Internet through DTV

[Leo J Mauler]

On Sat, 6 Dec 2003 17:21:13 -0600 Greg Kedrovsky
<greg at iglesia-del-este.com> writes:
> On Sat, Dec 06, 2003 at 11:14:26AM -0600, Leo J Mauler wrote:
> 
> > Perhaps a fiber optic line from your house to his?   
> 
> I am putting in provisional hook-ups in my rack for fiber-optic. Is
> there a distance limitation with fiber-optic?

Fiber Optic cable allows for cable runs of 2 to 5 kilometers, and you
might even get Multi Mode fiber optic cable to make the full run from
your house to a friend's house.  Single Mode fiber optic cable would
definitely make the run from your house to his, but that stuff is
extremely expensive (as opposed to Multi Mode which is only expensive). 
And with almost no attenuation and no EMI, such a long cable run would be
worth the effort.

Don't try and string it on the power line poles.  Power linemen have a
job which is rather like being a fighter-pilot without all the photo
opportunities.

Naturally, you may just want to use high-speed wireless with dial-up as a
backup.  Fiber is expensive and you will have to find an unbroken stretch
of land between yourself and your friend (it being difficult to run your
own cable under roads and pedestrian pavements) as well as lay in a pipe
to help prevent accidental fiber cuts.  And if the fiber is cut, it is
somewhat difficult to patch.

But just as a gestalt experiment, fiber optic is one *possible* solution.

> > (even Cringley admits that he needs a *land-line* solution for 
> > when storms or other electrical disturbances *knock out* his 
> > wireless solutions)
> 
> Dial-up would by my only back-up.  :-(  Perish the thought...

I know it sounds dumb, but check into solutions where you combine two
dial-up connections into a single "baby broadband" connection. Then all
you have is the cost of a second phone line and a second Internet
connection.
 
> > I didn't like satellite then and I still don't.  Latency 
> > is not the friend of the online gamer.
> 
> Yeah... I s'pose. I'm not an on-line gamer (not much 
> of a gamer at all; more like a work-aholic). My enemy 
> here is my global position. No one would sell me service 
> here in Costa Rica. And I don't believe it's even possible 
> (let alone "ethical") to fake them out and buy equipment to 
> set it up myself.

Back when Computer Bulletin Board Systems (the "information dirt road")
were still widely available and the Internet didn't have Mosaic yet, I
lived in a town called Lawrence, Kansas (USA).  And in this town there
were ten BBSes.  And one of them was run by a guy who provided the
connection to the outside world through a BBS-to-BBS semi-Internet known
as FidoNet (think of an E-mail only, UseNet NEWS only Internet). Certain
BBSes provided Nodes in the nationwide network, and information was
transferred by dial-up connections (a whopping 2400-14.4K!).  

Normally providing FidoNet to other BBSes meant committing to massive
downloads with long distance charges.  Yet this guy in Lawrence found a
solution to downloading all the FidoNet data quickly, leaving the only
long connections being local BBSes and to send data out to the rest of
FidoNet.

He had a conventional Satellite Dish with a K-Band connection at the
base.  He noticed it one day as being a simple 9-pin serial port.  He
contacted a few people and arranged to have FidoNet data beamed down to
his Satellite Dish a few times a week through the teenage
Internet/ARPANet.  Considering that the transfer for a full FidoNet feed
was rather huge at the time (50MB-250MB a download), this was a blessing
for him, since the only long distance call he had to make was to upload
local traffic, less than 10MB usually.  The other BBSes in town just
scheduled a night of the week to download the portions of the full
FidoNet feed they wanted.

So you might want to look into getting a full-size Satellite Dish with a
K-Band port and see about receiving data through it.  It might take some
jiggering and kludging to get it to work as part of your home network,
but you should see fairly fast download speeds this way, if not upload
speeds.  Heck, for all I know full-size Satellite Dishes might even have
some better way of handling downloads by now.

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