For years I've yearned for a faster Internet connection

The connection at my old office was actually quite good. Despite it being a 56K modem, I could connect at 49K most of the time. And that was tolerable. The only time the speed was noticeable was when a publisher would send me some multi-megabyte file, which would take a big chunk of an hour to receive. Otherwise, the speed seemed okay.

But I lusted for more!

My old office was in our house, which was about 8 miles out of town (up on a hill overlooking the lake — very beautiful). Our phone service was on something called a MUX. That meant that rather than use wires to service our little community up on the hill, the Phone Company beamed all the phone signals via microwave to a central location (the MUX), where it was then sent by wires to all the homes (some 200 of them).

The connection over the MUX was good. But we were too far away from the central office for DSL when that became available. (Though I did ask.) And there's no cable service out that far, so cable modem was out of the question. And ISDN — never mind.

I did buy a satellite modem. But, at the time, the cost of the Hughes DirectPC service was $700 a month. I could pay less, but the $700/month figure was more in line with my true Internet usage (about three hours a day at the time). And then there was a technical problem: the speed was about 512Kbps but only when downloading. Uploading, or sending stuff to the Internet, poked out through a standard 56K modem. Too slow.

A few years afterward, my ISP told me that I could get something called a "Frame relay," which is their term for a T1 line. But you don't need the full T1, just a fraction of it. And they could install it right up to my house, simple as plugging in a new phone line. I was thrilled.

After investing money in some new equipment and putting up the initial payments, I was crushed by the evil Phone Company. You see, my mountain top dwelling was destined to be upgraded to fibre optic Real Soon Now. (The transcontinental fibre optic cable runs underground just about a mile from our house, yet there are no local taps into it.) Because the fibre optic upgrade was on the books, they could not set me up with a wire-based T1. I would have to wait.

It turns out that I would have to wait for two years. Because of the GTE-Verizon merger, the fibre optic upgrade was on hold indefinitely. I was promised that I was in the queue. Still, that didn't help much for getting on the Internet faster.

One day, while mulling tapping into the transcontinental fibre optic line all by myself, I noticed that my ISP offered wireless service. I'm a big wireless fan. Yet I was too far outside of the signal range. I could see the mountain were the tower was positioned; on a clear day it would show up on the DrivewayCam. But I was too far away to be guaranteed a signal.

Eventually the ISP did boost the signal and I could have gotten wireless. But by then the office was headed into town to get the mythical T1 line.

Okay, so it's a "Fractional" T1 line

The full T1 line is something like one zillion bits per second. Very fast. I didn't need all that speed, nor did I want to pay for it. So I opted for a fractional T1 line. Sounds skimpy, but it's 384Kbps speed with a guarantee that it won't drop below 192Kbps (half of 384). The price was more reasonable, and the good news was that Verizon could install it at once.

So one day, the happy Verizon people (specifically the high tech Verizon people) showed up and stuck a new box on the office into which would flow my T1 line. Ta-Da! Step one was done.

The T1 line ventures into the house.

Step Two involved setting up a computer to act as a gateway and firewall between my office's local area network (LAN) and the Internet (Internet). Though it would have been funny to use a Gateway computer, I found a cheap eMachines box on the Internet for $450 (no monitor) that would ship the next day. So I bought it and had guru Jim at the ISP install BSD Unix on it. Here's technically how things would be hooked up:

This is technical; please do not memorize!

Finally, on Monday April 22, Verizon showed up to put The Magic T1 Box on the wall. That's where the Internet comes into my office and eagerly awaits connection (through a router; see above) to a computer. It was exciting, as the following image illustrates:

The thrill of the T1 box on the wall.

The next step was to wait until Wednesday when the line would be officially connected and working and such. On that date, Jim from the ISP stopped by with my revamped eMachines computer, the router and all sorts of fun toys. When he left ($200 later), the BSD Unix computer was talking to the Internet at some 300Kbps. Whoa.

The final setup.

On Thursday I connected all the computers in the office to the system using a cheap-o Netgear hub and several long cables. (I will be "site-wiring" the office in the coming weeks so that I don't have to step over all the cables when I go to work.

Oh, yeah: And this is my SPAM filter:

Ha. Ha.

Life at 384Kbps

Honestly, overall I don't really notice that much speed improvement. Sure, the Web pages do load faster, but it's not really that much. While some do fly up on the screen, I don't remember in the past really waiting that long for stuff to show up. And some pages still loads slowly; it all depends on the speed of their Web server. So sometimes there is no speed improvement.

Of course, when it comes to downloading and uploading stuff, the speed is very noticeable. I used to be able to download at about 5Kbps/second. Now the download speed is roughly 40Kbps/second. This means those 6MB PDF files my publisher sends me take only two minutes to receive as opposed to twenty.

Streaming audio and video works better, naturally. In fact my former favorite radio station from San Diego comes in wonderfully clear. Though most of the audio and video stuff on the Internet is still rather crummy.

And the shared connection is nice as well. Before each machine had its own modem and had to dial into the Internet over a single phone line. Now all the machines are on the Internet all the time, which means I do things like listen to Internet Radio on one system while reading e-mail on another. That's nice.

What the future holds

I didn't upgrade my Internet connection just to listen to streaming audio or watch live video. (By the way, one thing Rush Limbaugh fails to mention is that it COSTS MONEY to watch him on the Internet DittoCam. Too much money, in my opinion.) No, I upgraded the connection to offer more features here on Wambooli. Such as:

A new WebCam that updates every few seconds instead of every 90 minutes.

A better newsletter e-mail server

Direct hosting of Wambooli

Eventual interactive features on Wambooli (games and chat)

All of these will be coming soon. Alas, I'm buckled down tight with book projects (which is really a good thing), so things will happen slowly over time. The WebCam will be first, as soon as my newsletter readers help me find a proper location for it.

So I'm back to work!

Stay tuned to the Wambooli home page for updates to the system as they occur.