Re: Hawking HWU8DD Dish any good for extending WIFI range ?

"Cliff" <cliffclingan@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Howdy Floyd from Sunny S. Florida,
We visited Barrow for a day, in 1999, while on an Alaska Good Sam
Caraventure tour.

Sounds like you _really_ took a wrong turn somewhere...
;-)

But seeing something that is actually different is the
*right* way to visit Alaska. I feel sorry for folks who
spend all that money to come up and then drive around
the highway system looking at stuff which isn't all that
different than what's within 100 miles of their home.
Barrow isn't anything like their home!

Interesting place, not sure I would want to live there
... to far to drive to "Winterize" the motorhome ... Is this Hardy Soul
still "Fulltiming" in Barrow? :-)
http://www.cj-and-m.com/HomePage/RVs_Page_1.html

I don't know if it is or not, I'll have to go look. It
is probably still there though. Not a lot of things
have changed in the past few years. The building
directly behind it in the picture got a paint job
though!

Question: How do you get Internet connection in Barrow, by satellite I
imagine, just curious as to how reliable your outside contact is, especially
in winter with the "Lights" messing with reception.

We have two different providers (one is the local telco,
the other is one of the two long distance telco's), and
yes they both use C-band geosynchronous communications
satellite systems.

Aurora Borealis doesn't interfere with satellite
communications, so that's not a problem.

It is very reliable, though somewhat expensive compared
to other ways to provide bandwidth. Satellites are
bothered two things, technically. All of the time there
is the problem of sending a radio signal 23,000 miles up
and 23,000 miles back down, which takes about 1/4 of a
second for it do. So a web page that requires 200 back
and forth exchanges (to open lots of windows, for
example) will take a *long* time here. There are ways
to deal with that, such as caching, so that if it
something more than one person does it only takes a long
time the first time. (Helps with eBay, for example, but
would not with your web page.)

The second problem is called a "sun outage", and that
happens for a few minutes every day during a two week
period in the spring and again in the fall. When the
satellite "eclipses" the sun, or tries to. The sun is
directly behind the satellite, and what the ground
station radio picks up is a very strong signal from the
sun instead of the very weak signal from the satellite.

There are two different satellite systems that cover
Alaska for regular telephone (and Internet) service
exclusively. Plus for Internet there are several others
that can be used. The local telco, for example, put in
a little earth station just for their Internet service,
and leased space on one of the others.

The two big ones are GCI (MCI World Comm is a major owner),
and Alascom (now owned by AT&T and called AT&T Alascom).

One of the oddest trivia facts (with huge non-trivial
significance) is that Alaska is the best "connected"
state in the Union! We have a higher per capita
Internet connection rate, plus virtually *all* of our
schools have high speed Internet.

In terms of the Internet, the "bush" is right up there
in the front row seats!

(Heh heh, I should mention that I'm retired from 34
years with Alascom, and am finger touching familiar with
how the Internet comes to Alaska's bush!)

Cliff in FL - where wireless tapping is common, but not Whaling ...

I don't know if anyone does it here or not. I've driven
around with a laptop, and there are dozens of
unprotected AP's, usually two or three per block. But
since we all have just about the same speed connections,
it's no big deal. So far only two of the four hotels
have wifi access, and there are *no* restaurants or
coffee shops with it! (I have a repeater in the
restaurant across the road from me, so that my friends
can access the Internet from there, but it is
passworded.)

Don't get me started on whaling though... goodness, I
might bend your ear off!

--
Floyd L. Davidson <http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@xxxxxxxxxx
.

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