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?"
Cell? (Score:5, Interesting)
Fixed wireless? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here was my solution: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fixed wireless? (Score:4, Interesting)
line of sight to someone with broadband? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Buy a faster modem (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fixed wireless? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Here was my solution: And it's likely illegal (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, really. You forget to take a Prozac or twelve today?
"4 wire unloaded circuit" [was: Re:Cell?] (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm in Canada and googled that: the only hit was right back to your post.
And you posted less than an hour ago. Amazing.
Anyway, what is a 4 wire unloaded circuit?
Re:ISDN, your friend from the past (Score:1, Interesting)
ISDN will be available anywhere you can get a phone line (in the US at least) assuming your ILEC supports it, which they almost certainly do. It's more expensive and slower than other high speed Internet connections, but has the advantage of you being able to get service. Finding old ISDN equipment shouldn't be too hard.
If you are independently wealthy or your employer really loves you, get a T1. Like ISDN they're available anywhere, but they're a wee bit more expensive. Depending on distance from town you might be looking at $500 to $2000, or even more, per month. Call the phone company and ask for a quote; that much won't cost anything. If they claim they can't do it, be more persistent.
If you're very persistent, you might be able to talk your phone company in to installing a dry pair to your property, then you could connect the other end of the circuit to someplace with high speed Internet service and set up your own high speed network after an initial investment in the appropriate hardware. There is, however, risk in doing this since the phone company may not promise any level of signal quality over the line, there's a recurring per-mile charge for the line itself, and the equipment you'd need might be a bit spendy.
Re:"4 wire unloaded circuit" (Score:4, Interesting)
You need line-of-sight to something (Score:2, Interesting)
Most trees can be gotten over with 60 foot of tower, hills might be higher than that, depends on your area, you'll really need about 30 more feet that what ever the tallest item is between you and where you want to go.
Re:Satellite Reception (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want an reasonable estimate, look how high the sun is in the sky at equinox (around March 20 and September 22, that is now), which is when the sun is directly over the equator. An estimate using math is 90deg - latitude. Even if you're at 60 degrees north you have 30 degrees to go on, which is damn steep over any distance. The problem is usually just that hillside you're in, and if you can steal a few meters (end of house furthest out, mast to raise it a bit above the roof) or just roll out cable on either side of the hill you're good to go. If you're really stuck with a big hill/mountain, there's often enough people to set up a local relay. In short, there's rarely a problem getting coverage anywhere.
Re:ISDN, your friend from the past (Score:3, Interesting)
Now that ADSL2+ is an option with a non-monopoly carrier I get speeds over 4M all of the time with zero dropouts (current connection active for 7.5 days and the onyl reason it went down is because a backhoe operator dug out the power cables in our street last week. Try pushing the ADSL2 issue if it's available on your exchange. It can work really well depending on the quality of the copper to your house (and 26.4 sounds like you might have reasonable copper).
Four-wire unloaded circuit (Score:3, Interesting)
Back in college in the mid 1980s I shared an off-campus apartment with a bunch of other geeks like me, and we looked into getting a connection to the school's computer system (which they were surprisingly friendly about). I won't say it was "the Internet" since it was in a lot of pieces back then (and the school seemed to be on everything *except* the ARPAnet until very late -- even Mailnet, which was barely even anything).
Anyway the local telephone company (NYtel) said they could give us a 2-wire leased line to the school for about $36/mo, or a 4-wire one for $72/mo. The catches were: (1) about $600 for installation, (2) it's not one run of copper all the way there so we couldn't just run 20mA current loop or something, we'd need real leased line modems (I eventually picked up a pair of Gandalf 9600 BPS line driver/receivers cheap but I don't even know if that was the right thing, and that was about when dialups started getting that fast so it was pointless), and (3) the school wasn't an ISP, so it wasn't at all clear what would go at the other end (in those days, translating between SLIP and Ethernet didn't just mean stuffing Linux into some old clunker PC). So we never bit, but I regret it, it sure would have been educational.
Anyway those are 1980s upstate NY prices. I'm sure it's more now (and, we weren't talking about a very long distance) but I'll bet you earn more than you did in the 1980s too. And presumably the data rates are way higher now, and most ISPs would know what to do with their end. OK so it wouldn't be as cheap as DSL but how important is the Internet to you?
Also it might be worth looking into RF modems. Before cable broadband came to my neighborhood and made it all easy, I had the local mom + pop ISP (the best kind!) mostly talked into letting me mount a doodad in their attic (since they were only a block away -- if they'd been on the same block I would have just begged neighbors to let me string wires through the trees), and I was just hemming and hawing over which pair of doodads to buy. The data rates aren't fantastic but you can sure beat 26kbps. Anyway even if you don't sell the ISP themselves on the idea, maybe you could at least get their permission to buy space on someone's connection who's closer to you, and talk *them* into sticking a horn antenna on their porch railing or whatever. Privacy is out the window of course so that would have to be OK with you.
Re:Cell? (Score:3, Interesting)
About the time DSL came to town, the telco figured out what the ISP was doing, and jacked the rates. LADS lines are now $56/mo. (wow...) The trick to the LADS lines is they are "dry copper", meaning no coils or lightning arrestors, at least not what's normally on the lines. So to set up a LADS they have to find a run of copper from you to the telco that they can run around to and remove all the coils. (so setup can be pricey) What makes a LADS line possible is that MVL modems transmit in such a way as to be able to pass the "jumper clips" at the various network boxes and terminals etc that jumper one side of a block to the other. Most high speed digital lines see this as a small RF choke, and it heavily attenuates their signal at every hop. It' quickly becomes unusable. MVL modems are able to run signal through jumper clips.
I never had a problem wiht my MLV modem setup. Then after they skyrocketed the line price I went to cable and they started really jacking me around. (my "static" ip address changing every 3 mos, capping my upstream at 24kbs, etc) Now I'm content with a business grade DSL. Waiting for FIOS but not holding my breath.
Re: "4 wire unloaded circuit" (Score:5, Interesting)
Just for reference, the reason it was designed that way is because in the beginning of telecommunication, the exchange station would just feed 48 V into a line on which the microphones and speakers of both participating telephones were simply connected in series. It's obviously an extremely simple design; befitting the era, I guess. I don't know how it is done these days, but in the days of old, capacitors and resistors weren't used to cancel out feedback, but rather a very special transformer circuit called a duplex coil. Nowadays, it seems to be hard even to find information on how it was constructed.
You might wonder why I know these things; it is simply because I've been trying to design a "telephone soundcard" (like a modem, but without the modulation/demodulation part). It turns out that it is rather easy to construct a converter from a two-wire circuit to a four-wire circuit using two opamps and five resistors. Of course, that won't make the line unloaded.
Re:What my uncle did (Score:1, Interesting)
There are many businesses that have 200 or 400 desktop PCs behind a single T1 for Internet bandwidth, and most folks still think that it is pretty good.
The average joe just does not use a lot of bandwidth, unless they get into P2P applications.
Yup - T1 rocks (Score:3, Interesting)
Throw in a squid proxy, and that'll be a *nice* connection for all 25 people -- assuming they are reading e-mail, surfing the 'net, and doing anything but gnutella or bit-torrent. Some traffic shaping should even make these usable, albeit slow during busy-hour. Even 2 or 3 P2P users won't destroy a T1, 200k per P2P client is acceptable and still leaves half the T1 empty for general purposes surfing.
Once upon a time, my office had 3 meg wireless and 768k SDSL (synchronous DSL over dry copper). I chose the SDSL for my general-purpose surfing and liked it a LOT more than the wireless connection. Now we run the whole office and development lab over T1, and frankly, there's more than enough bandwidth to go around.
Re:Fixed wireless? (Score:5, Interesting)
A year ago I was 80' up in a man-basket (hooked to a crane), "re-modeling" a farmer's silo. I wanted to take off the metal cap and put in a catwalk. That connected 9.5 miles to a water tower, where I have a dsl connection. Since then I have learned that grain legs are easier to work from. I'm developing POPs on two of those, and have several more lined up. Once I get above the trees, I can link two grain legs at several miles distance.
I would suggest looking at www.staros.com (software and hardware). Another source of hardware I like is www.wlanparts.com (Pasadena wireless). I started with Trango 900MHz radios, but the StarOS ones are faster, cheaper and have more features. My TrangoLink10 has been very reliable, basically non-stop for about 10 months now. It did start to fade for 30 minutes once, but the signal was never dropped (not sure if it was the snowstorm, or another WISP testing equipment on that water tower)
You might be able to mount the radios in a tree and avoid the cost of a tower. (if you don't use 900MHz, which might go thru the trees) Look at the StarOS forums for some info on that.
Oh, you might check into sharing a T1 with neighbors. That way you would only need to setup an AP and connect them. But a T1 for me was $600/month, I didn't want to commit to that. I think I paid for my wireless backhaul in 3 months, compared to a T1.
Re:You mention cellphones (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, there's a bit of latency, but ssh works just fine. I did work on servers in the United States every day. Takes all of about two minutes to get used to the 1-2 second lag time. Even VOIP worked fine, better than DSN phones, actually.
Nothing like 1 mbps of dedicated satellite bandwidth after screwing around with NIPR all day.
MVL (Score:3, Interesting)
This fairly ancient (1998) article [telephonyonline.com] claims 24,000 line-feet at 768kbps and gives the name of an equipment manufacturer who pioneered the technology. Given the sparse information available and the fact I've never heard of it until today, I'm going to guess it was kinda stillborn.
Still might be cool in a pinch, though.
One thing I've always wanted to find out is whether there's a way to use two cheap consumer DOCSIS-compliant cable modems to transmit data over a dry piece of point-to-point CATV coax. The OEMs charge an absolute bundle for real cableco headend gear, and I've always wondered if it would be possible to hack two consumer ('tailend'?) boxes to talk to each other. Given the distances that you can run cable for compared to most UTP services, its ease of installation compared to fiber, and the ubiquity of DOCSIS equipment, that would be a pretty neat way of extending an Ethernet network over very long distances on the cheap.
Re:"4 wire unloaded circuit" (Score:3, Interesting)
I think someone at google is catering to us.
Re:Cell? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe living on a mountain could be an advantage. It all depends who lives in the valley below. Do you have any friends with DSL a few miles away, down in that valley?
We had a 12 foot satellite dish we used to use for TV before the little DirecTV type dishes came into use. We have a barn/workshop about 1000 feet from the house. I wanted to have a link to the shop for a test. One day I mounted a wireless access point (linksys) on the focal point of that long dead 12 ft monster and pointed it at our barn.
I was able to pick up the signal, not only from the corresponding link in the workshop, but also (surprisingly) a number of miscellaneous signals from other wifi devices many miles away. Some of them were not encrypted and allowed me to get Internet connectivity at high speed, after adjusting the dish for maximum signal.
A 12 foot dish antenna has a very high gain, but is unwieldy and hard to come by these days. However it can be a means of communicating with very low powered devices rather far away. I have read of amateur radio hobbyists using such dishes to bounce signals off the moon. We recently took the unsightly monster apart and sent it to a metal recycler. We now have DSL service, as a package phone deal. Nobody gets any sort of cell phone service right where we live. Our visitors are mostly bummed by this, but some like the peace it gives them.
Re:"4 wire unloaded circuit" (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/minty-fresh-indexing/ [mattcutts.com]
Re:Seems obvious. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: "4 wire unloaded circuit" (Score:4, Interesting)
I had a phone outlet in my room but but no phone and I used to listen to my sister's telephone conversations (like a little brother would do) by hooking up a speaker to the bottom 2 terminals.
I figured out that I could pulse dial my friends by tapping on the terminals and use another speaker for a microphone.
Back then, you just couldn't get another phone without parental approval because phones were leased and no one had a phone sitting around so I used old tape recorder parts.
Re:Cell? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.trangobroadband.com/technology/point_to_point.shtml [trangobroadband.com]
I know of a local ISP which uses this same company's equipment to feed clusters of users in office buildings up to 30 miles away and never has to visit the equipment more than once a month. If you can get a decent pipe within line-of-sight or only one hop away this should feed you and your neighbors. We're going to use it in a few years to connect our very remote vacation home to my brother-in-law's ISDN line.