DIY super fast internet

[smurphos]

The villagers who DIYed some of the fastest internet in the UK – video

https://www.theguardian.com/global/vide ... e-uk-video


Love this...

[Pierre]

'Lousy' NBN prompts community outside of Sydney to crowdfund their own internet:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-13/b ... ey/9984890
and women who owns a cafe in Kangaroo Valley,, south-west of Sydney, said her business lost internet access so often,
- that it had threatened thousands of dollars in sales.

No Blasted Network

it's all very common - - too common, in fact.

actually - - what is Your Set-up Cost / Speed / Bandwidth ?.

[BG405]

I really feel sorry for you folks with poor connection speeds & reliability. It was bad enough here back in the days of dialup, regular dropouts & waiting an age for a web page to load or a song to download. Had to put up with this until the early 2000s for cable broadband to go live, then had blazing 600Kb/s which progressively stepped up over the years, 20Mb/s by the time I cancelled it. There are still too many populated areas without decent service though.

Cable broadband had some teething issues W.R.T. loss of service lasting to the mid 2000s, especially frustrating as it also knocked out the analogue cable TV at the same time. Daughter didn't complain about the outages, but I bet she was a rare exception. Finally ditched it when it got too expensive. Now on ADSL @ ~9Mbit/s & now I see the upload has increased to 1.35MBit/s, making Web surfing more responsive. It's been pretty reliable so far (after some initial teething issues) & I'm happy with the speeds.

Hope those of you still putting up with the raw end of the deal don't have to wait too much longer. 5G is probably not the answer; long-range WiFi stations likely a better solution, even if it means the householders & businesses needing a small dish or other suitable antenna for the service. It reminds me of a failed wireless telephone service in the UK, whose technology would have been ideal for adaptation to digital communications such as broadband, had it survived. I forget the name of the company though there are still some antennas around.

[Portreve]

I pay about $63 a month (€54 / AUS$85) for 25 MB/2MB cable Internet from Comcast. In my experience, they offer a service which is significantly more reliable than DSL, much of this having to do with bothering to update the physical layer of their network.

Now, the DSL carrier in my area is touting Fiber service, and I'm like “Really? You're full of **** because there's no fiber in the ground around here going out to people's homes.”

[BG405]

about $63 a month (€54 / AUS$85) for 25 MB/2MB cable Internet

That is quite proportional, bandwidth-wise, with the cheaper deals here @ ~£20/month for 10Mbit/s/1.35Mbit/s. Sounds a bit high for ~25Mbit/s though as the fibre "deals" (a.k.a. introductory 18- or 24-month contracts) here aren't that much more money than ADSL & offer decent speeds.

If I want faster internet, there's always a couple of the locals; there I can get double or approximately quadruple bandwidth compared to home.

It was pretty bad in Nairobi, at least before they put the undersea fibre-optic cables in to Mombasa in around 2007 or 2008. Using the machines in the Internet Cafés was like pulling teeth. Had to load every email page twice to get it to display correctly. Could have gotten a better connection through Safaricom for around 2000KSH (roughly £18-£19 IIRC) per month but wasn't sure how long I'd be there that time. It would have been worth it if I'd taken a laptop. Could have provided my host with a link, as she had a computer, & saved a few shillings on the rent .. maybe enough to pay for a few drinks.

[Pierre]

and they did it:
ie: the Kangaroo Valley Broadband Network (KVBN) and it’s all thanks to a crowd funding campaign.
https://www.southcoastregister.com.au/s ... d-network/
Kangaroo Valley residents pay $120,000 for their own broadband network

- The campaign had a dollar target of $120,000 and subscriber target of 120.

- on Tuesday afternoon, the target was met, and the Kangaroo Valley Broadband Network (KVBN) finally became a reality.

[Portreve]

I don't know if this is precisely the right discussion thread for this, but I think some history is in order.

Most folks probably know (and anybody can simply google) Alexander Gram Bell, who was the pioneer behind the telephone. Eventually, a "telephone company" would be set up called, simply enough, the "Bell Telephone Company". Here's a Wikipedia article for those who really want to delve into the details, but the simplistic version is that eventually AT&T pretty much took over and thereafter was the phone company across the U.S.

Back in the day, you did not own a telephone. You rented one, along with the service itself. You were completely at the mercy of AT&T and their company rules, which essentially had the force of law. You could ONLY connect AT&T-supplied equipment up to the network. Most if not all calls cost you some amount of money. Nobody else was allowed to set up phone service. Given costs of phone calls, people would record an entire conversation they wanted to have with someone else, the other person would do likewise, and then one would call the other, and each play the recording at a greatly sped-up rate, thereby reducing the length of the phone call. If AT&T caught you doing this, you'd lose your phone service (or, possibly, pay some sort of fine) and, of course, if you lost your phone service, that was it. You had nowhere else to go, so you'd just be out of luck.

There was an anti-trust lawsuit brought, which (tl;dr) resulted in the breakup of AT&T in 1982 into a group of separate phone companies, collectively known as "Baby Bells" in reference to the original Bell Telephone Company.

• As a quick side-note and tangent, you folks might be interested to read up on something called "phone phreaking" whose heyday was during the 1970s and stretched into the early-mid 1980s. To this day, there's a church bulletin-sized (a.k.a. 5 1/2" x 8 1/2", or 14cm x 21.6cm) magazine called simply "2600" which talks not so much about the phone network any more, but the broader issues of technology, how it can be leveraged, various exploits found and how you can either make use of them or protect yourself against them, etc., and it takes its name from what was essentially the genesis of the phreaking movement.

Anyhow, the phone networks of every country which had gotten phone service back then were analog, and by the 1960s with the advent of packet-switching and the development of digital circuitry, there began an effort to migrate from the analog system, which was eventually realized by the mid 1980s. However, because there were certain basic standards maintained for purposes of backwards compatibility with hardware then in use, the U.S.'s Plain Old Telephone System (or POTS) network turned into a patchwork quilt of different systems, equipment, etc. And because things like dial-up BBSs and later public access to the Internet were not contemplated, there's been lots and lots of basically work-arounds. This, of course, has complicated the heck out of trying to use our existing network for broadband access. I don't know, but I would not be surprised to hear equivalent horror stories from other countries on this subject.

[Portreve]

Now, the reason I brought up the history (and broke this into two posts) is I wanted to give some context to my own history of access to high-speed Internet.

My parents retired and we moved to Florida in 1982. Since then, there have been a series of companies which ran the phone service in this state: United Telephone, United Telephone of Florida, Sprint, Embarq, and now finally CenturyLink. DSL really hadn't come into existence until after Sprint had taken over Florida's portion of the POTS network. In the city I moved to, in fact in the general area I moved to, as various different "new" services came into existence, like call forwarding and caller ID, etc., what Central Office and other down-stream equipment boxes serviced your area determined if you could get those services. I have vivid memories to this day of knowing people who, even in the late 90s/early 2000s, could not get Caller ID simply because the equipment servicing their area did not support that capability and could not be made to support it, and of course Sprint could not be bothered to change the equipment out to provide those services.

When DSL first started to become pretty broadly available in the early 2000s, I wanted to get it. However, the town I live in had areas where you just couldn't. At the time, I lived in a 60s era condominium that was situated in one of those dead spots. I could get (and had, obviously) standard phone service. But, I couldn't get DSL. In fact, Sprint often didn't even know which customers could get DSL and which ones couldn't until they tried to provide it, and then finally they'd discover there was equipment in the way which prevented it. I mean, how can a company not even know about its own network? Anyhow, Time Warner (who was then my area's cable provider) had cable modem service. Unfortunately, my building had old-school RG-59, and so the drop in signal strength and increase in noise along the hundreds of linear feet between the cable company's point of entry and my apartment meant I could not get their service.

I didn't wind up getting high speed Internet until 2004, when I moved into my current home.

[andyO]

Hope those of you still putting up with the raw end of the deal don't have to wait too much longer. 5G is probably not the answer; long-range WiFi stations likely a better solution, even if it means the householders & businesses needing a small dish or other suitable antenna for the service. It reminds me of a failed wireless telephone service in the UK, whose technology would have been ideal for adaptation to digital communications such as broadband, had it survived. I forget the name of the company though there are still some antennas around.

I think you were talking about Ionica? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionica_(company)

[Faust]

and they did it:
ie: the Kangaroo Valley Broadband Network (KVBN) and it’s all thanks to a crowd funding campaign.
.....

Superb !
Congratulations to all concerned .
It warms my heart to see people-power defeat the greedy corporate entities ... the Zaibatsus .

I see adverts from a major ISP saying " Enjoy fiber-optic broadband speeds right now " ,
and it is total BS .
Sure , they have fiber up to the cabinet in the street , but only copper to all the residential addresses .
Only new-built residences have any chance of getting fiber right into the home .

[AZgl1800]

Back when I lived in Phoenix, Arizona we had Cox Cable and they brought the fiber right up to the house, installed the modem in a grey box on the outside wall, then CAT-5 to my jack where I plugged in my PC's modem CAT-5

when I left there in 2010, my PC enjoyed 50Mbps down and around half of that up? can't remember the up speeds.

now, in old rural outback, I am lucky to be within 5,000 feet of the Central Office that feeds my little community of 1,000 homes and copper is where it is at.....

this is what I can see, 10.5 at best and as low as a 1/3rd of that at times. Uploads are never better than 0.9Kbps

[Portreve]

I see adverts from a major ISP saying " Enjoy fiber-optic broadband speeds right now " ,
and it is total BS .
Sure , they have fiber up to the cabinet in the street , but only copper to all the residential addresses .
Only new-built residences have any chance of getting fiber right into the home .

Exactly.

I would be willing to bet S.W. Florida has a very modest amount of fiber in the ground, and that's probably just from the various backbones to Central Offices (or COs). I have never heard of any residence or business in this area which has fiber running to it. Maybe the school district and our local hospital network has fiber running to them but I can't imagine it would be much more extensive than that.

Nevertheless, CenturyLink is advertising fiber and 1Gbps service. No way in hell. Besides, given how crappy the DSL network is, and that includes such things as rack-mounted gear that CL has no way to remote log-in to (the boxes can only be physically turned off and back on, and cabling switched from one port to another in evidently quite a number of cases here in Florida) the idea they are rolling out fiber is ludicrous. Besides, my job has me driving quite literally all over S.W. Florida, and if there was some massive upgrade project going on (which would have to happen) I would know about it.

I had DSL service for about a year. It was the crappiest thing I'd ever seen. My dial-up connections of old, speed aside, were at least as good as the DSL service I got. Now, mind you I live about 488 meters (give or take) from the boxes that service my area. They, in turn, are around 4.8 km from the nearest CO (yes, I know where this area's COs are located... ) and the best I was able to get from them was a 10Mbps throttled down to 8Mbps for stability connection. Meaning, I could not even get the level of service I was paying for (I agreed to this in advance; this was not a nefarious act on CenturyLink's part). But even IF I had gotten full speed, I was still only able to get about .75Mbps up. You had to go to their top tier of service (which I could not get) to see above 1 Mbps.

With Comcast previously, on a 5Mbps connection, I had 2 up, and often 3. Seriously?

[AZgl1800]

I have a Verizon JetPack 5g MiFi modem which I use sparingly, save it for when I am out of town, as my plan is 4gB/month... ( 5g has not rolled out yet, I just have the latest model MiFi modem. )

I did test a while back when staying in a hotel with crappy WiFi service....
I ended up using the MiFi modem the entire weekend....
The motel at best, would give me 1.5MBps down and ~300Kbps up.

VZW OTH gave me this:

Dnloads from 13+ to 30 Mbps
Uploads consistently 5.0+Mbps





If, I could afford it, I would stay on VZW MiFi

[HaveaMint]

I pay about $63 a month (€54 / AUS$85) for 25 MB/2MB cable Internet from Comcast. In my experience, they offer a service which is significantly more reliable than DSL, much of this having to do with bothering to update the physical layer of their network.

Now, the DSL carrier in my area is touting Fiber service, and I'm like “Really? You're full of **** because there's no fiber in the ground around here going out to people's homes.”

They run fibre on the poles where I live, not buried.

netspeed.jpg

[Portreve]

The villagers who DIYed some of the fastest internet in the UK – video

https://www.theguardian.com/global/vide ... e-uk-video


Love this...

Wow...It's amazing. I love this kind of people.

That's pretty cool. Then again, if you have a committed group of folk who are willing to undertake a project, it's amazing what can be accomplished.

I love the so-called lo-fi music in that video. I've lately been getting into more of that groove because of being introduced to it with some of the YouTube channels I've been watching, particularly How Ridiculous. Australians are some of the coolest people on Earth.

[Pierre]

Are AT&T and Verizon fleecing rural America?

$60 a month for 10 Mbps DSL broadband? That’s the same price AT&T charges for its 50 Mbps U-verse service:
https://www.cnet.com/news/are-at-t-and- ... d=55107043
does make you wonder, though .. .. ..

the thing is - - that My Location is between Two Country Town's, both of which have adsl2 available,
& I'm not able to connect,, despite the fact that my House Telephone is connected to one of those exchanges.
so - - I'm currently using Mobile-BroadBand as my Internet Connection.
- - Yeah - - it's a limited bandwidth / data available /month.

[Portreve]

Are AT&T and Verizon fleecing rural America?

$60 a month for 10 Mbps DSL broadband? That’s the same price AT&T charges for its 50 Mbps U-verse service:
https://www.cnet.com/news/are-at-t-and- ... d=55107043
does make you wonder, though .. .. ..

I love how business spokespeople either honestly believe what they're saying or knowingly misuse economic terminology, and in either event don't exactly present a completely accurate picture.

I completely understand that in a lower population density area, your cost per customer will increase because there's more to it than just having the physical network layer present. Even if 100% of the grid was identical in maintenance costs, there's fewer customers to amortize the costs across. Obviously, different areas present different challenges. However, the problem with that is the Government long ago built in subsidies to push the base telco grid out to everywhere, which is why there's rural surcharges on everyone's telco bill.

However, what I just said by itself is an incomplete picture. You also need to understand that traditional telco service providers (i.e. not Cox, Comcast, Time-Warner, etc., or fiber, etc.) are covered by regulatory compliance laws. Amongst those laws are a requirements that anywhere with telco (i.e. telephone) service must always have that service available, no matter what. In other words, absent catastrophic natural disasters, the service must be completely reliable and continuously present. If you ever go into or see photos of the insides of telephone central offices, you'll note the equipment is highly duplicative to provide insane amounts of redundancy. Moreover, CO buildings themselves are built to be as close to bulletproof as is humanly possible. The trade-off is quality of service is allowed to slide, so long as there is service. Therefore, a noisy telephone line is acceptable because there's still a dial tone and you can still physically use it.

The point I'm trying to make is there are a LOT of extra costs for telco providers which, for example, do not exist for non-traditional services, such as cable or fiber. That said, these companies (AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, etc.) are still having to remain in compliance overall because of the continuing presence of the POTS grid and their respective business's connection to it.

There's been a constant upgrading of our POTS network over the decades; however, it often has not really been as fast as many of us would like. Naturally, higher-density areas have been prioritized because of cost amortization. In an ideal world, we would have very heavy-duty trunking networks laid with heavily-protected fiber (and no copper) to cover everywhere, but thus far nobody's willing to stump up the cost to do so, and in my view nobody probably ever will. We've got the hodge-podge POTS physical layer that we do as a result of this reality, and I suppose all things being equal we should consider ourselves lucky that thus far it works as well as it does.

Without trying to get into politics here (for obvious reasons) there is a political reality here related to infrastructure upgrades, with massive philosophical differences between the various political groups in the U.S. about who's responsibility the grid is, who should be financing it and on what basis, etc. In addition to that, it's always been easier to kick the can down the road so that current office holders get to escape having to deal with personal ties to government and/or private sector spending which might be considered unpopular.

[powerwagon75]

We too live in a fairly rural area, with limited choices. Live just outside a small town, and was just close enough to give DSL a go when we moved here back in '03. That service was horrible. Streaming/videos were pretty much unbearable. Eventually, went with an independent provider, and got hooked up with wireless internet for $55/month, at 15/5 MB/s. Unfortunately, those numbers were frequently unattainable, but at least could stream media. Regular issues with the throttling, outages, etc, got to be old hack.

This spring, another company was working up by the highway (we live not quite a 1/4 mile off the highway) on installing fiber to the businesses and residences up there. I stopped and found the guy in charge and inquired as to why they didn't ask me if I wanted in. I would have to pay the difference on top of the standard install fee for the extra distance to cut-in fiber down to the house. (which wasn't that much, so I said let's do it!) After a lengthy delay, they finally got permit approval to do our service.

We are paying about $23 more per month now, but are paying for 75/75 MB/s. Had it about a month now, and very pleased so far. Its more than I would have liked to pay per month, but considering the local independent alternatives, it was the best deal by far. Got a fiber line all the way to my basement, where they installed an ONT box/UPS, and then about 40 foot of cable up to the router. Below is a typical speed test result. The slow one is showing what happens when I turn Opera's VPN on, and the other is where it has been rock solid since install.

Speed_results.png

[AZgl1800]

I tried to do the same thing when Google laid a fiber optic cable right down the highway which abuts my property.

Only needed about 500ft of buried fiber optic, but the contractor would not even discuss it with me....
so, I have to get along with DSL at 10/1 Mbps if I am lucky.