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?"

Wireless broadband

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.

Re:Wireless broadband

Or someone who doesn't have broadband but *can* get it...
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.

Re:Wireless broadband

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.

Take a realistic approach

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!

Uh, get the dish or quit crying.

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?

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 /.? Being forced to live with old single core processors?

fake rock

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.

Potentially crazy suggestion:

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.

Re:Potentially crazy suggestion:

or just place it under the roof. They sell purpose-made fiberglass roof tiles that will match the existing ones after a little creative weathering, and are microwave transparent.

Re:Potentially crazy suggestion:

A 20 foot high fibreglass gnome in the back garden would do the trick. You could paint nerd clothes on him too as an ironic thingy.

Re:Potentially crazy suggestion:

Howz about putting the dish inside the roof and replacing the roof tiles over it with pretty fibreglass tiles? That puts the dish in the house, and off the ground, out of eyesight, safe from the wind and hail and yes, maybe even lightning.

Re:Potentially crazy suggestion:

Putting the dish on the roof would reduce latency too since the signals don't have to travel as far.

Re:And I'll tell you exactly how crazy

nearly 300 km per millisecond

Almost as fast as that joke whooshed over your head.

Authentic

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

Quitcherbitchen

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.

Re:Quitcherbitchen

Not only that, he wants political action to put broadband in his parent's summer home...WHICH IS LOCATED IN AN FEDERAL ECOLOGICALLY-PROTECTED SEASHORE!

"Dear Senator, please destroy a wildlife habitat and sanctuary so that I can get broadband..."

Go ahead and mod me down

"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.

Re:what about EVDO?

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.

EVOO?

Oh, sorry, I thought we were on the Rachel Ray forums for a second... :-p

Re:pda?

I don't know what it is like in the US, but here in Ireland we have 3G services, that the government even include in statistics as "broadband" connections. However, they do not actually provide good speeds in practice for most, as the service does not handle increased users well - the cell bandwidth gets divided out between the users and so just 20 or so means worse than dial-up speed and useless QoS. At the worst times it can be faster to switch to GPRS (2.5G)

Maybe Edge or whatever is used in the US is better, although I believe the top theoretical speeds are lower even if they do deliver better speed in practice.

----

As regards the OP question of how to cope with dial-up, I highly recommend NoScript for Firefox. Greatly reduces the load time for webpages (at least in my experience of seeing it on a browser using dual-channel ISDN). It by default blocks the worst web content - flash and javascript (e.g. loading graphics and animations from 3rd party ad servers). Simpler and more useful than Adblock, also fairer for website owners as you are not blocking ads specifically - just not handling certain types of content. You can easily whitelist javascript for domains for which it is essential.

For email, set up your email client (it doesn't need to be text only) to leave the emails on the email server - you can choose which ones to open up and download, and delete junk without downloading.

For downloading, it is useful to use a download client that can pause and resume downloads, or handle interruptions.

Two-way satellite works great except for the latency. You could always have the dish on the ground out in the garden if the house or shrubs etc. don't shadow the signal. Two-way sat has the advantage of being "always on" and you don't have the time-based billing of dial-up, also usable for downloading large amounts of data.

Re:pda?

All of us had dialup from circa 1980 to 2000 and we survived.

This is like saying, "My grandpa earned $200 a month, and he got by ok!"

Times changes. Bandwidth inflation is a serious problem. Web pages don't clock in at under 10k anymore.

Re:pda?

"Times changes. Bandwidth inflation is a serious problem. Web pages don't clock in at under 10k anymore."

I agree. In the article, it kind of joked about getting used to a 'text email' client. Why is this a joke? Email is SUPPOSED to be text only, and somehow along the way, we've bastardized it into all kinds of HTML, with images, fugly wallpaper, etc...

Geez...it is now taking a couple of 'K' to send a simple 2 line email these days.

I try to keep all my email clients set to text only...both for receiving and sending. Last time I was forced to use Outlook...I couldn't easily get it set to do text only both ways...

Why isn't this set by default?

Re:pda?

>>>"This is like saying, "My grandpa earned $200 a month, and he got by ok!"

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:Look on the brightside

Seriously. I'm going to contact *My* senators and tell them that if they wast a second on catering to people with cottages on cape cod instead of the 5 billion other pressing problems in this country they can kiss their own ass goodbye.

Re:Look on the brightside

I agree, the government shouldn't force anyone to pay for it. But we already did pay for it:

The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal [newnetworks.com]

Here's a summary of the relevant points:

The fiber optic infrastructure you paid for was never delivered.

Starting in the early 1990's, with a push from the Clinton-Gore Administration's "Information Superhighway", every Bell company - SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest - made commitments to rewire America, state by state. Fiber optic wires would replace the 100-year old copper wiring. The push caused techno-frenzy of major proportions. By 2006, 86 million households should have had a service capable of 45 Mbps in both directions, (to and from the customer) could handle over 500 channels of high quality video and be deployed in rural, urban and suburban areas equally. And these networks were open to ALL competition.

In order to pay for these upgrades, in state after state, the public service commissions and state legislatures acquiesced to the Bells' promises by removing the constraints on the Bells' profits as well as gave other financial perks. They were able to print money - billions of dollars per state - all collected in the form of higher phone rates and tax perks. (Note: each state is different.)

* ADSL is not what was promised and paid for. It goes over the old copper wiring, can't achieve the speed, has problems in rural areas and is mostly one-way.

* The public subsidies for infrastructure were pocketed. The phone companies collected over $200 billion in higher phone rates and tax perks, about $2000 per household.

* The World is Laughing at US. Korea and Japan have 100 Mbps services as standard, and America could have been Number One had the phone companies actually delivered. Instead, we are 16th in broadband and falling in technology dominance.

* Harm to the economy. Five trillion dollars was lost because new technologies and services that America would have developed, happened in Korea. Municipalities around America are waking up to the fact that the phone companies failed to deliver and are now doing Wifi and fiber-based work-arounds.

* The promised networks couldn't be built in 1993 and state laws were changed based on "deceptive speech". The technology today still has problems delivering 500 channels.

* The phone companies pulled a bait and switch. In order to offer DSL over copper, it was not necessary to have state regulation changed. Their plan was to get rid of regulations and enter long distance.

* The Bell mergers resulted in the death of the state plans for fiber optic broadband. Over 26 states had fiber optic projects closed when the mergers of SBC and Verizon were completed. That affected almost 80% of all phone customers in the US.

Wouldn't you like your $2000 back?

Re:Look on the brightside

People read "cottage on Cape Cod" and immediately assume the owners must be wealthy. That's actually unlikely to be true. In fact, the only private cottages inside the Cape Cod National Seashore are relics. The Park Service would just as soon they were destroyed, but they are grandfathered into the law when the land was designated as national parkland. They cannot be sold outside the family which owned them historically, only handed down through the generations. They are mostly tiny, weatherbeaten shacks, and they cannot be updated or expanded. Many were once the homes of poor artists, now used as vacation homes by their descendants. Cape Cod was not always a playground for the rich.