable/etc you might could use one of the versions of point to point wireless, I have considered doing that myself. I would say that would be one of your better options IF you can managed to work that out.. Satellite internet in my experience works for downloading larger files from a single source (like FTP or from a HTTP source), but its latency is terrible, I rather surf on a 56k modem or ISDN. The ping times Ive seen on sat were between 1200ms to 2500ms.. which i find it a bit amazing they dont have something worth a damn in that area without that latency yet (but i do not know the technical issues on that, i just find it odd..)
So i would at least get ISDN, should be available to you, would be around 6x the speed you have now if I understand right using both lines bonded. If you got the cash to shell out they should be able to get a T1 to you for $500 to $700.. I went through a re-seller from AT&T and she managed to get me a better price than AT&T was going to give me themself.. but that is quite expensive. And there is always the wireless to the next town that has something cheap and usable.
Re:Cell? (Score:1, Informative)
Web browsing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Satellite Reception (Score:3, Informative)
I live on the north side of a heavily-wooded slope, too. When I invited a Dish Network installer out, he took one quick look, said "no way", and left.
It took me a while to find a solution. In my case, parts of the property do have narrow views through trees that, while not due South, proved to be adequate. I figured out what orbital slots a network of dishes would need to "see" in order to serve my needs, and used this French guy's magic calculator [gjullien.fr] to figure out at exactly what time and date the sun would be directly behind those orbital slots. At those times (I actually took an afternoon off of work to do this), I ran around hurriedly snapping pictures of sunlit areas on my property.
Some of 'em are on the roof of the house (biggest clearing on the property). Others are in totally never-would-have-guessed-that locations on the ground. I parked dishes in those locations, and used RG-11 cable to help overcome some distance problems, along with off-the-shelf switch gear to integrate them.
You'd need to sort out where Hughes has orbital slots serving its satellite network, then calculate the right dates and times, and take the pictures. Any sunlit area revealed by your just-at-the-right-moment photos, in my experience, about six to eight feet wide is viable. In some cases you can stretch a smaller opening by taking down a few limbs. If you find viable dish locations, then you need the toughest thing of all to find - an installer with a sense of humor.
That's because the days of self-installs are generally long over with. You could do sort of a proof-of-concept setup for an installer, though, by putting up the post or posts and using used low-end used gear from eBay to verify reception.
I'd suggest at least doing the math to figure out when your next opportunity is (they occur twice a year, one in the Spring and one the Fall), and taking the pictures. You never know. My access to the 101 orbital slot is from a short post on the ground underneath a dogwood tree, which is now missing a few limbs on one side. To look at it from the house, you'd swear there'd be no way this thing could see the sky, much less a satellite. It generates signal strength levels in the low 90s.
Granted, I've only demonstrated that this technique works for satellite television reception. I haven't tried it for bidirectional satellite internet access. I do know that my Dad's got satellite internet access, and while it is certainly not ideal, he would never go back to dialup.
Good luck!
isdn bri (Score:3, Informative)
Easy solution (Score:3, Informative)
This is an option for you. (Score:2, Informative)