01.04.07
The Street of Broken Broadband Dreams, Chapter 23
The Boss has been on me about updating the blog. The holiday doldrums, with its gray skies, wind and rain, has caught up to me. I have “cave-itis” pretty bad at the moment. It manifests in the overwhelming desire to sit in a dark room, staring intently into a LCD flat panel display.
Happily, we received our Kyocera KR-1 router
, and our online life has begun to approach something akin to normal. Now I know that last statement is a bit heavy with equivocation, but hear me out. We now enjoy lazing around in various rooms using the Internet on our respective laptops. I have managed to make my Vonage phone work over this connection, and I’m not leashed to the window in our living room in order to do whatever I want online. I even have been able to VPN into work and be productive. But here’s the thing: Verizon BroadbandAccess is not broadband, at least not how you would normally consider it. It is a wireless data service (and at $80/month, an expensive one) that Verizon wants you to use only for certain tasks. And after reading it, it’s pretty clear that the way I want to use it is not the way Verizon wants me to use it. To wit:
Unlimited Data Plans and Features (such as NationalAccess, BroadbandAccess, Push to Talk, and certain VZEmail services) may ONLY be used with wireless devices for the following purposes: (i) Internet browsing; (ii) email; and (iii) intranet access (including access to corporate intranets, email, and individual productivity applications like customer relationship management, sales force, and field service automation).
The emphasis is theirs. So, here’s the risk to our Internet stopgap: if we go over a pre-set bandwidth limit, they assumes we’re abusing the service and may kill our subscription without notice. Again, from Verizon:
Anyone using more than 5 GB per line in a given month is presumed to be using the service in a manner prohibited above, and we reserve the right to immediately terminate the service of any such person without notice. We also reserve the right to terminate service upon expiration of Customer Agreement term.
Fun.
So, while I am blogging about this and being quite open and honest, my desire is to just fly under the radar and hope that Verizon doesn’t pull the plug on my subscription before I’m able to install the “Trench of Dreams” and run the fiber link to the “Antenna of Doom”.
Speaking of the Trench of Dreams, I recently received a lovely pair of StarTech media converters
, these beauties will convert from the rather limited reach of Category 5e copper (say, about 100 meters) to multimode fiber optic strands (which can pump data up to 2 kilometers). Each one draws 9 watts, when added to the 7.2 watts that the radio at the vineyard is rated to draw, we have devised a relatively low-power rig for getting the real Internet to the house.
Also, a new character has come to play: Mr. Handy. We actually met Mr. Handy indirectly through our pan-dimensional super being, Solar God. He has turned out to be, well, quite handy in a number of projects around the ranch. He’s also a real easy guy to get along with.
Well, through no fault of his own, it looks as if he needs a place to stay, and the ranch having the extra cabin (small as it is), we have a place that is serviceable. Can you say “barter”? (I knew you could.) So, it might be that we will get the trench dug up to the vineyard for just the cost of renting the trencher.
After that, the major costs will be getting the materials (PVC conduit in varying sizes, fiber optic cable, copper wire) to get power, data and water to and from the vineyard. There’s still no strong estimate for solar versus copper for providing power. However, having run the numbers myself, I believe it would take about 5000 feet total of 1/0 AWG copper just to run a 20 amp circuit from our current panel up to the vineyard. Sounds just a bit prohibitive to me. Getting a basic solar installation seems much more likely to fit our budget.
So, as strange as it’s turning out, we’ll definitely come out ahead of the Wunderkind’s $16,000.00 Challenge. It’s now just a question of “how soon”?