Faster, Internet! How? How?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Please excuse my ignorance and probably-garbled explanation, but that’s why I’m asking for help, after all.

Anyhoo, a couple of my bosses take their laptops home or on the road and use Earthlink dial-up service for Internet access. As you can imagine, they are finding it tooo slooow. I’ve looked into Earthlink high-speed Internet but given our rural phone number, it’s not available to us. (Why does it depend on your “home” number when you are using it when traveling? Is it just a matter of local vs. long-distance fees? (but they are saying we can’t subscribe to it at all)) I also don’t want to rely on their wireless service as it may not be available around here or in some places the bosses may travel.

So what are our options to speed up, given that this is for a couple of machines used on the road or in hotels? What should I be looking for when researching this for them? Please don’t hesitate to talk to me at the most basic of levels because I am just learning all of this (we use service provided by the company here at work and I don’t surf at home).

Thanks for any help!

2

The high-speed option is DSL, which is totally tied to and dependent on your home phone line. As you’ve already found, DSL isn’t available on your line, because it’s simply too far from the phone company switching office. Even if you could get DSL on the home line, it would be useless for traveling.

For traveling, look for hotels that offer in-room ethernet jacks. They’re usually free in the sense that they come with the room, but you won’t find them at Motel 6 or other inexpensive “tourist” hotels - rather, they’ll be at the likes of Hyatt, Marriott and other “business” hotels. The buzzword they’ll probably use in the advertising is high-speed internet. This will require the laptops to have a standard ethernet (aka network) jack, and your travelers will need an ethernet cable.

Otherwise, there’s just no practical means of getting more than 56k out of a dial-up connection.

You could also investigate cellular modem internet service. On a good day, I can get a roughly 110k connection - twice as fast as dial-up, but there’s a big collection of gotta-haves for it to work. You gotta have a cell phone that can take a data cable. Your phone needs to be on a plan that offers data service. You need the data cable. Finally, you gotta be in a data service area, which is often the same as wherever a phone is getting digital voice service. Downsides are that it ties up your cell phone, so if you want to be online and talking, you’ll need two cell phones. It’s also a bit pricy. For me, the cable was $45, and the phone service needed a $6/month upgrade. The real cost is in the data. You think roaming is expensive? Try getting online during the day. Data service may be free during nights and weekends, though.

I’ll offer yet another option - WiFi. Seemingly everywhere you go, someone’s offering a WiFi connection. Boingo is one of the big players in this market - For something like $20-25 a month, you get unlimited access on their network. Otherwise, you can pay as you go, but that can add up, by the time you pay Starbucks $10 for a day’s use one day, and $4 for an hour at McDonalds and so on. On the other hand, pay as you go is better if you only need the service rarely. And of course, there are free hotspots out there.

3

Thanks for the info!

Even if there is an ethernet jack in the room, it wouldn’t be any faster, right? I mean, even if they advertise high-speed internet, the speed still depends on the plan we have??

I am looking at Earthlink Wireless Enhanced Access, but that looks like you need to subscribe from one of the cities (not us).

Then they have the WiFi (Wireless High Speed) you mentioned; is this relatively widespread, reliable? I doubt it would be accessible near us, but maybe would be available when traveling to cities. Does it work that you have to physically be near a transmitter for it to work? I am assuming this is what is deployed here at work in our auditoria, etc.

4

No - it depends upon the plan they have. Just like home vs work.

5

Yeah, what gotpasswords said.

Alternately, you could try and get Tura Satana, Lori Williams and Haji to beat the crap out of someone at your ISP.

6

Think of Internet access as a pipe carrying data instead of water. A typical home user has a 56K dialup connection - not a very big pipe. DSL, where available, typically starts around 256K and goes up to 4M (4000K). This is a much bigger pipe, so you can move more data faster with it. A hotel offering in-room high-speed access might have anything for a T1 (1536K) to a fractional DS3 (6M and beyond).

But whatever speed it is, it’s still a pipe - you can’t take it with you. If you have high-speed access at your office, you’re stuck with dialup on the road, unless the hotel has either Ethernet jacks in the rooms, or there is a WiFi access point you can tap into.

If you do happen to stay at a hotel with high-speed Internet access, you’ll be using their pipe, along with everyone else there. It’s totally unrelated to anything you have at your office, your home, your cabin in the woods, etc.

Earthlink’s wireless is via a cellular network - it will work anywhere they have upgraded the cell equipment to handle it, mostly in urban areas.

7

I’d like to add that if a hotel does offer high-speed internet, this wouldn’t be through Earthlink or any other plan (like your local dsl or cable modem service) that you had already purchased. You’d have to pay the hotel directly for your connection. Unless, of course, you find a free wireless hotspot around. And libraries usually have free access, but you have to use their computers.

8

Every hotel I’ve been to that offers high-speed internet simply has it there for free as an amenity to attract the corporate road warriors. Given the choice of free breakfast or free ethernet, I’ll pick the ethernet. There’s no payment to be made to the hotel or any ISP for the service. You’ll be lucky if the basic connection is as fast as T1, never mind DS3. The one I’m on right now gets really sluggish now and then, and it’s not a very large hotel.

9

So if I have it right, these are our options if we stick with laptops and don’t wander into cellular service:

  1. Dial up at home or on the road using a regular telephone line and the Earthlink dial-up plan we have. Slow.

  2. Try to stay at hotels with high-speed internet as long as it is free. Then we don’t need a plan at all, because we would be using theirs. Faster.

  3. Outfit the laptops with wireless cards (may be built-in? or buy one as part of a service plan) or use WiFi network. Need wireless or WiFi plan. Fast, but may be limited in areas available.

Does this sound right? Thanks to all for your help.

10

Yes. At the office, until you can get cable or DSL, you’re stuck with modems.

Yes.

Yes to the first part, no to the second - you don’t need a WiFi plan to use wireless; you just need to know where you can and can’t use it for free. I bring my laptop on the road for twice-monthly travel. It has a built-in wireless card and also a side slot (PCMCIA slot) for add-on cards. The hotel I stay at in Denver offers free wireless because it was cheaper for them than running cables to all the rooms. When you check in, they will loan you a wireless card with your room key for no additional charge.

At airports and in some other other public places, however, you need to pay something like $4.95 before the wireless network will assign you an IP address. There’s a default homepage that the network sends you if your machine makes an HTTP request, and that homepage has the order form that you fill out. Give them your credit card number, and they give you access.

If your travelers have laptops (but are stuck using dial-up at the office) and typically stay at “business” hotels, then go ahead and spring for wireless cards for however many people are typically on the road at a time.

Keep in mind, however, that as long as the office is on dial-up they won’t be able to move any files into or out of the office computers any faster than that dial-up connection, no matter how fast their own connection is.

11

So what is Earthlink selling me when they offer “Wireless Enhanced Access”? When would/could I use this that isn’t already covered by what you are describing?

12

I’m not intimately familiar with Earthlink’s offerings, but from browsing around it look like their “Wireless Enhanced Access” is them reselling CDMA2000 1xRTT cellular data services - essentially, giving you a cellular data modem that works with multiple providers, wherever the network supports it. It’s not at all like WiFi.

WiFi coverage is typically limited to a couple hundred feet - the cellular data services work over a couple of iles, out to tens of miles. It’s more appropriate for people who will be travelling to place that don’t have WiFi coverage or need a mobile connection.