Lake Waseosa Ratepayers' Association

Updated: What happens when it all goes south and quits working. (Added to the end of this article.)

I got high speed access today, but it was touch and go there for a while.

The installer actually came out a week ago to test for signal. We knew in advance that my property would be borderline for service. A line drawn from the transmitter just grazes the top of Treasure island and has to penetrate almost half a kilometer of foliage horizontally. So getting service here was a bit of a test case. 

Chris, the installer, is well equipped for the job. He's literally a walking wireless network! In his backpack he has a 12v battery pack and a wireless router. In one hand, he has a 20' pole (which he can extend to 30' if necessary) supporting a directional "yagi" style antenna.  In his other, a wi-fi enabled PDA that displays signal strength, connection speed, jitter, distance from the transmitter and other parameters from which he can judge the anticipated quality of service.

Wandering around the property, it soon became apparent that the signal was marginal at best. Even standing atop my garage didn't help. But persistence paid off and he finally found a spot way off in the corner with a decent signal.  Unfortunately it was 150' from the house and 30' in the air! 

They could supply a tv type tower, but I decided to look around for a used one, to cut costs a bit. I know a few fellow "pack rats" and was confident I could come up with something in fairly short order. After all, over the past 10 years, everybody switched to satellite TV, right? 

Yes, and most people scrapped the old TV tower or turned it into dock supports. Old TV towers are becoming harder to find, so if you have one you want to get rid of, please advertise it in our classified section for your neighbours who find themselves in the same boat that I did! 

Fortunately I finally found one in decent shape that the owner was happy to have hauled away and out of their yard. I booked an appointment with Chris, and together we erected the tower and he installed the hardware. 

The hardware consists of a "subscriber module" -- a weatherproof radio that in my case is mounted atop the tower but would normally be located on the side of the house or perhaps on the chimney.  In an area with a good signal, its internal antenna is sufficient but in my difficult location an external high-gain yagi was needed. This is very similar in appearance to the UHF section of an old TV antenna -- a row of short elements mounted on a long tube. It's about 4' long overall. 

The radio is connected via outdoor "cat 5" ethernet cable, rated for direct burial. In spite of the 8 conductors, it is similar in size and appearance to television co-ax cable. That run of cable is connected to a lightning arrester where it enters the house. A separate ground wire is run from the lighning arrester to a suitable ground point such as a copper plumbing pipe. 

Once inside the house, the cable can be run direct into a computer or into a router, as with the output from a cable or ADSL modem used to provide wired broadband. There is one small difference: the radio gets it's power from a small transformer with a 3 foot cord to an adapter. The ethernet cable from the radio is plugged into the adapter and the adapter plugs into your computer or router. This system is known as "Power over Ethernet" and means you only have one wire going through the wall. One note here: if you sign up with Vianet, you will need to log in using PPPOE. Pretty well all modern routers will have that capability. Windows operating systems from XP on up have that capability. If you are using another operating system, you will need to check before planning to plug the cable directly into your computer. If your operating system does not support a PPPOE connection, you will need a router that does. Surenet customers should not face this issue as they are using a more traditional DHCP approach. Think of it this way: Vianet connects like ADSL, Surenet connects like cable.

Chris double-checked the signal at the end of the wire one last time to ensure everything was operational, and phoned the office to let them know it was time to turn it all on. It was up to me to call my ISP and let them know I was ready for service. Five minutes later, I was told it should be up and running as soon as the installer left.

This is were things got a little frustrating. 

Now, the frustrating bits were not unexpected. As an early adopter, I knew up-front that there could be some bugs to work out of the new tower. And the frustrating bit was not the fault of the technical support staff. I dealt with both Core and Vianet and their people were knowlegable, courteous and as helpful as they could be under the circumstances. But it was a weekend -- a long weekend at that -- and not everybody was sitting at their desk with nothing better to do than diagnose network problems. So it was about 24 hours before they sorted out the software glitch that was keeping Vianet from talking with my radio.  And since I had just checked the connection for the umpteenth time, I know it was less than 5 minutes after they fixed it that Core called me to let me know it was working. Now that that glitch has been corrected, future Vianet customers should not have that problem. Any similar glitch interfacing with the Surenet system should also be corrected by now, as I understand their first customer is also up and running. 

And within 5 minutes after they called, the entire family was putting it to the test. One computer was downloading AV updates. Another was uploading pictures to this website. She Who Must Be Obeyed was surfing with my son while I was downloading an e-book into my PDA. Simultaneously. And everyone, accustomed to watching the dial-up hourglass, was amazed at the speed. Using Vianet's speed test utility, we are consistently seeing d/l speeds of over 1.5mbit/s and uploads consistently over 700kbit/s. Of course, that will likely drop a bit at peak hours as more users are added to the system. (Only one person can talk at any one millisecond.) However, it seems clear that speeds will be at least twice as fast as satellite. It is also less likely to be affected by weather conditions and does not suffer from the same caps as satellite service. 

This install was likely just about the worst-case scenario that can still get service. So cost-wise, this is what it would have cost to have Core supply and install everything, over and above the standard $180 install fee:

Scoring a free used tower and doing as much of the labour myself as I could beforehand kept the costs down, of course.  I also had a router already. If you need a router, prices range from about $40 for a basic wired router on up to $200 for the latest n-band WiFi unit. The speed advantage of a high-price router is only useful if you are transfering a lot of data between computers in your own home -- the radio has a 10 Base-T port so a gigabit router won't speed up your internet access in the slightest.  A better use for your money would be a  surge suppressor to protect your investment. They run around $20 and up. Staples has a good deal on a 350 watt UPS right now, so you could still access the net during one of our frequent power outages. Regular $90 but with an instant rebate of $30. 

The monthly cost is about $50 (seasonal plans are available, as described here. ) That's more than the traditional $25 for unlimited dial-up, but about the same as dial-up + 2^nd phone line. And if you can work from home sometimes, way cheaper on gas than the stressful drive back and forth from the city!

Update:

At 5:05am, April 3 the internet quit working at our house. A check of the router logs showed the router couldn't connect to the system. Vianet tech support hours are from 8am to 1am. I could have left a message on their answering machine, but opted to wait until they were open. After 8am, I explained the problem to the girl who answered the phone and she opened a support ticket. 

A technician called me back within an hour. Looking at it from his end, he couldn't see our radio connected to the system anymore. His logs showed that the radio had connected for a few seconds several times, but that the signal was immediately lost. He advised that he would have to contact Core. About an hour later, he called again to say that Core would have a feild tech at my place sometime in the afternoon. 

Early in the afternoon, Chris (soaking wet from his last service call in the rain) showed up with a replacement radio and antenna.  He climbed our tower in the pouring rain to replace the unit. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to have fixed the problem. The signal strength was a paltry -85dB. This was quite perplexing because it was a very nice -63dB when he installed it a few weeks ago.

He spent some time on the phone with the fellows watching computer screens in a nice dry office. They played with switching frequencies and so forth with no success. Eventually he went back up the tower with his test rig and pole. Positioning the test rig 10' above the existing antenna produced a marginal signal (-79dB).

At this point, all they can suggest is raising the tower another 20' to see if that might work. Unfortuately, Chris will not be available to do the work until next Wednesday. After Chris left, I called Vianet and told them what was going on. They offered to set me up with a temporary dial-up account for the time being, and it was active within a half hour. 

To be continued sometime Wednesday...

Further UPDATE: April 20. Ok, it's a bit later than Wednesday. Core decided to upgrade some equipment at their end, so we held off. Their upgrade did restore service, although it was still a bit flakey with a borderline signal. We ended up raising my tower another 10', and the combination has everything running well with no interuption of service at all over the past week.

Remember, my particular location was considered marginal at best to begin with because I'm behind both Treasure Island and the big hill north of the channel.  Most people will not have these problems. And I have to give credit to both Vianet and Core for their professional and courteous service while they solved my problems.