Spectrum service down

[Obie]

"Ask nicely and your cellular provider will even install an external antenna with a signal booster."

They don't do that anymore. They tell you to get a cell phone capable of wifi calling.
You can find them used on Ebay or Amazon.

[terracore]

You mean that ugly can on the side of my house might be worth something?

I stumbled across this article today. Apparently a company successfully tested the concept that any off-the-shelf cell phone can be used as a satellite phone (all that is missing is the satellites).

https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/25/ubiqui...ite-phone/

[TomK]

Different provider? I thought Spectrum was the only cable/internet provider.

Serious question here. Do we have a choice? I thought the lines running down my street were owned by Spectrum.

Yes, it's kind of why I found the suggestion of a backup laughable. The only reasonable backup is a cell connection, not another cable connection, and you lose bandwidth with a cell phone. It's yet another reason Kalakoa should not be taken seriously.

A backup system for internet is not laughable.

I have (and I suppose kalakoa does as well) a mifi device for internet backup. Of course using a cell phone as a backup doesn't work well. With Verizon service and the mifi device, I get a solid connection and 10MB download speeds, enough for Webex's. Ask nicely and your cellular provider will even install an external antenna with a signal booster.

I had a Verizon mifi device until about two weeks ago but finally got rid of it because it wasn't worth the money I was paying for it. I had an external antenna and booster but it only improved performance by a couple of percent at best. and 10 MB/s is quite slow compared to cable and certainly not quick enough for the stuff I do.

[kalakoa]

and 10 MB/s is quite slow compared to cable and certainly not quick enough

"Buyer to perform own due diligence..."

Having Spectrum means you (probably) don't get Telcom simply because the Federal grants only paid for fiber where broadband wasn't available. Telcom might let you pay construction to bring the fiber, or you could build a radio link and trade backup connections (as mentioned somewhere above) with someone nearby who has fiber. Use a fast radio, such as the (aptly named) AirFiber from Ubiquiti. Cross a subdivision boundary if possible, because their plant will be physically diverse from yours.

Anything less isn't fully redundant, or fast enough. Because big data. I'm more command-line, so it's all about low fixed latency, which makes mifi kind of painful -- works great for a while, then goes out to lunch for a minute, then fine for another half-hour, etc.

Fantastical new 5G technology will solve this problem if the tinfoil hat crowd allows it. (It's not "new construction" so doesn't trigger permitting, nobody will know when to object. Hilarity ensues.)

[randomq]

It's 2020, all your big data should be in the cloud (public or private) and all your management should be done asynchronously via automation and containers. If you're trying to transfer big data to your home workstation or griping about latency to a remote command line you are doing it wrong, grandpa!

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

It's 2020, all your big data should be in the cloud ... grandpa!

My first computer was a punch card Think-A-Tron.  It didn’t need no stinkin’ cloud, WiFi, Ethernet cable, just a fist full of D cell batteries.  As long as you had D cell batteries, you were good to go:

https://youtu.be/GXwUiogMd_4

[TomK]

It's 2020, all your big data should be in the cloud (public or private) and all your management should be done asynchronously via automation and containers. If you're trying to transfer big data to your home workstation or griping about latency to a remote command line you are doing it wrong, grandpa!

Your honor, may we respectively point out you still need a decent internet connection to access the cloud!

I miss the days of VAX/VMS. Virtually unhackable, very reliable and commands that were almost English. Half the time you could guess the name of the command you needed and if the command was unique you didn't even have to type the full thing, it knew what you wanted to do.

[randomq]

I actually miss the days of my youth scouring FTP lists looking for cool files to download, feeling the lag from 56k link saturation and failovers, back when 56k links were backbones for some universities! EFnet IRC when the total users on the network were under 100! Logging into RMS's unprotected MIT account to learn shell scripting or telnet into MUSHes. Arguing with roommates over optimal queue depth settings on our home LAN dialup router, so the guy downloading GNU Hurd didn't lag our telnet/ssh sessions. Setting "+ +" in random victim's .rhosts...

My primary connection at home is LTE via a signal booster and hotspot, usually under 2mbit/s. It's not ideal, but has been forcing me to do more scripting and less hands on. It also makes me realize how lazy web programmers have become, and how bloated frameworks are.

[leilanidude]

It's 2020, all your big data should be in the cloud (public or private) and all your management should be done asynchronously via automation and containers. If you're trying to transfer big data to your home workstation or griping about latency to a remote command line you are doing it wrong, grandpa!

@TomK - If the internet is this important to you, why not utilize a RDP connection to a desktop computer in your company office? Then you login to it and are doing the work, there, instead of locally on your computer at home. There are plenty of solutions.

[terracore]

"It also makes me realize how lazy web programmers have become"

All programmers. It's not like the olde daze where programmers omitted the "19" from the date because they couldn't afford to lose the memory it consumed and assumed nobody would be running their software when the new millennium came.

A friend of mine works at Intel and his job is literally to create software that makes the current chips obsolete. They don't have a department that makes existing software run more efficiently. It wouldn't sell new chips.