Community broadband

I have another "can't get broadband" situation. This time, instead of a building practically in the middle of the capital of the United States, at least this is a home in a fairly rural area.

I have a client who lived in this spot, and he has nothing in terms of broadband.

He's much too far for DSL, there's no cable in the ground for a mile or two, and Fios and U-Verse are certainly not there either. He currently has satellite internet, and for $85 a month he has an extremely slow connection with bad latency. He's also an insurance agent with a large company who won't set him up with home office equipment because his connection isn't good enough for their services.

He gets kind of good speeds with a 3G wireless card from Sprint, but it's still not great. I've looked into 4G and none of the carriers can deliver any kind of "4G" speed to his home.

The only possible idea I had left is the possibility of some sort of community broadband setup. There are plenty of other homes in the center of that map that could take advantage of something like this, but I don't even have a clue of where to start. I assume it would be a pretty significant investment that could be split by the homeowners who buy into the plan, but I don't know who I'd talk to to set it up, what kind of legal issues there might be, etc. Does anyone here have any direction they could point me in?

Is the topography such that he can't get an antenna pointed at Leesburg?

Also, ain't "4G" and satellite both about 1.5m?

Which satellite provider do they have? From experience with my mothers rural living situation, Hughes net (DirecTV) service has degraded badly over the past few years, possibly due to oversubscription. She switched to WildBlue, and the difference in service is noticeable. Latency is still bad (due to the nature of using geosynchronous satellites), but the bandwidth is good enough for streaming services once they get past the latency issue. The downside is that not much streaming can be done, due to the bandwidth caps.

As far as other solutions, DSL was slowly being rolled out by various small companies in rural Colorado. And an old coworker of mine who lives in rural Texas outside Austin had some sort of 802.11 based wireless solution. I'll try to contact him to see what company he uses, to give you ideas there. Unfortunately I have a feeling the up front cost is going to require a business to be involved, one willing to put up the initial capitol to build it out, then recoup the costs over time with subscriptions.

Is there any kind of wireless other than satellite there? There is a company in Minnesota that has wireless in the rural areas. I no nothing about it other than it isn't satellite. I have just drove by their billboards.

What speed do you need to get?

In the 802.11 space, there have been a bunch of multihop (roof-to-roof) vendors over the years. I once stayed in a rural house that had such a setup. It worked well, when it worked, and spent minutes at a time completely failing to work.

That was what I was thinking. It looks like he's on the other side of a range from Leesburg, but once you're over that range it seems pretty flat. An antenna of some sorts could provide access to everyone on the side of the range he's on.


Definitely not, that sounds more like 3G. 4G was technically supposed to be 100Mbps, but the carriers are getting away with far less. I don't know what the 3.5G carriers are doing, but Verizon's actual 4G LTE service has users regularly reporting over 21-25Mbps. Of course, that's only in cities where it's carried and apparently it's pretty spotty, but so was 3G.


I can't quite remember which company they went with at the moment. I'll have to confirm that. I think the latency is still going to be an issue when it comes to the insurance company setting him up with the equipment for a home office. I think they'd want him to have a service capable of VPN and remote desktop stuff. The bandwidth is an issue with all wireless carriers unfortunately


That's what I figured for this guy and his neighbors. I don't think price would be an issue, either. He's currently paying $85/month for crappy sattelite, I'm sure he'd pay more for something good. I'd appreciate it if you could ask that guy for info.


I haven't heard of any services like that around here. Normally it isn't much of a concern, as Leesburg is considered less and less of a rural town. There's definitely people living in remote parts of it, though.


Honestly, I think he'd be happy with a nice solid 5-8Mbps as long as the latency wasn't terrible. Of course, more is always better


I was thinking of something like this. Either a multihop thing or some sort of mesh network. I just don't know where to look for that kind of thing, and half of that kind of setup would still be figuring out the origination of the network.

Thanks for the input, folks.

This might be interesting to you...

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/4212-fibre-optic-broadband-in-rural-areas-lyddington.html

A pretty extreme solution, but here in the UK several communities are making it work. It does however base itself on the regulation we have here in the UK and the access to the final mile it gives. Now if there is no final mile.....

Maybe useful to get a few ideas of the technology that is out there.

Cheers

Cris

I've got a Verizon 3g MiFi that in my opinion works great. I just check the speed and it’s around 800 kbps. I had Hughes satellite and the latency really did suck and thick clouds killed it. VPN was a nightmare.

The only issue I have is the 5 Gig cap. If I don’t stream I can be on the internet all day with two computers but I top out right at 5 Gig every month. I really like being able to take it anywhere. Keeping the kids busy while driving on a trip is great.

I had this as well, once. And had the same experience. When it worked, it worked well, and when it went down it, was hell. Because my provider was the Local Rural Internet Dude, his transceivers were homegrown jobs running embedded linux and flash memory. We had a lot of discussions about how much the Empeg and his transceivers were similar to each other in design and kernel implementation. Anyway, the problem is that his stuff kept going down and would stay down for days at a time.

It seems he's only 2.5 miles from the middle of Leesburg. If there is a hill between him and there, can he put a repeater on the hill?

I have a yagi antenna just under the eaves of my 1 story house, and I'm hitting an access point in a McD's 5 miles away with 80% signal. I can't even see the mcd when standing on my roof.

Some information here but possibly only applicable to Aust. as far as legalities go, however it may give you some ideas as to equipment available and capabilities. Ubiquiti seems to be the gear to use for this type of application.