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build your own line of site net by piggybacking on your neighbour’s tower. You may even need to put up another tower to bridge the gap (power it with solar). But in the end you’ll be best off (if your neighbour will play ball).

It’s not available yet, but the FCC is testing the possibility of free, nationwide wireless Internet using radio spectrum. The explicit reason for this service is to reach rural communities that are under-served by current options (as you’ve discovered). It looks to still be two years away, or more. But help is- possibly -on the way, eventually.

I wrote more about it, including the one BIG downside (read: censorship) right now, for the Huffington Post.

I’m from Vermont, and just outside of town, we’re in the same boat. We went with Hughesnet, which is terrible. It may be better than dialup (most of the time), but damn. It’s bad.

We pay for the second level, so we get 1Mbps down and 128Kbps up (I think it may have recently changed to get a little faster), but it hardly ever is actually that fast.

We believe (though it’s tough to prove, obviously) that they are specifically limiting us. It seems that if you are a heavy user (within the ridiculously small bounds; 375 MB per 24 hrs), they try to limit you by giving you slower speeds. We get at most 800kbps down in the early morning, and then slower throughout the day until it’s about 100k or lower past 6PM. It’s really not good, but if its all you have, its all you have.

Sounds like your stuck back in dial-up land. Or maybe you can hook up one of those pringle can antennae.

Though if you’re looking for the simple life, perhaps you don’t need so much “speed” ;)

Sorry to hear of your troubles, but I can’t say I’m overly sorry. Now you may understands the problem of having to take HighRise offline, no?

Ah HA! I knew you were rich as hell! Why don’t you just have have a telco built nearby and tied into a nearby fiber backbone? Or possibly have a couple of your Aston Martins act as repeaters to get a wireless signal back to the nearest town? ;)

But seriously, you can always pay to have cable run out to the place. My parents are looking to move to West Virginia soon and I believe it was $1,000 to run cable to the house, but it was only a few thousand feet from the nearest neighbor’s house. I’m assuming you’ll have to go a little farther than that…

Can you piggyback off the neighbor’s wireless so that you yourself don’t actually need line-of-sight to the towers? What about a minimalist tower/utility pole that’s high enough to get line-of-sight to the neighbor?

Good luck with that. My parents were lucky enough to get 256k (more like 128k) DSL on our farm back a few years, but we are the last people on our road to have it and we’re little more than four miles away from town.

Perhaps a little rural ISP is in order? You could create a consortium of local users who would pay a set amount up-front to create the network, then a yearly amount for upkeep and service. That is all totally dependent on your neighbors, though. Good luck!

This might not be one of the answers you’re looking for, and I know it’s a hard thing for us geeks to imagine happening, but my suggestion is to not work when you’re there. It might mean that you’ll spend less time there, if you can’t do what you need with just e-mail and offline coding, if you code, but in the end you’ll end up with a place that has NOTHING to do with work. Like I said, this answer might not be what you’re looking for, but I wish I had a place that had nothing to do with work, where I could just relax.

Welcome to my professional life. Working for a Farm Credit Services lender in Missouri (even hillier than WI) and collaborating with the FCS in WI, let’s just say we battle this daily for not just our offices in Podunk, but our customers as well.

Per the commenter above wanting to rib you about taking BaseCamp offline, I guess that’s one point I’d like to make – offline mode is useful in some situations.

And here’s another point – you never mentioned (cough) dial-up (cough). I want to be clear – you don’t try to surf the ‘Net or do anything else over low-bandwidth except ONE THING – remote desktop (with user experience settings set WAY low) to something that’s on higher bandwidth. TightVNC comes to mind. The point being diff’ing changed pixels on a screen and shipping those compressed over low-bandwidth is better now than trying to do anything else on that bandwidth, like actually serving up a rich Web app.

If your neighbor is willing, you could look into a mesh networking product, something like this:

http://meraki.com/products_services/hardware/outdoor

Get one for you, and one for your neighbor. Your neighbor plugs this into his network, and your device connects to his. You piggy back off his service, and you guys could split the bill.

I am just learning about ham radio but apparently you can get internet via ham radio. But as a beginner in ham radio, I am not a very reliable source on how or where or what.

Telco providers like Verizon, for example, will sometimes waive the cost of provisioning the line (T1 minimum) in favor of 1- or 2-year contract at something like $350/mo.

Likewise, cable providers will do the same, if there is surrounding community interest.

On both accounts, there needs to be more than one customer in line. It doesn’t sound like that’s your situation.

In every house I grew up in, cable never passed by. We’d have a couple local channels over the antenna. While in college, my parents got a dish for television. Whenever I was home I was stuck with dialup, and my mom continues to use dialup. (She and my father are about to relocate, and are looking forward to cable/broadband.)

There are rumors of a line-of-sight solution starting up, and she’s been on their list if they reach her, but that’s the only real option. A friend up there (in rural Northern New York) uses HughesNet and HATES it. Even when the service is up, there are ridiculous bandwidth caps. It flakes out a lot.

I’ve advised both my mom and friend to get a card from Verizon for their laptops. Unlike your place, they do have Verizon coverage.

My real advice: Always research your broadband options before closing the deal. Unless you’re really looking to get away from it all.

Hey Jason,

I grew up in rural Wisconsin myself, up near Green Bay in Door County. My neighbors down the block could get Cable, as Charter ran it up the side of the county. I, on the other hand, was stuck with a slow phone line (so no DSL ), no cable access (it was right across the street!), no wireless access, and a horrible satellite option. Needless to say, I spent most of my high school days at the library…

http://www.wildblue.com/

or is that hughs?

You could try getting WildBlue satellite internet. It does still require a contract, but I think it’s at least faster than HughesNet.

In Africa, 3G was my best option. Wireless router accepting an HSDPA card (which had a mobile SIM inside) powered the LAN and there was much rejoicing.

This suggestion falls into the “making the best of a bad situation” category, but you may want to invest in a router with multiple WLAN bonding capability (or try to set this up yourself with a linux box and a couple NICs).

You could bond together your EDGE modem and Satellite to try to improve things.

- Mike

Is clearwire available down there? I’m over in Eau Claire Wisconsin and I know they are slowly moving eastward, I just don’t know if they are in your zip yet.

ClearWire

After looking at the coverage map, its not even close yet…

While I think the option of “not working at that house, period” is a pretty good solution, the Pringles “cantenna” idea could work: If all you need is line of sight over that hill, a couple of cheap wifi routers/repeaters could work OK.

Of course, you may not be able to string them up where you need them etc., but barring that, it could work. Your neighbor has the actual antenna, and connection, and you just use the wifi bridge.

Alternatively, you turn all hAx0r and hack the nearest military satellite with a satellite dish made out of an oil drum.

Further alternatives:
- Messenger pigeons
- Smoke signals
- Pony Express

(I kid, I kid. I can’t even get a reliable mobile phone signal, forget EDGE , at my country house – and that’s in Denmark, which has massive IT penetration and is generally a small, flat country)

you can see about ISDN . It’s only 128Kbps, but faster than dialup.

Maybe you should talk to David about offline access to your apps? That would make things less painful ;-)

“ The idea of offline web applications is getting an undue amount of attention. Which is bizarre when you look at how availability of connectivity is ever increasing. EVDO cards, city-wide wifis, iPhones, Blackberry’s. There are so many ways to get online these days that the excitement for offline is truly puzzling.” link

My parents have Hughes.net and it is terrible. Even on its best day, it’s only slightly better than dial up. The speeds are terribly slow and customer service is even worse. I stay with them once a month for business trips to the area and almost always manage to max out their daily allowance in just the few hours I’m there.

Avoid Hughes like the plague. No internet is better than internet served up by those guys.

got the same issue with a farm in north carolina. satellite works ok down, but not so good up. we can have t1 run, but have to pay to get it dropped from the road to the house, which is expensive. (3/4 mile to the road) eventually i plan to end up there full time, at which time i’ll go that route.

i like the idea of dropping a t1 into your loc and reselling to others who might be in the same situation. find an enterprising young’in who’s interested in selling off the excess and feeding your chicken and you’re set. (cause fresh eggs rock.) not sure how to get connections to others from you, but i’m sure there are some geniuses out there that have the answer. geniuses? how do you do this?

I run a Wireless ISP in Texas and have also been a ham for 12 years. Your best bet in terms of overall price and connection speed/latency will be to work something out with your neighbor and their WISP . I have a few small repeaters on a few of my customers houses where it lets me pick up a few additional customers nearby.

Give them both a call and see what you can work out.

Not available yet, but when it is, broadband over power lines will be your solution.

You can just create a wifi daisy chain w/ custom directional antennas up to a line of sight somewhere, or better yet, a really long network cable. Actually if you have line of sight with a hill that does have line of sight, you can probably create some sort of radio redirector:

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/31/defcon-wifi-shootout.html

8 years ago I lived in a small city about 10 miles from AOL and UUNET world headquarters, and still couldn’t get broadband. ISDN actually worked pretty well. It’s 4X the speed of dial up and instant on for all practical purposes. It’s old technology and tends to be rock solid. The hardest part may be finding somebody at the phone company that knows anything about it.

Try the google solution

http://www.google.com/tisp/

This sounds like something I might read on your blog, but how about disconnecting for a while? Keep a to-do (ta-da) list of problems that need Deep Thought™, not instant and overwhelming bandwidth. Check your email over dialup a few times a day. The constraints are speaking to you. Listen.

If you really don’t want the satellite at all, it does sound like Wireless is your best bet.

Hard to tell without knowing your location, but it shouldn’t be impossible to do something about your line of site issues. A tower in between, a tower on your property, a repeater unit set up with a neighbour—all valid options depending on the terrain. You can power via solar, and maybe even work out something with neighbours to help them too.

All a bit vague of course, but they should definitely be options.

I’d try working with your neighbour and go wireless. Cringely has a good article of what he tried: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2002/pulpit_20020207_000721.html

I’ve got a hundred foot tower on my rural property to get above the tree line so I can get a line of site. I wouldn’t even consider satellite for the reason you mention. Caps, lag, cost etc.

What about plain old modem + 56k, maybe just enough for syn with repo + mail reading

Creative solution? Just put a pail of milk and pile of cow shit in the office – it will feel like you’re really in the Wisconsin countryside after a while.

Note to self: Start a blog as a stealth tactic in accruing one’s own unpaid board of advisers. Milk it, J!

To be blunt, way to buy a house!

Seriously, I spent many months researching before we bought our house, to make sure we’d get Verizon FiOS /and/ high speed cable and full signal from all four major cell carrier in addition to all our regular family needs—safety, great publics schools, proximity to even better private schools, etc., etc., etc.

Speaking from experience: No internets is better than slow or intermittent internet. If you don’t have it at all you’ll find ways to be productive offline and discover you don’t need it. If you do have it but it’s slow, it’s going to be frustrating and get in your way more than it helps.

DON ’T GET HUGHESNET !!!

I’m the guy in rural Northern New York Mark talked about above… I use HughesNet and yes, I HATE it! I pay a premium fee for the 1.5 MB connection, but it only averages around 1 MB (WHEN IT WORKS CORRECTLY ). Keep in mind that the UPLOAD speeds are horrible as well… I swear sometimes I’d like to keep my Earthlink dial up account active just so Coda doesn’t constantly give me fits. The customer service is absolutely horrible. You are limited by the “Fair chuckle Access Policy”. With my account, I am “allowed” 500 MB in a 24 hour period… and I’ve learned the hard way, that the 24-hour period isn’t from 7am – 7am… it’s shifts to whatever way they need it to.

Anyway… If you’re stuck with no other options, I’ve heard that WildBlue at least has customer service that speaks fluent english.

Don’t build a tower, get a weather balloon!

This is interesting since I’ve bought 40 acres to build on in SE Wyoming and it has pretty much no hope of cable or DSL . Ever. My plan was a local line-of-sight/tower ISP , so thanks for the heads up about that. This post’s comments will probably prove helpful to several people like myself.

You know, dialup isn’t THAT bad. Might give you more appreciation for making fast-loading websites.

I know it’s only a few kB/s, but it’s often good enough for pure work purposes.

Satellite wasn’t that bad for me… used it for 8 months in VT when the house was just a little too far away for cable. Yeah, latency is a slight nuisance, but overall, the signal was reliable. Downside: expensive equipment, you can’t install yourself, and the service is pricey.

I read something (I thought it was on I, Cringely) where a guy had the telco install a dark line (no phone service like they used to use for alarm systems) between his house and the isp. He used special modems at either end and was getting good results. It wasn’t as fast as a T1 but was faster than dialup. I have used my google fu to no avail. Anyone else remember this crazy article?

My family lives in a rural area south of Dallas and is subject to much the same limitations. They have settled with HughesNet, but hate it. And my experience, having used it briefly, is even worse than theirs. The limits and throttling is precisely as horrendous as advertised. And the latency and throughput is possibly worse. Uploads are particularly troublesome. One option posed to them when they were shopping around was installing a tower on their property. While line of sight may be an issue in terms of contact with a central hub, it’s apparently possible to relay from a nearer neighboring tower, and so potentially overcome some of the local geographical concerns. Even if it was a matter of installing two towers, this would seem to be preferable to the alternative. I look forward to hearing how you ultimately resolve this issue, I hope this helps. Good luck.

How about RONJA ? That’ll get you about 1 mile of (optical) range. Just don’t plan on using it during a snowstorm…

(As Carl indicates, you might be able to bribe a cable company or telco to run a line out to you. You’ll have to foot the bill for construction, of course.)

@ratchetcat: here’s the thing: light travels in straight line, just line radio waves. No wireless line of sight—> definitely not a Ronja line of sight.

A friend of mine in high school had an IDSL line. He lived in the mountains where DSL and cable dare not tread.

It was ridiculously fast. It was synchronous 128k, but the ping times were so low that unless you’re streaming video or something you’d think you were on fiber. It cost like $80/mo 6 years ago.

Hi there,

your best bet is to connect to your neighbor. But it’s all about reliability of the setup. BEtter if you use fiber to link with him — this will be the most solid solution but expensive one. Next one is to use end-to-end xDSL modems, they can give you up to 4-6 Mbits on 2 wires cable reaching a number of kilometers (we use it in Russia for telecom operations). If it’s less then 100 meters between the houses you can use standard network equipment (I guess you already considered that). And the most faulty solution in case of clear sight between your house and neighbors house is WiFi with directional antenna or even an IR link. But this can work differently depending on weather conditions.

I’d go for edge myself. After all, broadband is hardly a requirement – you’d still be able to send and get email, use IM and even voip (back in the days of 54kb modems, voip for yahoo messenger used to work.. kinda). Besides, you probably will be living there for a couple of weeks a year, which makes lack of internet pretty bearable.

Wouldn’t this be a great opportunity to not worry about connecting to the ‘Net? :) Just enough speed to pick up your email, a bit of surfing etc.

I’d go with ISDN .

Another vote for ISDN , you can even see if anyone will provide you with a PRI line which will give you nearly 2 Meg of bandwidth, costs quite a bit more than the the BRI lines that operate at 128k though.

Don’t mean to be rude, but if you bought a “sometimes” house in the country side to be able to recharge and calm down, why would you want internet at all?

Don’t move to the country and then moan its not like the city.

Welcome to dialup, its not that bad. You’ve just been spoilt

Why not sell the house and buy another one that’s got the internet access you desire?

In 1999 I moved out to a 21 acre horse farm down two miles of dirt road. I also had no broadband. I used DirecPC (now HughesNet) for awhile and it was barely better than dial-up for my purposes. I ended up setting up a SOCKS proxy on a Windows box in order to make anything work from my non-Windows systems, and the download limits are pretty draconian. Wild Blue is supposed to be better, but I never tried it (the latency made even dial-up seem like a good idea). I ended up using sneakernet from the network at the office to move large files and just lived on dial-up.

If you can work something out with your neighbor, as others have suggested, that is probably best. One of my neighbors was an early employee of Red Hat (4 or 5, I forget) so he has greater means than me, and he had two T1s coming into his farm. It was close to $1000/month, though. We looked into a point-to-point wireless link but could never get the height we needed.

The local carrier here was Sprint, who could have cared less about us, but with their Nextel acquisition they sold that business to Embarq who has been very responsive. We were able to get 50 signatures from people in the area and Embarq put in a DSLAM , so I now have DSL . I don’t know your situation but something similar might be possible.

You could check this: http://www.telkonet.com/

Internet through the power lines.

A friend of mine had this problem in Michigan recently. He ended up building a radio tower to solve his problem. His blog has info and pictures.

@Peter – Oops. Thanks. Not sure how I missed that there was no LOS …

We use Hughes in rural New Hampshire everyday where we live. It’s slow and expensive, but it gets the job done. One note: You got the download limit wrong – it’s 425 Mb/day. Yup, still too little but if you’re careful about videos and automatic downloads/updates, you should be fine.

As for speed, it varies from 1.5 Mbps (7am) to 300 Kbps (9pm) depending on time of day and usage (and we also pay for the most expensive plan). When you get throttled, it’s basically one page a minute so you have to keep an eye on your usage using a something like Netmeter. I’ve found their off-shore customer service mostly helpful except when throttled. Then there’s nothing they can do, not even when you escalate.

All in all, if HughesNet is your only choice, it’s tolerable. But it will certainly make you appreciate the connection back in reality.

P.s. I’ll probably forget to check back here. If you have any questions feel free to email.

I’ve used HughsNet through a reseller here in Canada and it’s better than dialup. And that’s the only good thing I have to say about it. Better than dial-up not so much for the speed but for the fact that it’s always on.

Except when it rains, of course. Or if it gets very windy.

We got DSL at that location recently and I ran 100mph to get it.

So, it was slow (but I think generally faster than dial-up), very expensive, had an 18 month contract and poor customer service.

But it was the only thing available, so…

You’ll need to get the highest package you might require, because if you go over the limit and they throttle you back, it’s painful.

JF:

Umm, the tower didn’t cost me anything, really. My dad-in-law owns a tower construction company and he had an old one lying around the shop. It pays to marry well.

It’s a metal tower and I think it would have run me at least $5000 to have it installed but that’s pure guesswork. This particular tower required a poured concrete foundation (similar to what Larry’s pal in Michigan has). I’m in the woods so a tower with wire supports was out of the question.

Sorry I can’t help more.

Is there a way to add something to the windmill to gain a bit more height? If you only need 20ft extra, you should be able to rig something from there.

It might also pay to have the ISP scout your property. They might be able to make some suggestions. I think this is usually a free service. It was for me anyway.

@carl: I think the Cringely article you’re thinking of is this one: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2001/pulpit_20010823_000703.html.

That might work as well if you can get a hard connection to your neighbour without too much digging up of the countryside. But excavator rental is fairly cheap if you want to do the work yourself.

One last thought: If you have to use VPN , definitely don’t go with satellite. Apparently, the satellite lag screws up or doesn’t even allow VPN connections. This was the final nail in the coffin for satellite for me. I need to use VPN .

we’re lucky to have cable access at our place in VT, DSL is not an option for us yet as we’re about 4 miles out of town.

Other rural folks I know have been moving to WildBlue satellite and seem happy with it.

I have a several friends living in South Central Wisconsin (less hill, more densely populated). And for them living in rural areas they’ve used DirectTV / Wild Blue as someone else had mentioned…. I can’t say they RAVE about it. But its seems respectable… my brother is on it and routinely does PeerNetwork downloading (legally of course…) but not WFH .

I too had heard through friends and work peers that HughsNet was not good. AFAIK Wild Blue is not Hughes

Speaking as a native rural Wisconsinite, if you do decide to try to work something out with your neighbor here’s one very important piece of advice: take those Illinois license plates off your car before you go to see him or her. Seriously. Many people in southern rural Wisconsin have no sympathy for the recent influx of cultural tourists from the Chicago area.

God help you if there’s farmland attached to this house. Farmers in the area will crucify you if there’s usable farmland that you’re not using or renting out.

Southwestern Wisconsin is particularly hilly. It’s extremely beautiful and secluded, but you’ve found the down side of that is non-existent infrastructure and difficult terrain to deploy cellular services over. I’m betting you’ll have to wait 2-3 years for US Cellular to get 3G access out there. There are not Verizon or Sprint: they move very slowly. You may not want to believe this, but there just is not a lot of demand for high speed wireless in rural areas. People balk at paying $20 a month for dial up.

Two words: carrier pigeons.

I would try Wireless ISP : No line of sight if my neighbor would let me share his Internet connection. I would connect to my neighbor using custom means (optical line, wireless, direct cable, whatever).

Of course I don’t know how far away this neighbor is.

Years ago, a buddy of mine had this setup where two dial-up modems worked in parallel to double the speed.

Have you actually plugged a modem in to check if you’re even in the 90s as far as speeds go? My parents were never able to reach even a solid 28.8 with their phone line in a rural area. They’re also just out of range of the local line of sight ISP and recently were offered DSL but judging by some use, it’s obviously a pretty lossy connection and far below the advertised speed.

I work for a company that has a large rural client base and WildBlue seems to have a foothold. You’re going to deal with the satellite latency, though. It’s amazing how few web resources ever mention developing for high latency connections—have you thought about turning this into a learning experience?

Shotgun modem. Basically, you tie two 56k modems together over two phone lines.

It ain’t pretty, but you’ll at least get marginally tolerable speed for the basics.

Singing with the choir here . . . but I would avoid Hughesnet. I’ve never been so frustrated with a company. We are forced to use them here outside of, not so rural, Lake Geneva, WI. Good luck. If you come up with something that works, please let us know.

-Chris

A hundred years ago it was A.M. radio making the slow crawl into the sticks.

Light up the bbq and forget the business.

My father was in the same situation (in Michigan) they ended up paying the phone company to run DSL up the road (about 1/2 mile) because it was the only option.

I have a friend who used HughesNet for a while. He ended up dropping it because dial-up felt faster in most of the ways he used the Internet.

The latency is a killer for anything where you do a lot of interaction. You basically have 1/4 second from you to the satellite and 1/4 second from the satellite to the destination. Then the same for a response. That’s a full second, not including any other delays routing across the Internet.

My friend is now using a wireless service, but as others have mentioned, he had to put up a large metal tower to get line of sight.

An additional problem regarding HughesNet comes from my experience on the provider side. I’m part of a small business that runs a Web-based service. It is very clear that HughesNet is running everyone through flawed proxy servers. We’ve tracked it down with customers having problems and can see where HughesNet is mangling content.

Hughes won’t even talk to us because we’re not their customer. They seem to have no way to report such errors, even though we have full details of the problem.

We’ve unfortunately had to tell those customers that we can’t do business with them as long as they use Hughes.

BTW , @Daniel and @Ryan, regarding carrier pigeons: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt

Quoting you: “Emergency is the only urgency. Almost anything else can wait a few days.”

I would combine the advice from you and Alessio, and use the 56k in the case of “emergency”. :)

As someone mentioned above, start the Rural Broadband Coop.

Happened in Ireland recently, in West Cork, where the telcos wouldn’t justify the investment in the required infrastructure: http://www.digitalforge.ie/

Lar

Use EDGE to deal with GMail, Campfire chats, IM, SSH , etc – and skip watching the YouTube videos or downloading Linux ISOs for a while. Then hopefully that promised 3G network to be rolled out “early next year” will be in town and you can go to wireless broadband. This is the “least effort expended” plan, of course ;-)

Don’t use satellite. It will frustrate you. Have seen it in work and it isn’t great.

ISDN is OK, but it is frustratingly slow at times. And it’s overpriced, or was as of a couple years ago.

I’d check if there’s anyone else doing DSL out there. I have 35 acres well outside Denver and we’re well beyond the 18k ft limit, but there are lots of repeaters now and Qwest has DSL out here.

We had wireless at one point and it worked well. I would probably first check if you can get your neighbor to help you out and put a 2nd dish on his house, maybe you pay him $200 a year or something. Then repeat it to your house.

I’d also look at Windmill towers. You can get a guyed 100’ tower for a reasonable price, wiring would probably be the big cost. Need power up there at the top. Here’s one http://www.affordable-solar.com/100.foot.tilt.up.guyed.tower.kit.bergey.htm, that’s $2700 + foundation, but if you can go lower, it seems 65’ is much more affordable ($900).

It’s a business expense. That doesn’t help your wallet now, but it can offset some other costs.

Hughesnet is bad, but I use it at a family vacation house nestled in redwoods a mile off HWY 1 in Northern California. The house has no landline service, no mobile service (closest is off-and-on service on HWY1 ), and no cable, so… satellite was the only way to stay in contact with the world. The bandwidth cap is good in that it forces you to relax, but trying to download a show off iTunes will kill your day’s allotment. ;-) (Fortunately, even after reaching the day’s cap there is enough connectivity to receive emails, but surfing is gone).

Hughesnet is bad, but its better than absolutely nothing, and its nice to have the option of internet service to even the most remote of places.

If you already have a data plan with your mobile carrier, and you will only be at the house a few times during the year, I would not even bother with getting additional service at the house…. at least not now. Wait until you actually spend time working from the house to see if it will be worth the hassle and expense. You may find out that you really only need (or want to use) email, text chat, and moderate web use which you may get by using your mobile card. (One less account; one less bill; one less contract).

good luck!

@Joshua I’m laughing over here in eastern Wisconsin because what you said about the Illinois plates is ironically very true. I’m wondering how it came about, maybe the Bears and Packers, that sounds logical.

@JF Change to Wisconsin plates, you will be safe in both states. Srsly.

@Joshua The only thing I could compare it to is attending Harley Davidson’s 100th anniversary with a Honda motorcycle. Then mix it with beer and ppl get scary…

Jason, don’t let them scare you. Wisconsin isn’t a scary place with people on the lookout for Illinois plates. You’ll be fine.

@Cary I came all the way back to say “Welcome to Wisconsin Jason Fried”. Don’t worry cops don’t look at Illinios plates either… hehe

P.S. Remember to wear orange during deer hunting season. Just a precaution, someone may use it as an excuse to ….. welcome you.

Jason – Before building a tower to gain line of site, get a good feel for the provider of that service. I lived up in the mountains of Colorado for 5 years, and the LOS provider was great for the first year… then he managed to pack the entire town onto his service and refused to buy more bandwidth to accommodate his new customers. Needless to say an entire town on one T1 pipe… might as well have been dialing up. I feel your pain! And as a Wisco native – Welcome!

That tower sounds like a lot of work but if you can afford it go for it ;)

Otherwise I say run a cable over the hill to the neighbor and pay his bill for him! (or 802.11n repeater or whatever is needed)

Good luck! Brian

If you’re near Dodgeville, just drop me a line any time you need high speed access. You bring the beer (this is WI you know) and I’ll provide the cheese and high-speed internet. Hope you don’t mind my wife and kids mingling about…

Congrats on your newly found peace and quiet! So go fishing dammit!

Make the best of it and work at work and when at home, be at peace … or program without the omni-present internet noise and get real work done.

But I feel your pain … I have FIOS at home and at the office, plus the Blackberry … I’d seriously feel disconnected with no connection at home.

A friend in a similar predicament built his own tower (60 feet) and wrote an article about his experience: http://icrontic.com/articles/man_builds_reception_tower

Hard to gauge the price too well though since he found the actual tower structure secondhand and had free access to concrete. :-/

Ah, to live in the real America ;-)

What about going through your cell phone provider? I was in the middle of nowhere, Illinois for a month this summer and relied on my Verizon Wireless data package to get connected to work. It was awesome – often faster than my DSL line at home.

No line of sight now? Well, you should be able to build something that can get there. You might need a repeater or make friends with another neighbor that has line of sight to you and a tower. Hey, if you buy their service and yours, it will still be pretty cheap and waaaay better than satellite.

AT&T makes an edge-router that uses GSM @ around 600kbits. It might be your best option. We have a warehouse in SoCal that has no DSL access and we are using one until a T-1 is built out in 3 months.

T-1; yea, that is the best bet, but as you stated, the build out will cost a bundle. Odds are your service will cost $500-$600/mo.

Satellite – Yes the speeds are terrible. Yes they are horrible in bad weather. But it’s a solution you find in a lot of farmer’s houses.

Line of sight – Building a tower will cost more than having the local pop build a T-1. But your service cost will be much lower over the long haul.

Personally, I would attempt to do a tower / line of sight if I were in your shoes. If you have a hill, build your access from there and cable it down to the house. Otherwise, GSM internet.

Why are there so many mean comments in here? Sheesh.

Offline… really helps on a slow speed connection. Some of us live and work in places where internet access is not so easy to find, and the new “trend” of offline access has been a great benefit. Hope you now consider offline for basecamp!

I had Wildblue for over a year, and it was ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE . The connection was spotty at best, sometimes worse than Dial-up. Any bad weather would kill the connection.

The customer service seemed helpful, but their lackeys apparently have no idea what they’re doing… They screwed up my account once and charged someone else’s bank account for a 4 month peroid. When I called in to see what the deal was, they told me everything was Ok and I didn’t owe anything. Then 6 months later they call me saying I owe for 4 months because of a “problem with the billing software”. Long story short I canceled the service and sold the dish…

AVOID !!

Lots of nice comments (and a couple mean ones). I feel as though the latter category is lacking somewhat and I should help it to grow and flourish:

You moved to the country. What were you expecting?

Duh.

I remember back when dial-up was the way to go and 56k modems were blazing.. and there was a technology that used two phone lines and two modems to give you the dual-bandwidth. I doubt any ISPs would support it these days.. but I wonder if it would still be possible.

There are several legal precedent when you and some of your neighbors can use the phone company telephone line and build your own DSL service. They did it in a small town in remote Colorado. They bought used equipment from Ebay and built the system. Each person pays about $50 for the service they provide for themselves.

There is another precedent when you can build it from the ground up. I found that article here: http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/Minnesota-Town-Fights-For-Right-To-Fiber-98320

I used a Solution called webramp it USed dual POTS to connect using dial up this resulted in a total of 256k

+1 for hating Hughes Net. Just got it about two months ago (live in the sticks), and have a beautiful and unobstructed line-of-sight where it needs to be.

Hughes Net is about 4 steps backward in Internet access options, and they’re not joking about throttling.

If it weren’t the only option in my area, I’d happily eat the $200 to break the (2 yr!) contract.

irms

PS I ’m not willing to say the speeds are better than dial-up. I haven’t tested it, but I’d say I can check my email faster on my LG Shine using ATT MediaNet than at home on a bad-ass computer using Hughes Net.

Friends don’t let friends get Hughes Net.

Isn’t the whole purpose of moving to the country to slow down??

Seriously though, we are technomads on the road and use satellite with lots of success. Starband.

http://www.midwestwireless.com/

there was also a company that had rural wireless system in Minnesota that used a Motorola system.

http://www.onelasvegas.com/wireless/WI.html

Here’s a Washington Post article about a guy in a similar situation: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031301797.html

He’s a friend, so email me if you want to get in touch with him.

I worked for a peanut company as their sole technical support for over 300 users. We buy from farmers and sell to big companies like P&G, Smuckers, Jiff, etc. We had buying points all throughout the south (AL, FL, GA, SC, MS) and had this problem all the time. It seems that whereever we put a ‘buying point’ for farmers, there was no signal of any sort.

I tried using Wild Blue and had a horrible experience. We also used Ground Control which is much more expensive, but was better than Wild Blue.

We tried using a wireless cellular cards and bridging the signal to multiple computer using Alltel and Sprint. We even put in a celluar booster made by Ztel with no luck.

We ended up going with a T1 line at one location with Sprint. If we signed a 3 yr. lease, the monthly was $590/month.

We went with a T1 at another location with the same contract through AT&T and got no setup fees, free cisco router, for $390/month.

At another location we were successful at using a Verizon wireless card and a Cradlepoint MBR1000 router. We have had really good success with it.

I looked in to wireless ISPs, because one of our locations in FL was in a sort of valley as well. That turned out to be a dead end.

I worked on this for YEARS trying to make it happen at these locations and had telcos give me the go aheads only to have them reneg on them later.

Good luck.

Since this is a secondary house, you aren’t going to be able to put a lot in to R&D. You might be stuck with EDGE .

Do US ISPs not have radio-based high speed internet? In Canada both Rogers and Bell offer it. We replaced satellite with it at my cottage, and it’s a dream in comparison. Plus if you ever feel like moving to a different part of your property you can just grab the modem and go.

I have helped design and install a working wireless ISP . I’m from Wisconsin and know what you are going through. If you want some ideas I have gotten 48 Mps Up and down 12 miles away. I would just need to know what your true circumstances and limitations are. It would probably cost a good amount of money, but in the long run you would be creating something that all neighbors in your area would jump on board with and the costs would be recouped for certain.

been there done this. simple really if you can get the neighbor to play ball with you. Get him to ‘rent’ you space/power to set up another unit like his…then set up two WAP units that have bridging mode to link his farm site(your connection) to your house (line of sight) and your in. not a complex setup. very cheap as it’s consumer gear…no problem. you’ll likely get at least a Mbit connection.

here is the catch…don’t use pringles cans or cheap store bought antennas. get yourself the right gear antenna-wise. I use parabolic dish units from a place in Florida called Fleeman Anderson Bird. Antenna will cost less than $25/ea and another 25 bucks for antenna pigtail connects. maybe another $40 for a pair of commercially made, high quality/low loss antenna extension cables.

Don’t need to be a HAM to design this….but I am one anyway.

be careful which WAP you buy, not all support bridging.

well.. if you have a good neightbord he could retransmit the internet to you. This equipment will help you

http://www.nowdistribution.com/metro/5ghz_products.html

I was stuck with Dish Network a few years back. I was not as good as my DSL is now but it was way better than being stuck with dial up. It only went out for a few minutes at a time during the worst part of bad thunderstorms. The latency was only noticeable if I was trying to game on line.

With all the information submitted here, it’s dialup or isdn. Or mooching from the neighbor. Via a LOS optical repeater, fiber, cable run, or high power wireless.

Fiber, single mode runs best for long distances multi-mode, the signal degrades quickly. Cable- make sure that there are no EMR sources or else your speed will really crappy LOS optical, signal won’t be good in storms or snowfall (bird flocks might have an effect if it’s high enough) LOS /wireless get an adequately powered transmit/recieve dish

I am in about the same situation as you, my first attempt was Hughes Satellite and that was really bad. I had to reboot the modem every day and the upload speed was around 10K for $90/month. After that contract expired I got Wildblue which was better than Hughes but used FAT which kept us from doing much downloading. Both Satelite solutions seem to get much worse after like 6 months of service. Now I have Sprint 3G with a Linksys wireless router thoughout the house. I am extremely Happy with my Internet Service!

Time for a stroll down memory lane?

JF 02 Apr 07

I find an interesting trend in these comments: People feel like they can’t get work done unless they are using software. I find that a little sad.

It’s as if being away from your software means you’re helpless, hopeless, un-productive, and rendered brainless.

It’s OK not to be connected. It’s OK not to have access to something all the time. It’s OK to have to use pen and paper sometime. It’s OK to actually not be able to get something done right this second.

The commercials and advertisements and billboards at airports make us feel worthless if we can’t have access to everything right now. If we can’t update that Excel spreadsheet we’re dead! If we can’t change that one Powerpoint slide immediately the deal is off! I just don’t buy it.

A break is a good thing. Being away is a good thing. It gives you a time to think, recharge, and break your addiction to glowing screens and pixels.

I’ll write more on this topic another time. I just wanted to chime in.

This may sound crazy, but as I spend a significant amount of time on a sailboat, the Sprint 3G with a repeater (Wilson 801245 SOHO Dual Band Amplifier) with a 489-DB Yagi Antenna on the mast works great all over Lake Michigan and even in the Caribbean, I have used Kites and balloons with smaller Yagi antenna boosters in even more remote environments and have been able to at least check and send e-mail. where 3g is spastic this also works using your cell phone as your modem. If you happen to know any technophiles the Wilson amp can be hacked to triple its power…not a legal option but one that really improves its performance;)

Most phone companies can install dual ISDN (256K up/down), even out in the middle of nowhere. It is expensive, but cheaper than a T1.

One quick note about the tower. You’ll obviously need to cable it to the house. No big deal but my ISP said not to have more than 300ft of cable. Now, you might have better luck with better cable or repeaters but I’ve no idea. Just something to keep in mind in case the tower is 1000ft away.

oh man….i used hughes net for a year. if i had it to do over, i wouldn’t do it. the technology is neat-o for sure, a 1W transmitter talks to another transmitter 16-some-odd-thousand kilometers away—that’s really neat!

but! BUT ! oh gawd it’s just horrible. Speeds are tolerable, but secure sites are slower than dialup. and the customer service is truly horrendous. they’ll add crap to you bill, if you can even get a hold of someone on the phone, they won’t take it off, we couldn’t dream of getting a service person out for hardware fixes, the contractors that installed it were dishonest (my airport wireless router just wouldn’t work with their system, the insisted…i needed to buy the linksys router he conveniently had with him.) and it’s spendy.

my vote is sharing a T1, or starting a small ISP co-op. or in reality, dial-up. (dial-up and rdp to a high-speed internet computer is an interesting option.)

Some great ideas and suggestions…I’ll offer one more…call/write your state senator’s office and demand some action from the FCC . Also, write Chairman Martin at the FCC too! I believe that he is sympathetic to your situation.

I live in SE Wisconsin myself – yea, depending on where you are, there are VERY few options.

How far are you from your nearest Central Office (CO)? Perhaps ISDN ? Depending on where you are, you may also want to check CenturyTel (I don’t like them as a provider, but they handle a lot of the telco service for the SE Wisconsin rural areas).

I’ve been down the HughesNet option – it’s really not ideal. Anything to avoid that would be a bonus to you.

Worst case scenario I used to do back when, was to have two land lines and use two modems – one as send, one as receive. Again, perhaps not cost effective, but the boost in speed might be worth it?

I feel really bad for you! Engadget featured a couple of biquad dish antennas made from simple things. You could mount one on the neighbor’s property high up, and one on your own with line-of-sight. Otherwise, with a tall enough tower I’m sure you could get line of sight.

http://www.engadget.com/2005/11/15/how-to-build-a-wifi-biquad-dish-antenna/

There is also Starband Services. There are even dealer opportunities available. It does run around $100/mo for DSL speeds (1.5meg down)

I have to second the suggestion of WildBlue. My brother has had it at his house in far Southern Illinois for more than a year. He pays about $50 a month. He got a decent installation price on a special.

He’s getting around 400-500 kbps, I seem to recall. It’s not cable or even DSL , but it beats the heck out of the 16 kbps “dial-up over barbed wire” he had. I set up a wi-fi network at his house, and now I can stand to visit him.

Read the engadget article that Matt linked to. There is a comment on that article by U. Betchya with some more resources, and more importantly, info that he is pulling in cell signal from miles out in a mountainous area. If may be what you are looking for?

I thought that was the reason that you moved out to places like that…so no one could find you. I recently did the same thing I was over joyed that my phone, email, and internet were no longer tracking me.

We have a remote cabin in Northern NM – the first 3 years we owned it – we used Starband with good success – uploads were slower than home, and VOIP had a latency delay, but it worked fabulously.

This year we switched over to a local ISP that beaemed the signal to us via microwave antennae.

SvN: Jason’s MasterMind Alliance.

Good job, Jason … I’m taking notes!

Remotely connect to the workstation at your office using GoToMyPC (www.gotomypc.com). GoToMyPC uses the Citrix architecture which can get by with only 14k and has built-in security that your IT security admin might allow. Or use RDP (aka Remote Desktop Connection) which is free, but out of the box isn’t as secure and remotely accessible…unless your company has a VPN which will probably require more bandwidth.

[GoToMyPc Pricing: 1-PC Monthly Plan $19.95/mo. 1-PC Annual Plan $179.40/yr. Great Value (Save 25 percent!) 2-PC Monthly Plan $29.95/mo. 2-PC Annual Plan $269.40/yr. Best Value (Save 25 percent!) 3-20 PCs Additional PCs are $14.98/mo. or $135.60/yr.]

Or have your company implement Citrix XenApp…14k packets. I have to use Citrix when I visit my parents who have dial-up in the county at 22k.

Good luck, Brett

I live in South Central Wisconsin and have the same problem as you. I am a out on a lake that has little or no cell coverage, no cable, no dsl and the list goes on. I ended up with HughesNet, I have had no problems with this service, which I have had for 5yrs now. There is a few big drawbacks: price, bandwidth restrictions and upload speed. I am a web application developer and consistently move large files around via upload and download. I have exceeded my bandwidth restriction (around 450 mb of download, unlimited upload, this is in a 24 hour period) several times which becomes a huge problem because when you exceed the limit they limit your connection speed to that of dial up or less. It takes around 24 hours to return to the normal speed. So my advice to you would be if you can live within the restrictions it is a good service.

It seems like a lot of the satellite hate is coming from folks who have downgraded to satellite and have gotten spoiled very quickly (which happens to us all). Everyone saying “It’s barely better than dialup.” are folks who are delusional and clearly haven’t used it in awhile. The latency makes it seem like dialup for small things like web pages, but things we take for granted on a solid connection (like any video whatsoever) are entirely unusable on dialup. The average YouTube video would take HOURS to download over dialup. With satellite, it isn’t instant on but you can actually use it.

I’ve got WildBlue and their caps are significantly better (though still fairly low). Both companies are built around the idea of being an upgrade from dialup for folks who’ve never had any other choice, so a lot of the business decisions make a tad more sense in that regard. Customer service does suck though but I tried going without for a few months and it did NOT work.

Hughes offers what it can… What most people fail to realize is that the signal you’re getting comes off of a transponder which can only pump out 44mb/s… That same transponder costs CNN , FOX, Shell, GM, Ford, etc millions of dollars a year. So when you use your DirecPC you are getting $50,000 worth of transponder space per year… Now as far as upload speeds… 128k requires what’s known as an inroute. That inroute is built of gear which costs well over $140,000. Each user in space segment and inroute alone (not counting internet connection, uplink, etc) costs $64,000 a year if they were allowed to completely saturate their connection 24/7/365.

I used DirecPC for 5 years as a backup connection (it was free) and for my laptops about 4+ years back. Back then I had what was dubbed “the chicklets”, they were 2 boxes one for up and one for down and they worked great. You can expect 1.5 seconds latency with this kind of connection. AFAIK you can still get the hybrid rigs which are modem up and satellite down which speeds things up a bit. I never had connection issues, but you can only expect the same if you opt for a bigger dish, have it pointed correctly (most installers do NOT know how to point a dish), and mounted extremely well. The people talking about rain and wind problems obviously didn’t do any of the above (the old DirecPC dishes were pretty good as they were 2.3 meter dishes I believe)

I understand that if this is your only fast option for a connection and it does suck, but the costs and caps are justified.

Personally I would go with ISDN and be done with it. 128k is plenty for everything but video and big downloads and since this is a second house you have no real need for broadband. Quit making such a big deal out of it, ISDN is more than enough for you to “do your job”, but it isn’t enough for you to screw around looking at video, pr0n, or download hacked bs on limewire, torrents, etc. You’ll be fine…

Most rural places like that have an electrical cooperative – contact them and ask about Broadband over Power Lines (BPL). The advancements I’ve seen in the technology over the past 5 years is massive.

They’ve got stable deployments in Virginia and Indiana from a company called IBEC (ibec.net), whom the USDA just gave almost $50 for further deploying their systems.

I live in the woods, out with the critters and not much else. I’ve used Wildblue for about 3 years, and while installation took a bit of patience the service has been pretty good. I very seldom loose connectivity; i.e., hurricanes, yes, normal rain, never. The customer service people have also been very easy to deal with. It’s an automatic bank draft, so no worries there either. NO voip sux, but compared to dial-up, it’s salmon vs. sardines.

Check out American Tower Company http://www.amertower.com/

First, to clarify, I’m not trying to be mean, I guess the irony in it is that it’s somewhat true. I guess I have an ironic sense of humor. :-(

You could always move to Canada. I live in a Province(state for you americans), with less than 1 million people and my parents live a hour from the nearest city and they get high speed DSL . In fact most of our province can get high speed no matter how isolated you are. www.sasktel.com will show you how sweet our coverage is. Any takes to move here?

I had satellite broadband at home in rural Mayo Ireland. Works but you can get fustrated with the latency. i wouldn’t recommend it.

However you can use a combination of ISDN or Dial Up with a satellite to get a faster connection.

How about replacing the Mast with a Tree! and using wireless.

You could try to set up a long range wireless connection from a broad band feed. Use one of the tower links and a couple of Canopy radios (www.canopywireless.com). You can get up to 40 miles with the 900MHz radios. A point to point link would be most effective for upload and download speeds. A point to multi-point would be good if you could pitch in with your neighbors. You can get the manuals here: http://www.motowi4solutions.com/software/ You can find plenty of resellers on google. Hope this helps.

You’d be surprised how difficult it is to get broadband, even in areas that are not necessarily that far removed from a metro area. I live in the Texas hill country, 30 miles from Austin and cannot get DSL or cable. However, I was able to get service from a local WISP (Texas Wireless Internet), and the service has been good. The overall transfer rates are quite good, and the cost is extremely reasonable.

I agree with the other posters regarding satellite: DON ’T DO IT . The equipment is horrendously expensive, service is awful and many web sites just don’t work due to the link latency. The connection will also be lost any time there is heavy cloud cover. Satellite is a last resort; even dialup is better than satellite under many conditions.

As others have suggested, your best bet is to try to work out something with your neighbor. The other option if you can’t make arrangements with your neighbor is to find out if your local WISP offers NLOS equipment at a reasonable price. A good WISP will come out and do a site survey to see if anything works before they do an install (Texas Wireless Internet did this before they would take me as a customer). If they can’t get standard wireless to work and have 900 Mhz. equipment as an option, they might still be able to get you a 1 or 2 Mbps link.

Last, if you are running Linux or can use a Linux machine as a gateway, there are some adjustments you can make to improve performance on high-latency links. Specifically, there are changes you can make to the TCP stack settings after boot which will help a lot, and you can run a local DNS cache which will dramatically reduce the time it takes to do web page requests. I’ve done both of these things personally, and it really makes a difference. Come to think of it, it would probably help on dial-up as well.

Hope this is useful information….

HughesNet is bad, but if its your only option its not too bad. A year ago it was the only service, outside of dialup, available in my small town outside of Charleston, WV. Its fine for basic web browsing, but don’t expect to watch (enjoy) streaming video or to do Windows Updates ;)

I say look into Amazon EC2 (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/). Even now you can easily get a Windows 2003 server for pretty cheap which you can then access via RDP , it won’t support video and sound which is a bummer but everything else should be fast.

We had a similar problem is WVA . We were able to pay the cable company a certain amount up front and they were willing to lay a line for cable/internet.

I am a wireless tech, and have installed literally hundreds of WISP connections in my day. Just to establish I’m not talking through my ass here…grin

Klyde mentioned Motorolla’s Canopy product; best thing on the market. A bit expensive, but here’s the cool thing: the 900mhz gear will punch through a heckuva lot of stuff and still give you a usable signal. I have seen it go through 1500m of tall tress and still feed 3mbps between points. Depending on the size of the obstructions between you and your neighbour, this stuff might just do the trick.

An option I would look into would be to see if that WISP whose tower is not LoS to you would be willing to test some NLoS gear to reach your place. Perhaps if they stuck a Canopy AP on their tower, it’d be enough to hit you down in the valley.

Another option is to run your own fiber. Now before you mock the idea, hear me out. Fiber is cheap these days, even for the direct-burial rated stuff. Last time I bought glass it was $3 a metre for 12-strand single-mode, outdoor, rated for direct burial or aerial suspension. Not free, but still bloody cheap. This option will rely on the geography and neighbours cooperating with you: you’re going to run this stuff overland from the nearest point you can get connectivity. In rural Alberta (Canada), the phone lines are simply draped along the farmers’ fenclines- when we needed to fix something, we just dropped line on the ground until the fix was done, then replaced it all nice-like. Fiber is actually quite abuse-resistant, in spite of what the telcos say- it’ll handle laying on the ground in mud, snow, and rain without a problem (don’t drive over it, please!). At any rate, with single-mode fiber and a couple $100 transceivers, 100mbps is no problem over 15 or 20km. If you can cut a deal with your power utility to give you pole access (up here, it’s a couple bucks per pole per month for colo access), you can have your own fiber strung professionally and never have to worry about it again.

There are other NLOS wireless options out there; costs vary. Putting in a solar-powered repeater on the hilltop would get you over the hump, but will probably set you back $5K or more. Remember that always-on services like wifi radios will use 500mW of power (each), which means that for a back-to-back repeater, you will need a constant 1Watt (usually at 12-18VDC). This means big solar panels and lots of deep-cycle marine batteries; a week of Tupperware-like conditions will kill your battery supply, leaving you dead in the water.

Options abound, all at their own cost point. Give me a budget number and I’ll build you a solution! Also, what are the polar coordinates of your location? Google Earth has close enough elevation data for a design like this, so knowing the elevations would help a lot.

Hi Jason,

I might have a solution here. A while ago I saw a documentary about a hospital somewhere in Africa. They couldn’t get internet connection for reasons similar to your problems (hill in the line of vision etc.) What they’ve come up with is to build a ‘Cantenne’ system, a simple solution that turns a wireless router into a directional transmitter. They’ve set one up on the hill, one on the other side of the mountain and one in their hospital and had a good connection over several miles. I couldn’t find the exact documentary on youtube but there are several instructional videos on youtube how to use a simple can to build that device: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cantenne+wifi&search_type=&aq=f

Look at this website….. http://www.wlan.org.uk/antenna-page.html…... maybe you can get any idea from here. Good luck!

I haven’t read all comments (148 in total) but I would strongly recommend the following: read a book and enjoy the rural landscape.

I haven’t read all the comments either, but for living in a country that seems to be always “behind the times” when it comes to providing internet services (Canada), we do have great rural services for some reason.

Are there no local services in the area that beam their wireless signals locally? I have friends that live in the middle of no where that have great high speed (even better than mine at times it seems!) connections. Basically its a small antenna/satellite that’s attached to their roof and you connect to that?

I guess try local companies, not the “big guys” is what I’m getting at.

On a side note, I’m with Patrick on this one…go for the book and landscape…and if you must…take whatever work you can, offline. :)

Cheers, and good luck!

@chris – we’re actually not behind the times in terms of internet access in Canada. In years past, we had very high per capita broadband penetration compared to the rest of the world (we do tend to be a bit behind the times versus the U.S. in pricing, though…)

@jason – just be glad you work in code – text files, web images. It’s the sound and video editors, the poster-size image re-touchers that really get killed out in woods.

I’m writing to commiserate, unfortunately I am in the same boat. I live just 7 miles south of a fairly large city in Kansas. Across the street (a two-lane highway effectively) the houses all of cable internet. No DSL options on our side of the road because of our nearness to Lawrence, and line-of sight internet is out of the equation because the hill we live on is slightly taller on the other side, tall enough that we would have to build an inconceivably large pole. Any cell high speed service is similarly blocked out by the hill so we were left with one option. Satellite. Having heard similar horror stories about Hughes net we purchased Wild Blue, which was sadly guilty of everything you listed. Frequent blackouts (it was down for a MONTH in June for “the heat” and we were not reimbursed) frequent slow downs of service and terrible customer service requiring hours of hold time. We finally canceled our service in July having grown frustrated with the 80 dollar bill every month for service arguably worse than dial-up. We asked our neighbors across the street if they would split the bill and bounce the net too us, but they declined. Our final option is dial-up. Sadly, we have chosen to do without at the moment. If you come up with any creative ideas, please share on your blog.

I went from having cable for several years to moving to a rural area with only dial up. It’s not that bad. I would advise against satellite under all circumstances.

If the town is only a few miles away and you know someone that is willing to share connection you could get a dry pair point to point some sdsl equipment and you should be set

Dry pairs run at about $20-$40 a month though And expect about $500 in sdsl equip.

You can actually still buy dry pairs? Here in BC, the telcos quit selling them over 15 years ago, and by a few years back had already phased out all the active ones. (We used to use them for high-security alarm systems- banks, courthouses, etc.)

I had no idea anyone even still offered them, but that’s pretty cool. With current tech, you can do some sweet things over copper pairs.

I just wish the telcos would rent dark fiber that way! Wheee!

I spent months in 2007 dealing with acquiring internet service in deep South Texas. Just five miles from Mexico and 20 mi from the closest town, it was a challenge. We were too far from the CO for DSL . Attempted for several months to have a T-1 installed, but the infrastructure was too old to consistently pass the test, ATT after 2 mo backed out and still has not refunded the deposit or picked up their equipment (thats a whole other discussion of bureaucracy and hellacious customer service). We ended up with Skycasters commercial level Satellite Broadband. Expensive, but incredibly consistent and FAST . It supports VOIP no problem, a fax machine even works. Oil companies and the government are their biggest customers, they live up to their SLA . Its a big dish 1.2m, so rain fade is no issue either. The one downside is they do cap the traffic, and charge overages. We have yet to hit the threshold, several gb is a lot of web surfing and phone calls, you just have to refrain from downloading big files. For what it is worth, I also put up several Tranzeo 2.4ghz wifi radios to backhaul service across the Ranch. They have been outdoors in South Texas for a year. It is a pretty harsh climate, cold and hot, and we have had no trouble, physical or software. I don’t even think they have been power cycled. All in all its pretty frustrating, best of luck to you. I would go wireless point to point if I could. Wireless gear is impressive these days.

I am not prone to hyperbole – HughesNet is an absolute scam. It is the single worst experience that I have ever had with a corporation in my life as a consumer.

Could you work out a deal with a provider to use some of your land for a tower? They might be looking for a friendly location to extend their service. You could lease land to them and get a good connection too.