Thin Pipe, Part 5: Mark, our Internet Overlord

Sorry to be away so long. I was on vacation, as in: somewhere with internet service. I'm back now, still waiting for our reconnection to the town-wide WiMax network. We're limping by still on Verizon MIFI.

They say 9 out of 10 ain't bad, unless it's 9 out of 10GB used for your monthly bandwidth quota. The billing cycle is the 6th of the month, so I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that we'll go over this month and have to incur an extra $10/GB until our Internet Overlords get us back online.

Which brings us to Mark, our Internet Overlord. Mark is the guy who runs the mom-n-pop networking company that took over the local municipal wireless internet service (see Thin Pipe, Issue 2) , let's call them "Smalltel". Anyway a few days after my initial encounter with the Smalltel field engineer guy and the tree conversation, Mark came back from vacation or wherever he was, and gave me a call back. Mark apologized for the delays, and told me a little about some of the woes Smalltel was incurring as a result of the switchover from public to private ownership. One of the relay towers near me had gone down unexpectedly, and they initially thought my calls might be related to that. I guess a bunch of people on the street were affected.

Also, he told me about possible town-wide service disruptions on the horizon because of the construction going on at the summit of Mt. Wachusett, which is where our central WiMax transmitter/receiver setup and backhaul lives. The state parks and rec division is in the middle of rebuilding the auto road to the top (2007 ft. elevation). They've been at it over a year, ever since someone noticed the down-road was kind of slipping off the side of the mountain. As part of the work, they are rearranging the stuff on the summit, including the fire tower (owned by parks and rec) which is where our town WiMax antennas live.

It's an interesting side story about the fire tower. Five years ago when the town was just starting to install the town-wide wireless network, they needed a central place to relay all the signals to. Having a 2007 foot mountain in town proved to be kind of handy in that regard, but as people who live near 'real' mountains will tell you, 2007 feet is actually kind of more of a hill than a mountain. The significance being, there is no real tree-line at the summit, so just being on top of the mountain does not guarantee line-of-sight to all points in town, you still need some elevation from the summit. Enter the fire tower, which is probably like another 75 feet or so higher. It was the only logical choice, because while there are other telecom towers on the summit, they are all grandfathered, and only for government-use (like state police radio and so forth). The state parks and rec had been very diligent about keeping commercial towers (cellphone and telcos) from building anything there, to prevent a forest of towers from ruining the view.

I always thought that being a town muni light dept., we were considered 'government', so we should be allowed on the existing towers, but attempts by John our Light Dept manager to get on those towers was fruitless, there was just nobody else allowed to ride that train. John then turned to the parks and rec department to get permission to put our antennas on the fire tower. And the answer was a resounding 'no'. I don't even remember why the didn't like it, it's not like a few antennas would spoil the beautiful architecture of the fire tower (the pic above is not our fire tower, but pretty close in terms of how it looks).

Things got heated. The light dept had already bought all the equipment, and we had no access to put any of it on the summit. Any other spot it town would allow for only partial service to the town. Strong arming, pleading, nothing really worked, and so John kind of took things into his own hands. John is a get-it-done kind of guy, so one afternoon, a bucket truck from the town light department was seen near the summit, doing "maintenance" on the power lines that feed the top of the mountain. The last pole on the line, which is not quite but almost at the summit, apparently needed replacing. With a 60-foot-tall utility pole. With an antenna on top of it. The light department had gotten through most of the installation when the parks and rec dept. got wind of it, and went ape-shit. They threatened to sue the town for unauthorized telecom work or something, the town light department claimed the power lines were theirs and they were working within their authority to do work on them.

It was looking pretty ugly for a bit there until our local state rep, Lew Evangelidis, stepped in. Say what you want about Lew (but be careful, he's the county Sheriff now), but he has always been really good to us out in Central Mass. Lew basically acted as a mediator and got the two sides to calm down a bit. Turns out the parks and rec department would be more than happy to have antennas on their tower. If the light department did some fire tower wiring work for them, bought them a weather station, rewired their visitor center lights and a few other ransom requests. The antennas went on the fire tower. The light dept. took a chainsaw and cut the 60ft summit utility pole down to a regular-sized 30 ft pole.

And they lived happily ever after. Until the present day, when the people who are rearranging the summit decided to move the fire tower. I'm not sure who is involved but I think it might be the same folks who let us put the antennas on there in the first place, so they should have thought about consulting us to coordinate the move. They did talk to the State Police and other people on the existing towers, but nobody thought much about the fire tower. So it's unclear really if there will be a service interruption or not, and how things will shape up after the move.

The good news, previously foreshadowed at the end of issue 4, is that according to Mark, (our new internet Overlord), the tower is moving closer to the center of the mountain. Which means, closer to me. The closer part is probably measured in like hundreds of feet which in and of itself doesn't make too much difference. The important part though is that today, it is kind of 'over the hill', if you can imagine the geometry, where it is past the summit but not in a favorable direction from my house. So we never really get line-of-sight there, except maybe at the top of that infamous pine tree in my front yard.

The move should improve chances of getting a high speed link from somewhere in my yard. Eventually. Someday. Mark also said they are using the grant they received from the Mass BroadBand Institute (MBI) to install a higher-frequency equipment in town, "365" or 3.65GHz equipment that is used in other areas to get up to 4 MBit/sec to customers. That would be awesome, at least by my standards. Trouble is, a lot of things I've looked at online suggest that the higher the frequency, the less penetration of foliage you get (example paper). I'm just a little worried that a "365" system will be the same or worse for me than the existing 2GHz VL modem, even with the new fire tower move.

But we will see. Mark our Internet Overlord is a reasonable guy, I was very enthusiastic talking to him (probably too much) but he seemed open to perhaps using our house as a test site for that, once it comes out. We talked about other promising things, like the MBI fiber connection that should be coming to town next year. This is good but will only connect "central locations" in town such as town offices, schools, libraries, etc. Someone else, perhaps Smalltel, will have to wire the rest of town.

It didn't sound like this was going to be in the plan immediately. But I am going to stay on the good side of Mark our Internet Overlord. It's been a month without internet, but you won't catch me saying anything bad about Mark or Smalltel. He is our Internet Overlord, after all.

Next week, we are supposedly on plan to have a new 900Mhz wireless relay modem installed, which will hopefully get us back on line without quotas, at some interesting speed. Mark was hopeful they could get me back to 1.5 Mb/sec, even with the 900Mhz modem, but I'm not so sure. At this point, anything looks good.

So full report when that is running. For next time though, I thought I would take everyone through a flashback to my experiences with the wonderful world of Satellite Internet!

Next Time: Satellite, Shmatellite!

Thin Pipe, Part 4: The Quixotic Quest for DSL

I have a friend in town that is also a techie / internet junkie. He lives a couple miles away, closer to the center of town, where DSL is now available. Our town was late to the game to get DSL, we probably didn't get it anywhere in town until about 2005 or so. From what I am told actually, we did not get touch-tone phone service in town until the mid to late 1980s, long after everyone else had forgotten about rotary dialing. There are only about 1500 houses or so in town, and it's close to 50 square miles in size, 72 miles of roads, very low density. Not attractive at all to cable, DSL, or Fiber providers, and even the phone company takes it's time doing things out here it seems.

Rumor has it that the local Cable TV company tried to come into town and wire us up in the late 1980s, but our telephone poles were too short, not enough space available to separate all the services on the pole. The town fought with the cable company over who would pay for all the pole upgrades, the cable company said "see-ya", and the rest is history. If you look at a cable coverage map for our area, we are the missing puzzle piece. And the likelihood of them coming back now in the current economy is exactly zero.

But I digress, I was talking DSL, wasn't I? My friend ended up getting DSL back when we both had dial-up. Verizon has a little web form where you can enter your phone number, and it would tell you if you were eligible for DSL service. At first anyone in town who tried to put their phone number into that form got a message saying:

"Sorry, we don't offer service to your area currently. Please enter your contact information so we can inform you when service is available".


One day though, he tried the form out and it told him he was eligible for DSL, and they hooked him up. My friend is the type of guy who is sure to gloat about stuff like this, so he was immediately showing off his fast connection and talking all the time about how great his DSL service was. I kept logging in, getting the "sorry" message, then entering my contact info into the form, kind of like a write-in protest ballot. I even called them up and asked if they could connect me somehow, but the main issue was always the same. DSL works to about 2-3 miles from the central office, I live 4+ miles away.

I continued to log into the Verizon site periodically, entering my telephone info to see if I was eligible, adding my name to the "to be contacted when service is available" list. I would use different family members, neighbors, different versions of my first and middle name to mix it up, in the hope that Verizon would see this huge demand for internet service in town and extend things.

Sometimes, we would go to a local store like Circuit City (remember Circuit City?) and there would be a bunch of guys sitting at the Verizon Internet kiosk there, like Carneys at the Midway, trying to lure people in to the ring toss.

"Interested in High Speed Internet Service? FiOS? DSL?" they would ask as I tried to walk past. 9 times out of 10 I would succumb to my inner rage, and I would stop and say "Sure. set me up."

They would then ask for my zip code. The huge black no-coverage square would appear over our town on their little kiosk computer map, then they would look crestfallen and say "sorry no FiOS in your area yet. Are you interested in DSL?"

"Sure" I would say. Then they would check my phone number, look even more crestfallen, and say "uh, sorry, we can't provide it to your house, you're too far away from your central office."

"What can you provide us with for internet then?" I'd ask.

"Um.. sorry, nothing." (not true actually, they would sometimes offer me T1 service, but that is ridiculous enough that it deserves it's own blog post.)

Anyway, I am not sure why I would do this to myself again and again, insanity maybe. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I guess there was some small measure of pleasure in making a Verizon employee uncomfortable. (but, now that I think about it, he was probably a Circuit City employee. Sorry dude.) Somehow in my mind it all added up to some Verizon future-coverage-planning-manger being besieged by letters from their retail affiliates telling horror stories about how embarrassing it was to have people from our town constantly asking for service. Insanity.

But like the Man of LaMancha, I would joust at the proverbial DSL windmill from time to time over the years. In the process of bugging Verizon in various ways to provide DSL to me, I did manage to talk to a few of their field guys, and I discovered that there is actually a way for a telco to extend it's DSL service, using something called an ADSL Loop Extender. It goes on your telephone line, amplifies the signal, extends the range. Rural telcos in the mid-west use these to get service to their customers.

I also talked to a guy who suggested I move my telephone service to the neighboring town's exchange, which was actually closer than my own town. Our phone number would change, but I'd get DSL that way. But despite many calls to Verizon trying to find someone who would listen to the idea of adding an ADSL loop extender or changing my exchange, I had no success.

Short side subject.. There are a bunch of you who by now, (it is Issue 4 after all) probably want to know: why the hell don't you just move if internet is so important to you? Or maybe, why did you move there in the first place? I can feel you all thinking that. Good questions, deserving of answers. I'll do a little Q&A on that in a future post, stay tuned.

Now, back to DSL. Flash forward to the present day. I'm nervously watching the bandwidth meter tick away on my Verizon MIFI service, hoping my "normal" internet service will be restored someday soon. I decide that this would be a good time to once again call up Verizon, and make ten-tupley sure that they don't have some way to provide me with DSL they forgot to mention.

I decide to try the business services office, perhaps they would run DSL lines from the neighboring town to me. On trips to get pizza over there I'd count the poles between us and the town border; I'm 36 poles away from glory. How much could it cost to have someone string a cable line or DSL or something over to me? Or if not, maybe they would go for that repeater thing.

It took some initial navigating through the Verizon phone maze to get to a real person, and when I did, I launched into my spiel (thank god for Google, letting me know how to spell 'spiel', I wanted to add a 'ch' in there somehow) about how I live in a town with no internet, actually no internet near me, and it's a residence but really, I have my own business (True- I do video production, but the money I sink into it never matches what comes out so it's a 'business', as in, a hobby.) And so I'm looking for high speed internet options for my business. I take a breath. She recovers, after a few ummm... moments.

We start down the DSL road, and I quickly have to go into the whole too-far thing, and then into my various proposals to solve said problem, including the ADSL repeater, and/or moving me to another exchange. The lady on the phone shoots down the move-to-another-exchange option in short order. "We can't move you to another exchange, because we have to bill you in the town where you live."

"Go ahead and bill me in the town where I live. I just want a connection via the neighboring town."

"We can't do that, we're not set up for it."

There was some polite back and forth, but the Windmill did not move. It wasn't really a technical issue, it was an administrative one, something you really can't make any headway on, at least if you're a tech/nerd guy like me. Next up was the ADSL repeater idea, which I pitched. The (I suppose predictable) response was something like,

"I'm not sure what that is, I've never heard of it."

"Lot's of Rural Telco's use them. They extend the DSL range. I have some info I can send you.."

"I really can't help you with this, we don't offer that product. You will have to talk to our Service department because it's a technical question."

I had fallen into this trap before with Verizon. The handoff into oblivion. Unless you get an internal phone number of some sort, you get transferred to the main menu, and you call in to some central office and start all over again.

"OK, I say.. but are you transferring me to someone local to my area who can answer the question?"

"It's our main service number."

"But... They're probably not the ones who know if this can be installed on my line, are they? Can you transfer me to someone who handles our town?"

"That's who I have to transfer you to, they'll have to help you from there."

And back I went into the main menu maze, found the service department for business customers, and had a very similar conversation with the service guys, who eventually said I needed to call the business sales office with my questions since it was a sales issue.

I hung up, drained by the effort. Of all the Quixotic games I play with Verizon, this is the least satisfying one. I have no idea why I do it, screwing with the Circuit City guys is much more satisfying.

Things were about to look up a bit though, because the next day, I got a call from Mark, our new Internet Overlord.

Next Time: Thin Pipe, Part 5: Mark, our Internet Overlord

Thin Pipe, Part 3: MIFI, The Emergency Internet Solution

So this internet starvation stuff has been going on a lot longer than just this year. At some point I will post an entry talking about the good old bad old days, of Satellite Internet services, ISDN, extra phone lines and slower-than-most dialup. At one point I decided to try out using a cellular modem to get internet, it was back at the dawn of 3G service. I figured I would not get 3G, but should at least get the Verizon EDGE network and get some service. I ordered the modem, service, it came a few days later. Plugged it in. No signal. Nothing. I should mention that in addition to being an internet black hole, our part of town is also a cellular black hole as well. People come to visit from metro areas with their Sprint or Nextel or whatever works in the city phones and they get zero bars, all the time. About the only thing that does work for phones is Verizon, owing to their good rural coverage. But it didn't work back then for internet, so I had to return everything and cancel my contract.

So it was with quite a measure of desperation that five years later (after no internet for a week), I headed over to my local Verizon Wireless Zone to pick up another cellular modem. Verizon is in the process of rolling out their 4G LTE Network , but only in "select areas", which is of course code for no-effing-way-it-will-be-near-my-house. Still the 3G service, if I could now get it, was supposedly capable of delivering between 500k bps and 1 Mbps, which for a guy without any internet, sounded just fine. I was hopeful it would work this time, because Verizon put a tower not too far away (neighboring town) and the reception had improved quite a bit since my last attempt.

After studying the various modem and plan options, I decided on the Verizon MIFI 2200 personal hot spot. This sounds like some sort of thing you might be embarrassed to have your parents find on your night stand, but actually its a pretty cool little gizmo, it receives 3G cellular data and then provides a WIFI hot spot that allows up to 5 devices to connect wirelessly to it. Why only five? My best guess is that it's too puny to effectively route more connections than that. This thing is truly tiny. Imagine taking you iPhone, cutting off the top 25%, painting the rest jet black. That's the form factor. Plug it in anywhere, or you can run it on battery if you want to take it with.

I was not sure if this would work, and if it did work, how long I would actually need to use it. I was still hoping that we would have a guy on site after the long weekend, cheerfully connecting up a new relay modem. So I made sure there was a month-to-month plan available with Verizon's 3G data service. All of the choices available are bandwidth-capped, the unlimited bandwidth plans for smart phones were abandoned by Verizon a few days before I got my modem. (grrr...)

The new plans are either 75MB/month for $10... good luck with that after you access your first email message or two. then 2GB/month for $30, 5GB/month for $50, and 10GB/month for $80.

OK I know what all you FiOS guys are doing, rolling your eyes. What a ripoff - Who would pay it? The answer is, you would. If internet access was important to you. If you had no other choice. I was not sure how long I'd be out, but I didn't want to have to shut it off before my service was restored, so I chose the 10GB/month plan and paid the $80, on top of the MIFI modem cost and activation. A couple hundred bucks. But there was the hope I would not be spending another weekend staring at the red blinking light at the top of the tree, hoping it would turn green (see Issue #1).

Long story short, took it home, plugged it in, wrestled with Verizon's horrible VZaccess manager software install, and boom, it magically came online. Seems decent I thought, browsing some web pages. Next stop, speedtest.net - initially I came in with about 600 K bps. Not bad. Played with the position of the little black box. It has no external antenna, so just rotating and moving it around until the bar meter on the WIFI web server page showed 4 bars. Reran tests, and I was amazed to see 1.72 Mbps down / 1.86 Mbps up at the peak! That was faster than the internet ever went in my house, a new high-water mark. Faster than even some of my lower-priced DSL friends who have 1.5 Mbps service. My internet woes are frequently the butt of many a joke at work, and for once I would not be the slowest kid on the block.

Surf's Up!

I handed out the MIFI WIFI password to the family. They took to it like men who had been crawling through the desert finally reaching a watering hole, greedily updating their facebook walls and reading reddit pages and email. iPads, laptops, desktops, it did not take long for all five slots on the MIFI router to fill up. Soon we were kicking off one machine to get another on. "The average home has four internet connected devices" the commercial on TV cheerfully says. We have like a dozen or more.

It got ugly, I tried to patch the MIFI router to my regular router using a crossover cable and configuring the router as a bridge, but the MIFI router was still was handing out DHCP addresses and stopping after handing out five. After knocking out our service four or five times while experimenting, I gave up, and resigned myself to having to manage which five things got to drink from the great MIFI internet stream.

Things settled out by the end of the weekend, and I became more relaxed about hounding our new internet company for repair service, I could probably go a good part of the month using the MIFI 10GB allowance. Let them sort out their transition problems, I figured, I want to stay on their good side. I resisted calling them Tuesday when they reopened, we surfed happily on our 3G cellular connection. I bragged to my coworkers about my new internet solution, and how speedy and cool the MIFI modem was.

"How much bandwidth are you allowed?" they asked.

"10GB an month," I replied. My coworker frowned.

"10GB? Wow, when I update my PS3 software, it's usually like a 7GB update. Wouldn't take long to use 10GB!"

When I got home, I decided to check on our usage. We had sucked down 3GB of our 10GB already, after like 2 days. I freaked out a little.

"Kids, have you been watching videos on the internet??"

I had tried to discourage this with the little talk about our new, temporary internet service. They said they had watched a few, but I could not see that sucking down 3GB. Then I remembered auto update, and how our machines probably had been off the net for over a week, and sure enough they had all decided to go download patches and updates and all sorts of stuff.

Then proceeded the turning-off of updates, the talk about watching videos, the disconnecting of devices when not using them, and so forth. Then I read in the fine print on the WIFI page, something about "usage statistics do not include overhead and other factors, log in to Verizon VZaccess to get accurate usage info". I started to freak out again, expecting it to be an even larger number.. did we just burn through 5GB in like 3 days?? When I went to the "official" statistics though, it reported that I had only used 1.5GB. Whah...? Not sure how that works, but if that is the official metric, I am pretty relieved.

But my sense of relaxation regarding not bothering our internet company had evaporated. I decided not to let them have a whole week of peace, I would need to ramp up operation pester a bit earlier. But not before a little diversion into one of my favorite masochistic passtimes... bugging the telcom companies about my service.

Next Time: The Quixotic Quest for DSL

Thin Pipe, Part 2 : Your Radio Modem is *Where*?

Wednesday after a weekend without internet. What I had completely forgotten was that the town had gotten tired of running our internet, and had sold it all to a little mom and pop network company in the next town over. And the transition from our electric to them was happening this week. I gave them a call. I gave them several calls. By Friday I had finally wore them down and they promised to send someone out, Friday afternoon.
The guy jumps out of his truck, looks around. "Where is your antenna and modem?" he casually asks. We are standing under the tree it is in, I point straight upwards. It takes a moment to register with him that I am actually responding to his question. Keep in mind, this is a company that just took over our local town internet, they really had no idea what they had gotten themselves into.

He looks up, not seeing it. I point to the wire on the side of the tree. He follows it up with his eyes, until he sees the faint outline of the modem, complete with red blinking light. "See that red light?" I say. He nods, still stunned. "It should be green."


"That's not a standard install" he says. I agree with him. He goes on to tell me that if they go up there, it would be to take it down, and they won't support a modem up in a tree. My heart sinks, I always figured it would cost something to go up and fix it if it broke, but I hadn't considered that they would outright refuse to support it. Still it could not be argued, it really wasn't a normal install. I offer to pay for the repair, half heartedly, knowing what the answer would be. Then I decide to just take the high road.

"Sure, that makes sense," I say. "Whatever you guys think is best, I just want the highest bandwidth possible." The second option, always in my head as a backup, is to use a 900Mhz relay modem, that connects to a nearby tower. (The town sprinkled about a dozen 90 ft tall fiberglass towers around town as part of the network build out, these relay local signals that are not line-of-sight to the main tower on the mountain.) The system is not as fast as a VL modem connection, but it would be better than nothing. The issue though was that in the past, there had been interference between all the towers, limiting the bandwidth. As that depressing thought is circulating, install guy makes several gloomy proclamations about how wooded my lot is, and how the nearest relay tower is up hill, and how they would have to do a site survey to determine where to put up an antenna.

"Can't you just try it out and see? I used to have one of these before I got my VL modem." I am really starting to think he is going to leave without installing anything, stranding me on a Friday after a week of no internet at the house.

"No, we don't have any equipment in stock right now. We're still doing the transition, it's a holiday weekend, (July 4th) and we won't be able to get back to you until next week sometime."

"OK..." I manage, trying to contemplate going another entire weekend without any kind of internet.

"Don't worry." he says, jumping into his truck. "We'll solve this one. We're problem solvers." And he drove off into the setting sun, leaving us completely disconnected.

Next Time: MIFI, the Emergency Internet Solution

Thin Pipe, Part 1 : The Internet Tree

I live out in the woods. Not really impressively far, like an hour outside of Boston. Somewhere where you think they would have decent internet service still. But no. We live in the black hole of internet, our town has no Cable service, and we are outside of DSL range. So we to date have been using the only other option available, WiMax service via our friendly town electric company. This gets us about 1 Mbps download speed, roughly equivalent to slow DSL speed, but good enough.


Things were going OK, although since I work from home and use the internet a lot, i would prefer a lot more bandwidth for the $59/month I am paying. That is a relative ripoff compared to those who live in denser markets, but it's manageable considering the lack of competition we have in town.

To get that speed, I have a 2GHz radio modem sitting at the top of a 60ft pine tree. I had a guy free-climb it about 5 years ago and install it. It has direct line-of-sight to Wachusett Mtn, where the wellspring of internet goodness lives in our area. Without direct line-of-sight, its not possible to get that kind of speed with our system. You can use a slower modem that goes to a nearby relay tower, but then we are talking about 1/2 the speed, 500kbs or so. (We used to have that before we upgraded to the current configuration.)

So like I said, things were going OK, until last week, when our internet connection got flaky. I had always dreaded that moment, the moment I realized whatever problem there was could only be solved by fixing something at the top of that big big tree. The Internet Tree, as we lovingly referred to it. The source of all our music and news and movies and software. The internet sap had finally dried up!

Panic set in. But I had it in the back of my mind when this day came, I would just convince our friendly light dept to send out a bucket truck, perhaps at my expense, to go up there and fix it...

Next Installment: Your radio modem is where ??