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Wireless Networking Science Hardware

Really Remote Internet Access 182

Posted by Zonk from the can-we-have-a-souvenir? dept.
RexDart writes "The BBC Online has profiled Duane DeFreitas, an adventurer and guide living in Guyana. He's three hours away from the nearest town (in the dry season; three days away when it's raining), yet has full internet access via satellite. His latest project: setting up Skype for phone service, as soon as he can import a microphone and speakers. Yet more proof that the internet is truly everywhere. Mind the jaguar."
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Really Remote Internet Access More

Really Remote Internet Access

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  • I wonder... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheOtherAgentM ( 700696 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @07:56PM (#12629276)
    Do you think he is worried about identity theft?

  • Mic & Speakers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @07:56PM (#12629279) Homepage
    setting up Skype for phone service, as soon as he can import a microphone and speakers

    Is there a software which turns text into audio for Skype, and turns audio from Skype into text? Can the normal text-to-speech software do that for Skype?

    To him it'll be like an IM client, but the other party might enjoy talking/listening instead of typing.

    • Re:Mic & Speakers (Score:2, Informative)

      by downsize ( 551098 ) *
      the audio to text is not there yet. even the best dictation softwares [scansoft.com] out there are only about 80-90% and leave you to proof the transcript before you give it the thumbs up.
      working for a VoIP company I've tested these products, but they do not claim to be 100%. my step father is a director over at chevron and they have many (200+) that use similar software and it does save them time, but bottom line, I don't think Skype would be able to offer him (or anyone) audio to text anytime soon.

    • Re:Mic & Speakers (Score:2, Informative)

      by quintiusc ( 878597 )
      Not really a good solution. The listening party would have to listen to a computer generated voice which isn't as good as a human voice yet. There's also more lag in a typed conversation so combine that with the satellite lag and I don't think it would work.
      • a computer generated voice which isn't as good as a human voice yet. There's also more lag in a typed conversation
        ... nuk-uh-leah ... wepins ... o' ... massss ... dE-struk-shen ...

        That's one of the great things about voice synthesizers - you can make them do a bad imitation of anyone if you play around with the spelling a bit.


        • Anyone here know how to do sampling for digitizers? ;) Surely we have enough samples of Bush, Jr's speech to make something that imitates him.

          *goes to answer the knock at his door*

          SB

  • Yanno.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Khyber ( 864651 ) <techkitsune@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @07:56PM (#12629286) Homepage Journal
    were he really fast, he could use one half of a set of headphones for listening, and the other half as a microphone, if they were small enough. Earbuds work really well for this purpose, he just needs to split a jack and add another stereo jack. A little wire-rigging and he'd be set for less than 5 bucks.
    • I'd suppose that if basic speakers/microphones were unavailable then a soldering iron and the pick of audio interconnects at Radio Shack are probably out (unless he's McGuyver or something ;)

      And given that he's running a satellite phone I doubt that he's particularly bothered about saving a few bucks.Christ,the only people in the UK who are ever referred to as "adventurer"s are also referred to as "Sir".

  • Upgrade (Score:5, Funny)

    by tinfoilgrrl ( 594999 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @07:57PM (#12629295)
    Mind the jaguar.

    Surely he's using Tiger by now.

  • Where is the adventure part if you bring all your modern high tech gadgets with you?
    How is that any different from driving your SUV through a safari park?

  • Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)

    by rackhamh ( 217889 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @08:02PM (#12629339)
    Three hours away from the nearest woman.

    I wonder what sites he vists most often?
  • Was a web page being slashdotted by ip over bongo [slashdot.org]!
  • How well does this work?
    I have two sites in the Pilbera (North Western Australia) that could make good use of this.

    • The delay caused by satellite transit times will drive you crazy during a telephone conversaion. /Mark
      • Since skype uses TCP, it'll be even worse than satellite phones... since there need to be ACKs.

        So one high-latency trip to send the packet, and another one for the ACK.
        • firstly have you never heared of a TCP window? TCP is NOT a send and wait protocol it sends a number of packets before getting a response and that number is dynamically adjusted based on the senders previous experiance with the connection (though admittedly changes did have to be made to tcp to properly allow for long fat networks like satalite).

          secondly there was an analysis paper on sypes behaviour recently and it appears to only use TCP when it can't get through using UDP.

    • Re:Performance of Skype over Sat? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by epiphani ( 254981 ) <epiphani&dal,net> on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @08:20PM (#12629479)
      I looked at satalite access a few years ago when I was looking at buying a house too far out of town to get broadband.

      Geosynchronous Orbit is at 35,786 Kilometers. It takes light 120ms to get from earth to a geosync satalite. (source [uchicago.edu]).
      Hence, 240ms round trip. Back and forth, you to your provider. Another 240ms to get a responce.

      The only reason I'd consider satalite access would be for bulk downloads. 540ms on an ssh session would quickly drive me insane.

      So add that half second to whatever routing overhead there is involved in skype (I usually see about .3 to .6 of a second delay, talking to people within a few hundred kilometers). I'd say, all in all, pretty crappy experience.

      But its better than nothing I suppose.
      • Err, 480ms rather. I cant do math. Damnit, there goes my whole post.
      • The latency issue is what kept me away from satellite.

        I live about 15 miles outside of Deming, NM - corner of No and Where. My only options were dialup, satellite, and (hallelujah) SWNM.com [swnm.com], a local ISP that uses Alvarion BreezeAccess II [alvarion-usa.com] hardware to provide wireless access to a decently-sized chunk of the county.

        Most of my work is with clients back east, and satellite latency would have driven me nuts. I found the Alvarion hardware for about 60% less cost than what the ISP charges for it, so I bought it a
        • Costs about the same as cable and i get 3Mb down/1Mb up and my own fixed IP.

          Best of all i'm supporting a local company and their tech support people are actually TECHNICAL - something that's lost on comcast.
      • wow.

        you missed the Gulf war coverage I assume?

        and yes, I agree, more than 500 ms will drive most nose breathing adults insane.

      • Perhaps I misremember, but I seem to recall that back in the 70s, before they strung fiberoptic almost everwhere, a lot of long-distance phone connections were made by geosync satellite. Delays were only mildly irritating. I think a lot of of developing-world phone systems, which can't afford to string a lot of cable between towns, still rely on geosync satellites.
      • The distance and latency problem is indeed the main issue. I've only worked with Starband systems so i can't talk for the other providers out there but....

        typically i saw a ping time of about 600-800 ms. Working with ssh over a connection such as this is a bit hard but if you know your keyboard shortcuts you can do alright. You just have to think about what your going to do before hand and not be addicted to the backspace command. Another option is to edit files using emacs or vim's ssh remote access m
        • as you found you can accelerate the web by a HUGE amount if you control both ends of a high latency link. by using a protocol designed for the job.

          tcp connection setup is pretty expensive in terms of round trips so if you keep a persistant connection (either tcp or something propietry) over the high latency link to handle resends etc (on the rare occasion they are needed) possiblly even with forward error correction to reduce resends further then you can reduce the overall delay in getting a page to just a
      • Hence, 240ms round trip. Back and forth, you to your provider. Another 240ms to get a responce.

        No. The internet is not connection based. You don't have a "connection" (in the IP layer, there are no connections!) with your provider, you only exchange packets.
        Please do not think of the internet as a chain of connections. There are physical connections, sure, but 'Network link' is the proper naming here...

        The provider simply dispatches the packet into another channel and if that and all other hops are fiber
        • no the grandparent has it right for a 2 way satalite setup (ie where the satalite is your only link to the isp) ping time is a measure of how long it takes for a packet to get from you to a remote server AND back again.

          its 120ms from you to the satalite
          120ms from the satalite to your isp
          whatever time it takes to get to the destination server and back
          120ms from your isp to the satalite
          120ms from the satalite back to you

          so the MINIMUM ping time you can have to anywhere on a two way geostationary satalite ho
      • 540ms on an ssh session would quickly drive me insane.
        No worse than using ssh when you have a lot of torrents running. You type stuff in a local terminal window and paste it into the remote window.
  • <Your Dvorak remark here>

  • bi directional satellite? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Local Loop ( 55555 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @08:07PM (#12629377)
    I thought satellite internet was downlink only, with the uplink being provided by a phone modem. What is this guy using that is bi-directional?
    • Got news for ya, For some people in MS, they've got two way satellite net access.. thogh it still sucks, because after you hit 150 megs of bandwidth used, you get capped to 56k speed.

      You just need two boxes hooked up to the satellite to send and receive. The lag's still horrible, though. DirecWay offers it in Como, Mississippi.

    • Re:bi directional satellite? (Score:5, Informative)

      by FlynnMP3 ( 33498 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @08:21PM (#12629487)
      Bidirectional satellite connections have been available for consumer use for a little over 3 years now (that I am aware of).

      I use DirecWay. The Fair Access Policy sucks, you only get a measured amount of bandwidth to use per time slot. Mine is 500 meg per 4 hours. The speed of the transmission is nice. Download speeds can get upto 2000bps and upload varies based on how much money you parley. Mine is 120bps (pitifull I know).

      The latency is born from the signal having to leave your satellite dish, upto the geosychronise orbiting satellite, back down to the Network of Operations, out to the Internet, back from the Internet to the NOC, back up to the Geo sat, and finally back down to your satellite dish. All told, the best time for round trip transmission is 0.7 seconds.

      All network traffic handshaking is hampered by this high amount of latency. If whatever protocol requires pretty rapid back & forth to be responsive, then it's pretty much guarenteed it will suck with satellite internet service.

      -FlynnMP3
    • For the record, direcway's main competitor, starband, is also bidirectional through the satellite; no telephone-system connection required.
  • You can get internet from the middle of the Pacific. Or anywhere else on the face of the planet for that matter, with a satellite.
    • You do get some horrible latency, so you can very well forget about SSH, VNC, games or anything remotely real-time for that matter.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Fortunately, not all com satelites are geostationary. Internet access at the South Pole is present, but spotty - about 17 hours per day, IIRC.

        • Re:Um.... yay? (Score:3, Informative)

          by tomhudson ( 43916 )

          Internet access at the South Pole is present, but spotty - about 17 hours per day, IIRC

          Considering that their days and nights can be up to 4 months long, thats REALLY spotty ...
          Antarctic Culture - The Seasons [antarcticaonline.com]

          At McMurdo, there are about four months of 24-hour daylight (that's "summer"), four months of 24-hour night ("winter"), and two months on either end where the sun is either coming or going.

      • Re:Um.... yay? (Score:3, Informative)

        by tylernt ( 581794 )
        There are many LEO satellites (notably, Iridium sats in polar orbits and GlobalStar sats in various inclined orbits) that provide internet access for non-equatorial regions.* Granted, speeds are 1200bps to 9600bps and it will be horrendously expensive (around $1.60 per minute last I checked), but it can be done and often is done on oceangoing ships large and small for sending GPS telemetry back home and also so the crew can email their landlubber friends.

        Now, for *broadband* satellite internet, AFIAK you a

    • Re:Um.... yay? (Score:2, Informative)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      Turn the globe up a bit and rotate it just right and you can get it so you can see nothing but blue. Those are the south seas of the Pacific. There's no reason to go there at all unless you're whaling. . .or in the 'Round the World single hand race.

      It's nasty "country" where the wind has thousands of miles of scope to build up waves. Some years ago one of the competitors in the race capsized in those seas. She got an emergency signal out to the orginizers, but with no shipping lanes within a thousand miles
  • I wonder if he has all this set up just to read Slashdot. I know I would go through the trouble to keep up on nerdy news.

    Sir, could you reply to this from your satellite internet in the bush.
  • Why doesn't he open a bank account (replete with credit/debit card) the next time he's in the city?

    By doing this, he could buy things online with ease.

    However, I'm assuming he wants to purchase ahem, 'intangible' products from the web that can only be enjoyed on the computer, like the rest of world. On the other hand, I'm not sure how he'd keep the wife and kids out of the hut long enough to enjoy his new purchase.

  • We need to get him to set up a website (Score:3, Funny)

    by Solr_Flare ( 844465 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @08:16PM (#12629451)
    So that we can legitimately claim that there is literally no place on earth safe from being slashdotted.
  • ...what one thing would you bring with you? apparently this man chose the wrong answer as a child
  • When the rainy season happens and his solar panels become useless it's bye-bye World of Warcraft, hello Pin-the-Leech-on-the-Jaguar!
    • With this type of connection, it doesn't matter if he has power or not -- he'll lose the satellite connection anyway.

      I had Starband for somewhere around two years. It's better than Direcway in that, at least when I had it, there was no "FAP". I could download all day and all night and never lost any speed.

      I hated not being able to use DialPad (that should date about when I had the hardware) or play Asheron's Call with it, so I eventually switched back to dialup.

      'Course, those in power at Starband that
    • When the rainy season happens and his solar panels become useless
      Two things: clouds are not completely opaque, and since it is no longer 1960 solar cells can get a reasonable amount of power from less than full, direct bright tropical sunlight.

      However, the wavelengths used don't go through water very well, so you would lose the link in the rain.

  • Anybody else curious aobut how much this costs?
  • Junis! [slashdot.org]

    (I still contend that's the funniest Slashdot story ever)
  • A friend of mine has the sat internet, the delay is terrible, using voip on sat would be terrible, 3-4 delay at least.

  • So.. yeah (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Sase ( 311326 )
    If he doesn't have a credit card.. how is he paying for this mysterious satellite?

    Or is he pirating it?
    • Pirating satellite is relatively easy and you'll never get caught if you don't get greedy with bandwidth.

      Spread spectrum over a television transponder, at low bit rate will not raise the noise floor enough to arouse suspicion. If you're feeling particularly paranoid, bit rate can be kept low enough to be completely undetectable.

    • Uhh direct debit?
  • Real adventurers of the past never had broadband internet. Imagine if Edmund Hilary had this technology... it's summit day, and tension is high at base camp, when an email arrives: "D00ds, Everest is 0wn3d!"

    Self-proclaimed adventurers are generally publicity-seeking wankers in my opinion. As others have pointed out, you could use this technology virtually anywhere on the planet. So the guy has a "pet" jaguar - big deal!

  • I like how the story mentions carnivorous jaguars. (Score:5, Funny)

    by windowpain ( 211052 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @08:45PM (#12629641) Journal
    Because the carnivorous jaguars are much worse than the vegetarian jaguars, believe me!
  • Atari stopped making that game system a long time ago....

    Oh, wait... Now I get it
  • > Mind the jaguar

    I guess that means Macs are everywhere too. Albeit old ones. I guess it takes a while for them to get the latest release in the jungle...

  • Inmarsat BGAN (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @08:49PM (#12629674)
    The days of being amazed by remote connectivity are over. For several years it has been feasible to setup VSAT powered by generator or solar. You can get up and running for less than $5,000 and a couple of hundred dollars / month.

    The Regional-BGAN has been operational for a couple of years, but has been very expensive and a max speed of 144kbps and a foot print that only covers middle east, europe and northern africa. $700 up front and $10 / mb.

    In the next couple of months, Inmarsat will be bringing their new I-4 satellite online to be used with BGANs. This will provide speeds of almost 500kbps (depending on how you like to calculate your overhead) in a unit the size of a laptop. Coverage initially extends from Europe to southern africa and central australia.

    By the end of '06 the network will be almost global - including the amazon.

    Just for the record, I've done Skype and other VoIP over the RBGAN. It works ok with a similar delay to any other satellite phone. But the cost is still quite high due to the cost / mb.

  • And I thought I had it bad when I couldn't get broadband living ten minutes away...

  • Another good article... (Score:5, Informative)

    by kevcol ( 3467 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @09:09PM (#12629790) Homepage
    ...in IEEE's magazine Spectrum..

    Bill Woodcock of Packet House travelling the world and setting up Internet connections in remote locations. [ieee.org]

  • IP over Ham (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cyberfunk2 ( 656339 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @09:30PM (#12629937)
    I've heard you can do IP over shortwave radio (i.e. Ham Radio), would this be a reliable/ reasonable option in this case?

    In what cases does that sort of system work? Is it high bandwidth ?

    I'm hoping for some knowledgable Ham slashdotter here.

    • Re:IP over Ham (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes you can. It's not particularly reliable, as it's affected greatly by the state of the ionosphere. B/w stinks, as it's about 2400bits/sec over shortwave.

      Jacques Richer (n1zzh)
    • You can also do ham radio over IP too!
      http://www.irlp.net/ [irlp.net]

      But for remote linking, a sat ISP is probably much better than HAM because HAM is regarded as a common medium. As a result, you have to "play nicely", and can't transmit questionable material over the airwaves. Lastly, in the US anyway...i don't know about operation procedures in foreign lands, but you can't conduct business transactions (like sell stuff) over HAM radio. You can however call for a tow truck if you're stranded in the middle of
  • My brother has been using sat for internet 3 hours from nearest paved road for last year or so. It works great! I took a grandstream budget-tone(preconfigured to connect to my asterisk server) with me last summer when I went down there to visit. It blew them away when I called time and temperature at a local bank and the audio was crystal clear. They laughed at me when I tried to call my wife and all she heard was strange noises-lol Oddly enough we could hear her fine. Very weird to hear a perfectly clear v
  • When all 4 of the 5-rated comments (That's with a +1 modifier for insightful and interesting) are "Funny" and are just making fun of the content of the article, you can tell no one really cares. Wow, he uses satellite internet, and what do you know, satellite internet actually does what its supposed to by working outside of places where you can get other types of access. He uses Skype, that's also amazing.

  • Ummm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:13PM (#12630177)
    has full internet access via satellite. His latest project: setting up Skype for phone service

    Combining a high latency connection with an app that demands low latency? Good luck.

    • I have a bi-di sat connection and use Skype all the time. Strangely enough (or perhaps not) my international calls have low-enough latency to speak normally, especially after hours, but calling friend Nick who lives three blocks away is terrible - we've had to resort to using radio protocol. "Yes I can hear you - over." "OK over" Annoying but still usable :)

  • when she's in Cambodia with her Cambodian adopted son, Maddox. She said they don't have electricity (except flashlights and maybe an emergency generator). You can't get to her place there except by helicopter, especially in the rainy season when the roads wash out.

    Also, she has to watch the kid in case of tigers, supposedly.

    I don't think Brad's been up there...:-)

  • Yawn. (Score:2, Informative)

    by decrocher ( 444733 )
    I live on Niuatoputapu, Tonga. 1-3 months to the next town (whenever the boat comes). I often have to clean the sparkplug in my generator before booting.

    My net connection is 14.4 dialup that cuts out every five minutes... long enough to load Slashdot and POP email.
  • I recently finished a trek to the Mount Everest Base Camp in Nepal. Prior to entering the more remote areas ( towards Tengboche, out of Nache for those that care ) there was a sattelite Internet provider operating. It worked out to be around $10 Australian dollars for ten minutes. What was funny is that I did this whilist the rest of the country was under a declared state of emergency due to the maoist problems, whereupon the king severed all telecommunications in the country. Obviously, the sattelite feed

  • Yet more proof that the internet is truly everywhere

    Well, well, well... I'm writing this from the center of the Antarctic Plateau [gdargaud.net], where the winter night is now permanent and the temperature drops to below -80C... And I can tell you that the internet connection sucks. We connect 2-3 times a day to transfer email, and web connection is only available during those 20 or so minutes. The DNS timeout is 2 seconds while the ping on the DNS is on average 5 seconds... (if anyone knows how to change that 1st valu

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