Dealing With Dialup 588
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?"
Uh, get the dish or quit crying. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Get a USB Modem (Score:0, Insightful)
Communities in action (Score:1, Insightful)
First world problems. (Score:1, Insightful)
Authentic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uh, get the dish or quit crying. (Score:1, Insightful)
lots of ideas (Score:2, Insightful)
- 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
Quitcherbitchen (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
oh the horror... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wireless broadband (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Cell Tower Internet (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
That's your interpretation (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
stay with it (Score:4, Insightful)
Shotgun Modem (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Quitcherbitchen (Score:5, Insightful)
"Dear Senator, please destroy a wildlife habitat and sanctuary so that I can get broadband..."
Re:Uh, get the dish or quit crying. (Score:2, Insightful)
Not only in America - all around the world. Money > * to (most of) the sorts of people who get to the level where they are allowed to control the decision making process regarding how to extort more of it.
To everyone else
Dialup is not the end of the world at all. In fact, not having the Internet connected is not the end of the world. Why is it that so many high society white people (yes I'm one of them) piss and moan about their right to fast Internet and how the gumbiment should pay for it.
People, your Internet access is not a right. It's a privilege. You earn it by working and then paying for it. There is NOTHING on the Internet that can't be had offline (tomes of dead trees, video stores, record stores, the local adult empornium, mostly the last one).
I am tired of people whining about how everyone in the whole world needs to be provided the means to download their porn faster. For fuck's sake, there are people out there (in the USA, no less) who have NO food, NO home, NO clothes, NO health care. Yet you want the country to spend its money making sure you can start masturbating a few minutes sooner!
The Australian government made broadband for all an election promise, yet they haven't even touched on the notion that basic telecoms for all isn't even a particularly affordable option here because of the monopoly telecoms provider whose wholesale arm is more interested in serving their retail arm than any of the competition.
To summarise: Stop fucking complaining. If you want it then make the compromise required to get it. If you don't want it that bad then it's obviously not worth whinging about.
Re:Look on the brightside (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:pda? (Score:5, Insightful)
Times changes. Bandwidth inflation is a serious problem. Web pages don't clock in at under 10k anymore.
Re:Quitcherbitchen (Score:3, Insightful)
If someone "can barely afford to live there", where are they getting the money "to foot the bill for the last thousand feet"?
It sounds to me like we've got a bunch of dumbfucks that are going to spend their lives in poverty because of their piss poor choices ("we're broke, but we got broadband!") or we've got a bunch of spoiled fucks that want the world to wipe their asses and smile about it.
Which is it?
If you choose to live in the middle of nowhere, don't expect the latest-and-great tech. One of the benefits of living in the middle of nowhere is to get away from the latest-and-greatest. What you sacrifice in convenience you make up for in privacy and peace of mind.
Give me a little house in the middle of nowhere with dialup instead of a condo in the valley with broadband. Any day.
Go ahead and mod me down (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:pda? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:pda? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Look on the brightside (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Look on the brightside (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:pda? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:pda? (Score:3, Insightful)
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!)
Cellular is the Simplest solution (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re:pda? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.