Telecom woes (was: Re: 10 forgotten wonders of 1980s homes)

[Chris Elmquist]

On Thursday (12/31/2015 at 12:02AM -0600), Jim Brain wrote:
> On 12/30/2015 10:51 PM, Guy Sotomayor wrote:
> >We're at least 2.5 miles from the DSLAM, so DSL is *not* an
> >option. That's the distance on the private roads and I haven't
> >seen where the DSLAM might be (nearest town is 5 miles away once
> >you get to the "public" roads).
> We're in a similar boat.  We're too far away for DSL, microwave
> can't reach us due to the treeline, and Cable isn't available here.
> I took a page from FullTime RV folks, and bought a commercial grade
> router/AP that uses cellular modems for uplink, and then found a
> business cellular package that has unlimited use.  We burn through
> 400GB every month here.

I build those kinds of routers for my day job.  It's pretty much
routine now to see 50Mbps up and down on a 4G LTE link.   CAT4 will do
even better.  I have a little box running OpenWRT (totally open source)
with the cellular modem inside and ethernet out the back.  Does what a
cable modem+router or DSL modem+router does but does it over cellular.

As you have discovered though, finding an affordable package is the trick.
My world is IoT/M2M and so there is a lot of bundling and pooling of
plans going on to reduce the per user costs in that space.

Chris
-- 
Chris Elmquist