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!