I’m an IT guy but I still don’t understand how high speed internet connections reached much of the world in just a few years. I went to the USVI a few weeks ago and St. Croix had high speed internet connections available all over the place. Likewise, I have heard of internet cafes in the Himilayas and Africa. What type of lines are they tapping into that allows internet access all over the world. Is it phone line, cable lines, what? I am interested in the infrastructure that allows this.
Digital telephone technology is fairly old; packet-based digital-switching systems started gradually replacing the old analog CO’s in the 1960’s. I think by the mid '80s, nearly all voice-call switching down to the central office was digital (of course, the line from CO to your home remained analog POTS).
Basic-rate ISDN was the fledgling attempt to get digital from the CO to the home, started sometime in the early-to-mid '80s. The original vision was to replace all the cwires running to your home with fiber optics, but as this proved unsupportable in the market, the technology was developed to run over the already-existing copper. Still, ISDN was never really supported by the industry, and in some ways was an answer in search of a question (The acronym–Integrated Systems Digital Network–was often derisively labeled “It still does nothing” or “I still don’t know”). ISDN is still in use overseas (still popular in Europe; don’t know about the Himalayas), but has largely dies out in the US.
Digital Subscriber Lines built on the work of ISDN. They were originally intended for video delivery (one reason why the first systems were asymmetrical; more data bits downstream than upstream), but as the market for home access to the internet boomed, they became the perfect answer to the problem of download speeds (all the infrasructure was already in place).
Unlike DSL, cable modems were developed in direct response to the Internet boom. Still, they also made use of an existing infrastruction, and took advantage of the fact that cable TV was designed to be bi-directional. I’ve heard this explained as either an FCC requirement or because cable operators imagined a system where they would do many live broadcasts from remote locations in their community, even perhaps renting bandwidth to TV newscrews doing live remotes. This idea never got off the ground–newscrews used their own cheap-ish MARTI transmitters–but this artifact of old design eventually did find an application in cable modems. I’m not sure, but I believe outside the US cable modem/telephony systems are common in nations with traditionally poor (state-run?) telephone services such as Belgium and Australia.
Geosynchronous satellites have made high-speed data links and telephone service available to most of the world for decades. They aren’t cheap, but the cost of the equipment needed for the Earth station has declined dramatically over the years, making it much more affordable to install them in remote areas.
Island locations may also have a connection to FLAG (Fiber Link Around the Globe) or some similar fiber optic network, such as those operated by BT (British Telecom), or AT&T.
This is a little hard to see, but it’s a map showing the various undersea cables and where they connect.
The mountains of Colorado here. Central USA.
I was getting 9k until I went to DirecWay. I use the dish.
Now I get anywhere from 600k to 800k down, but only about 50k up.
Not good for sending lots of data, but fine for surfing.
I could get better up load if I wanted to pay for it. India, the Himalayas, are a different story I’m sure, but for home use, the dish does a good job in the US.
Right now, I’m rockin’ along at 19.2k. Sometimes it gets all the way up to 24.0.
There’s no way that cable or DSL will be out here in my lifetime, trust me on that one.
enipla, are you satisfied with your satellite setup? How much does it cost? We already have the small dish TV setup. (Direct TV)
All internet in Saudi Arabia is supposed to go through a single server in Riyadh. That one server is censored. (Odd sites are blocked too, things like Snopes.) In any case, I used a hookup to a satellite in order to bypass the One Big Server. It is fairly common here, but illegal.
I can’t speak for the home version, but business-class satellite service from Direcway offers up to 1.5 mbps down and 100 kbps up for $130 a month, plus a cool $1000 for installation.
Not exactly high-speed, but if you’re five miles away from the nearest phone line, it’s better than nothing.
Travelling in the US and UK recently, I was surprised how many people are still using dial-up and how even ‘broadband’ is only 1 Mbps or so. Here in Hong Kong, 10 Mbps is standard in the home and you can even get a 1 Gigabyte per second residential service if you want. I suppose the fact that we all live in high-density high-rise blocks helps.
Hemlock, that sounds sweet! Is there an OC trunk line in your basement? Or major phone provider nearby?
In some places in the US, like San Francisco, you can get 10 Mbps service. Many people I talk to on another tech board I visit have 6 Mbps service. It really does matter about population density, I guess.
I’m fine with my 1.5 Mbps service… It’s fine for surfing and terminal serving into work. Anything faster would be a waste.
I’ve never been to an internet cafe in the Himalayas, but I have been to one in very rural India. All it was was a PC and a regular phone line. Pretty high spped compared to the alternative.
Yes, we are happy with it.
We had just direcTV (only way to get anything where we live)when our internet dropped from 24k to 9k we had to do something.
It requires a diffent dish, and I think our set up was a few hundred dollars. I think we pay around $60 a month for the internet, and around $90 for TV.
So far I have had no problems with my home set up, except the dish is not grounded properly. Occasionaly i have to unhook the co-axe from the box and ground it. It’s my fault really, I plan on moving the dish when we get an addition done, then it will be easier to get it to ground.
Oh, and I’ll need to get help to move the dish. Since it uploads, you are not supposed to move the dish with out assistance. I’m sure you could, with the right software.
In the winter, I sometimes have to brush the snow off of the dish, and speed goes down durning storms. But it’s not worth bitching about. Rain and heavy cloud does not seem to effect it. Snow does.
One other thing.
I’m told that sat dishes don’t work well for online gaming. Too much latency.
Indeed. High speed is easy; low latency is hard. The problem is the speed of light: the satellites orbit at just over 35,000 km so a packet has a round trip of at least 4x that or over 150,000 km. The speed of light is 300,000 km/s, so you’re looking at a minimum latency of 0.5 sec. And since the signal isn’t straight up and straight down, it’s going to be more.