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?"
Take a realistic approach (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Potentially crazy suggestion: (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Why is "turn to government" the first solution? (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Look towards Siena (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Wireless broadband (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
google "dry pair" (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:First world problems. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Potentially crazy suggestion: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Potentially crazy suggestion: (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Potentially crazy suggestion: (Score:4, Interesting)
Local ordinances don't amount to a hill of beans if the dish can also be used for satellite television.
FCC trumps local ordinances. And they are reportedly quite aggressive about it.
Re:Quitcherbitchen (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Broadband Wireless Card (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:pda? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Potentially crazy suggestion: (Score:2, Interesting)
You CANNOT mount the dish inside the house or cover it with a fake rock as per Hughes standards. For starters, the uplinking signals are EXTREMELY weak..most materials (even some of the microwave transparent ones) will block the signal...it's actually a few ghz higher than your downlink...this is not to mention that the uplink dishes on your house are NOTHING like the big-boys..they use powerful transmitters remotely mounted and feed the signal with a waveguide out the center of the dish off a reflector, off the dish again and out into space.
The mere fact is the alignment required to get a signal up there accurately can be affected by things covering it...sure, people do it, and i'm sure it works fine...but a few years ago when i took the exam to install these things, this was not allowed.
satellite is an expensive option...the wireless G3 option is probably a much better solution. wind hail and lightning don't really pose to many problems IF they're installed properly...this means grounding the dish...which will be done becuase hughes DOES NOT let the homeowner install these things.
the latency is horrible but the theoritical speeds are good...but if you wanna pay a couple hundred bucks for your internet connection to travel 90,000 miles more than it needs (and that's about half a second of PHYSICAL latency)....then i have to question of you're a senile old geezer to begin with.
Re:Look on the brightside (Score:3, Interesting)