Broadband At Last

In the Beginning

I live in the country and have been waiting for YEARS for the local telcos to bring DSL into my neighborhood.

Back in 1995 when I first moved into my present house I was getting dial-up service at approximately 26,400 Kbps. I was prepared for this as I had "pre-tested" the telephone lines of a neighbor.

Five years went by and one day I noted that there were folks burying some sort of cable on the road side leading out to my home. I pulled over one day and asked what was going down the hole and was told it was a fiber optic system.

Wow, that meant I'd be getting high speed internet at last. I called the phone company but they knew nothing about the cable. Naturally it was all but impossible to get any information out of them. Regarding the phone company, there is one thing you can be sure of, the left hand not only doesn't know what the right hand is doing, it is totally unaware there is a right hand.

Anyway, after a few months went by I came home one day and saw several techs working on installing a brand new equipment cabinet right next to our telephone distribution box (the box that distributes service out to all the individual homes in the neighborhood).

Two boxes actually, the one on the left was the interesting one

 I asked again what was happening and he informed me that the telephone traffic was being moved over from the copper lines to fiber optic to make the trip from our neighborhood back to the central office.

A few days later my dial-up speed jumped up to a pretty spectacular 49 Kbps on a reliable basis.

Well, I thought. They have digital right there on the corner, all they have to do is let us connect directly to it instead of using analog signals and I'll finally have high speed access. Alas, it wasn't that simple. In fact, I've been bugging the phone company on and off for 3 years about this and they will not commit to offering DSL in our neighborhood. DRAT!!

The Future is Finally Here

In early June of 2003 I was driving up to a conference in Boulder when I get a call on my mobile radio. It was one of my neighbors and he was telling me that we had finally come into the 21st century. Apparently someone was offering high speed access via a wireless distribution system. He asked if I was interested. Absolutely!

I was actually considering buying into the satellite based broadband thing. I just didn't like the idea of being so limited in my upload speeds. Satellite broadband generally caps the uplink speed to around that of a 56K modem. So, while I'd get a much faster (300-400 Kbps) downlink I'd still be stuck with a miserable uplink speed. As a web master of a site that hosts around 130 Megabytes of information, I was loath to spend the money for broadband when it wouldn't enable me to work faster with my big website. So, I'd been holding out. Looks like waiting has finally paid off.

Broadband Comes to Elbert County

The company who offers this high speed access to Elbert and Douglas county is Air Wave Access. They have a web site where you can get the low down on their service. And the kicker for me was, they promise to give you bi-directional 500 Kbps access to the net. That's a total of 500 Kbps. Note I don't use the words synchronous or asynchronous. I'm not well enough educated to use them. But, the 500 Kbps can be used to upload or download but not both. In other words, you can upload a file at 250 Kbps and download another file at 250 Kbps. Having had broadband for a while now I can say that 500 Kbps is QUITE fast. It should make you pretty durn happy whatever you are doing. Of course faster will ALWAYS be better so if you can get that guaranteed from another source, it's economical and reliable then go for it.

Also if you think these guys are using 802.11 a,b or g forget it. This is a commercial grade system running at 10 megabits per second per radio and they probably have more than one radio on each access tower. How it all works is something you may want to discuss with them but just know this isn't an 802.11b ad hoc wireless network. It's capable of much faster speeds than that. Although you won't be able to get the full bandwidth available. That overhead is shared out to other subscribers thus making the system fast for us, the users, and economical for them the providers. For more information you might check out this Motorola site. I believe they use this technology for their system. If not they use something similar.

Map made with Street Atlas 9

They have several access points (AP). Above are three APs I am aware of. Each user of their system must be able to "see" the access point in order to be able to use it. Below are maps that show the coverage are for each AP. These maps show the propagation coverage at 5 gigahertz for the various Air Wave Towers. If you are located in a purple area surrounded by a red boundary, then you might, just might be in the coverage area for one of the system antennas.

East Access Point
Map made with Radio Mobile Deluxe

You will note that although the east access point is the closest to my home, it is below the horizon to my east and thus I can not use it.

Central Access Point
Map made with Radio Mobile Deluxe

The Central Access Point above is the one I am "connected" to.

West Access Point
Map made with Radio Mobile Deluxe

5 gigahertz is strictly line of sight. So if you are in a "valley" or behind a stand of trees you might not be able to receive their signal. The best, and only reliable way to find out if you are good to go is to call them up and ask. They can do a preliminary peek by just entering in your location and seeing what their software thinks about the terrain between you and one of their antennas. However, they won't guarantee anything until they actually come to your home with a test rig and see just how reception is.

Airwave will come out to your home and install a "satellite dish" similar to those used by Dish TV and Directv. However, instead of pointing to the sky, the dish is pointed towards their access point out there on the horizon.

Airwave Access dish and radio

Instead of an LNA poised at the focus point of the dish, there's a digital radio. The radio is connected to a small box, not shown, and the data is converted to standard Ethernet TCP/IP traffic. Then a cat 5 network cable is run from that box up into the location where you want to interconnect to your network or computer. You just plug it in and you're on. They also use a pair of the lines in the CAT5 cable to send DC electric current back down to their dish to power the radio. Naturally, this DC is filtered and does NOT enter your network. It only powers the radio.

Static or Dynamic?

I decided on getting a static IP address after a week of experimentation. It was the only way I could get certain strange programs to operate on the net. I would say that 95+ percent of the users of the system would NOT need a static IP. Everything "normal" works fine with the dynamic IP. There are a few programs that I use that act as servers that need that static IP.

Protection

Because I was going to become permanently "findable" on the net by a permanent IP address, I decided to hide behind a router letting it do NAT (Network address translation) which serves as a fairly good "firewall" from low level hackers. I put the quotes around firewall because it isn't a firewall at all. No inspections are made of traffic incoming or outgoing other than to make those address translations. However, an unsolicited request of a router usually results in nothing, just a blank stare sort of.

Beginner hackers use something called port scanners. Essentially they find an IP address and ask it if it will accept incoming traffic on different ports. A router just says NOTHING. It does not answer back saying it has the port but it is blocked. It doesn't say it doesn't have the port. It just acts deaf and dumb. 99% of hackers see this and assume that there is nothing there, or perhaps they know there might be something there but it's a pure guess and definitely goes beyond their ability to penetrate further. Real hackers won't be forestalled by this blockade. So, if you seriously want to attempt to protect yourself you should run a firewall too.

If you wish to see the benefits of a router added to your broadband connected network check out GOOGLE. I'm sure you can turn up innumerable explanations much better than I could manage in a click or two.

The Switch

Many, perhaps MOST, home networks rely on hubs to spread their network connections around. I decided to convert to switches. It's probably overkill but the cost is equal so, If you are setting up a home network for the first time get the switch not the hub.

Why?

When a computer talks to another computer through a hub the data is sent to ALL computers on the network. Only the computer expecting the data recognizes it and accepts it. However that still means all computers are getting hammered by megabytes of data when you are transferring a file or doing some internet activity. A switch is different. It KNOWS where the data is going and ONLY sends it to the computer expecting it. How is this done. I'm not exactly sure but there are at least two unique things about each computer on a network. They each have their own unique IP addresses within the network and each network interface card has a Mac Address:

Using one descriptor or the other a switch recognizes where the data is coming from and where it is bound and it only directs the traffic to the designated location.

So, suppose I'm downloading a file and I'm also transferring 100s of megabytes of data between computers within my local area network. NONE of this traffic competes when it moves through a switch. In fact, the internet connection and the computer using it are TOTALLY unaware of the traffic passing between the other computers on the network.

This ensures maximum throughput without clogging up the network with unwanted traffic as happens with a hub. I've probably mangled the details but the concept is correct. Once again, go online to GOOGLE and search out the differences between switches and hubs. But, the important thing here is that switches used to be expensive and hubs cheap. Now, they cost about the same. So switch to a switch.

The results?

Fantastic! I get a 99% + reliable connection to the net. But, let me confess to a few problems that were all based within my network.

When I first got online with the new system the speeds were VERY erratic. I'd get bursts of data at 500+ Kbps then the speeds would drop to 60 or 70 Kbps. Averaging the download speed on a large compressed binary from a reliable source (source with an excellent connection to the net that should be able to serve out the data at any rate up to T1 speeds), I was getting speeds of around 180 to 190 Kbps.

I emailed Airwave tech support and immediately (within an hour) got a phone call from Bob. He suggested I bypass everything on the network and see what kind of speeds I could get with the a computer connected DIRECTLY to the cat5 cable to the dish. I was instantly receiving at speeds in excess of the promised 500 Kbps. Bob offered to assist me in getting things settled down within the network but I declined his offer. Essentially AirWave was doing their part. I wanted to solve my internal problems myself so that I would understand the problem and be able to resolve it myself should it ever appear again.

When I tested direct connection to their dish I'd used my notebook computer. I discovered that it would work just fine even behind the router and network connections. However 3 other computers just would not connect reliably at high speed. I tried lots of things and nothing I did seemed to fix the problem. I even took my router back and exchanged it for another thinking that was the problem. Then I started researching the problem on the net and found one recurring suggestion. Fix the packet window size (RWIN and MTU). I kept reading and lots of folks were insisting that a particular tweaking program would solve all my problems. It was "Tweakmaster" from Hagel Technologies. I'd been using another of their programs for years and loved it (DU Meter) and so I decided to give it a try. It's a shareware program located at:

http://www.tweakmaster.com

It's tough luck for them but, you really don't need to pay for this program. You use it once and you're essentially done. It has a wizard interface. It asks you a few questions like, are you on dialup, or DSL or Broadband. Wireless isn't one of the choices since it's so limited in the number of folks who use it. I just selected Broadband as it is the most similar in speed and structure. Click, click, click and bingo my main system sitting behind the router and network switches was now running as fast as a direct connection to the wireless radio. I dragged the program around my network and ran it on each windows machine and they all came up to the 500 Kbps speed with no problem.

There is one feature in TweakMaster that requires it to be running in the background 24/7. It has a DNS cache. What's that? Well the internet runs on NUMBERS not names. So when you type in WWW.CNN.COM, that is totally meaningless. But, the internet service provider has something called Domain Name Servers (DNS). When you type in that "plain text" URL it is sent to the DNS and the DNS in turn sends back the actual internet IP address.

Today the IP for CNN is: 64.236.41.15

Well TweakMaster can store this information locally on you computer. This speeds up the connection to CNN and any other website by a few milliseconds. Instead of having to go to the DNS, TweakMaster just pulls the actual IP address from a file stored on your computer. Because I'm a sucker for paying for services rendered, I used this as an excuse to register TweakMaster. Frankly, I wouldn't have paid if I had just run the program once to tweak some registry settings. But since I'm now using it every day to add the very slightest of speed increase to my connection I feel it's worth the money.

In the first few weeks there were minutes where the connection would go away. Airwave is BRAND NEW and they are tweaking their connection to the net. Lots of new equipment. And occasionally I'd lose my connection for a short interval. Total outage per day was probably less than 5 minutes. However, that has totally disappeared and I now seem to have 100% access.

Yesterday we had a bruiser of a thunder storm. It totally knocked out my DirecTV signal. This is kind of interesting and coincidental but ... the azimuth (direction) to the local access point for Airwave is almost exactly the same as that of the DirecTV satellite constellation. So, I knew that there was lots of moisture floating around between me and DirecTV interfering with the signal. And since Airwave's access point on the ground was in exactly the same direction, it would be experiencing the same maximum interference from the moisture (rain and hail) falling from the storm. Airwave had promised that their signal would NEVER be affected by this type of interference. I believed them as I'm somewhat conversant with the realities of RF propagation, but just to be sure I got online and connected to the web. Absolutely NO problems with the net connection even in the midst of a raging thunderstorm. I actually went to the National Weather Service on the web and downloaded the latest doppler radar image. Sure enough there was that thunderstorm covering both ME and the Airwave access point. So, you should never have a problem with airborne moisture. Of course during the winter snow may accumulate and cause problems. However I really doubt it. The angle of the dish just doesn't offer any place for snow to accumulate.

Brave New World

Broadband is really a life changing experience for someone who is ALWAYS on the net. Take a look at this chart.

Chart made with data collected automatically in the background by DU Meter

I got Broadband installed on the 29th of June. See what happened to my traffic usage? The chart is showing the number of megabytes uploaded AND downloaded from the net by day. It rose dramatically. But, WHY? It's the same internet right. So how come all of a sudden I was transferring such large amounts of data?

The first week or two it was simply downloading LOTS of video. I was totally addicted to the movie trailers over at Quicktime (www.apple.com/trailers). Of course, as the chart clearly shows, this soon wore thin. But it was just AMAZING. I could download and LOOK at trailers in real-time. I didn't have to wait for the download to complete. I could actually watch it live. The download speed was faster than the speed of playback. That was neat!

Then I started using some facets of websites I'd been going to for years but never bothered with. For example, go to MSNBC and there are often video snippets attached to stories. With a 56K modem I NEVER clicked on the video. I knew that I'd be stuck there waiting 10 minutes downloading to watch a 2 minute interview. Not realistic unless the subject is VERY important to the viewer.

I also actually downloaded a song (MP3) using a P2P client. My first and probably last MP3 download. A 5 Megabyte song comes in pretty fast. Not being into the whole P2P thing I moved on from that. I actually believe it's wrong to download music for free. Of course, I also believe the RIAA should all be sent to jail for their incredible gall of suing Joe Public for doing it. The answer to this probably lies in the realm of iTunes Music Library. But, they need to get rid of that dratted Digital Rights Management. I'd gladly pay $0.99 for a song I could actually play anywhere. OOps, better let this one drop as it's totally unrelated to broadband except for the fact that file sharing is only really feasible with a high speed connection.

OK, so our website went KerSplat the other day. After some trouble shooting I managed to discover what was amiss. And then it was time to republish it in its new and repaired form. That means a 130 Megabyte upload.

I don't have exact figures for dialup, I just know that it took HOURS and HOURS and HOURS (more than 12) to upload the entire site via dialup.

I clicked publish and went away. Within one hour I was back at my computer and the entire site had been published. Now THAT was exactly what I bought into this high speed service for. If you do the math the upload speed tops out at approximately 288 Kbps. Of course, there is lots of overhead when you publish with Front Page. This slows things down. I haven't really tried to upload a single binary file to test upload speed. But, 288 is just fine for me.

Recently I wanted to do some mapping of radio signal propagation. I had for some reason deleted all my topographic data. This was a real mistake. And, I can't imagine how it happened. In the dial up days I would have had to spend several DAYS downloading information. Now, it's a whole different story. Instead of downloading the medium resolution data, I decided to go for the High Resolution stuff (10 times more accurate and 10 times more data). Using an FTP client I went to the topo data server and selected about 3 GIGAbytes of data. Ok it took most of that night and the next morning to grab that much stuff. But the thing is, dialup would have taken many days to grab the same data. Oh and here's a neat side note. The server that provides the topo data was speed limiting me to under 500 Kbps. So, while my main computer was downloading this incredible amount of data I was actually on another computer out in the living room surfing the web. And since my connection speed wasn't being maxed out by the data download I hardly even noticed any delays with my web surfing experience.

So, what you are seeing is not really an exponential increase in usage. In fact look at this chart.

Chart made with data collected automatically in the background by DU Meter

All I've done is get rid of those super high traffic days with more than 1 gigabyte of data transferred so the scaling shows more clearly the day to day usage. Just looking with the old mark one eyeball you can see that prior to June 29 I was averaging perhaps 20 to 25 megabytes per day and after I got broadband the average is probably around 75 megabytes per day not counting those movie trailer spikes in the initial first couple of weeks and that one anomalous day in august when I seemed to be after lots of data.

The most dramatic thing about broadband is that things really pop up fast.

So, Broadband rules.