November 9, 2005, 1:03 PM
Finally Broadband in the Forrest!
Posted by Per Hansson. Filed under: blog
Well, after almost exactly 10 years of 56k dialup access broadband has been delivered out in the forest where I live, and not just 0,5mbps but full ADSL2+ 24mbps compatible DSLAM equipment has been installed at the exchange!
I’m a few hundred meters short of 24mbps at 3km to the exchange but at 8mbps compared to dialup I sure will not complain!
The really funny thing about all this is that I had a wireless link completely setup to a friend 5km away from me through the forest that has had broadband access for several years… It took me a great deal of money, climbing trees and time to establish a solid connection through non line of sight dense forest… And the very night I got it working and come home my brother tells me “did you know Telia now offers ADSL where we live” and I told him you are kidding right, because we had been making fun about that when I finally do get that wireless link working broadband would be available at our location ;-) Even more strange is the fact that Telia has not sent out any letters letting the people that live here know that ADSL is available… I heard it from a guy working at Flextronics, which is the company that Telia hires to do the actual work on their telephone lines and equipment… He had “heard” it from someone within Flextronics and did not believe it himself so we went out to the exchange to have a look and got amazed when we saw the Ericsson DSLAMS ;-)
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2 Responses to “Finally Broadband in the Forrest!”
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Well, after almost exactly 10 years of 56k dialup access broadband has been delivered out in the forest where I live, and not just 0,5mbps but full ADSL2+ 24mbps compatible DSLAM equipment has been installed at the exchange!
I’m a few hundred meters short of 24mbps at 3km to the exchange but at 8mbps compared to dialup I sure will not complain!
The really funny thing about all this is that I had a wireless link completely setup to a friend 5km away from me through the forest that has had broadband access for several years… It took me a great deal of money, climbing trees and time to establish a solid connection through non line of sight dense forest… And the very night I got it working and come home my brother tells me “did you know Telia now offers ADSL where we live” and I told him you are kidding right, because we had been making fun about that when I finally do get that wireless link working broadband would be available at our location ;-) Even more strange is the fact that Telia has not sent out any letters letting the people that live here know that ADSL is available… I heard it from a guy working at Flextronics, which is the company that Telia hires to do the actual work on their telephone lines and equipment… He had “heard” it from someone within Flextronics and did not believe it himself so we went out to the exchange to have a look and got amazed when we saw the Ericsson DSLAMS ;-)
You actually climbed up these trees, equipment in tow? You need to write an article about this. What kind of equipment did you use? How many repeaters did you setup and how are they powered?
Thats really a huge project, kudos on getting it up and running.
Yea, I climbed the tree, the smaller stuff I had in a backpack. The 60cm Dish I simply lifted from branch to branch on the tree… The hard ting was the mount for the mast, it is made of wood and weights about 10kg… Try to lift that above your head with only one hand for 20 meters :) (did not work to lift it with a rope because it would just get stuck on the way up…)
I had two setups like this, one on each side, inside the Electrical box seen on the picture I had a Linksys WRT54GS running the Sveasoft third party firmware. I had to bump the TX power to 150mW on my side and 200mW on the other to get the best results (which is illegal in Sweden BTW, max is 100mW… though I did not hear the animals in the forrest complain) :D
To get the signal from the trees down to the houses I used another pair of WRT54GS machines plus a Directional Yagi antenna, one in the tree and one on the house, aimed at each other…
I would have written an article of this if I had actually had any use of it… As it is the only transfer I did on the link was with a TCP test tool, called epi_ttcp I got about 2MB/sec wind did not affect it much at all, strangley enough… The dishes where also never aimed properly, I just set them up in the direction I thought was ok… Mind you it was a none line of sight link so I guess I made a good guess :D