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NetBITS: rural Internet
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Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 19:48:55 -0800
From: NetBITS Editors
NetBITS#009/20-Nov-97
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Many people don't associate cutting-edge technology with small towns and rural communities - in this issue, however, Jim Heid reports from the road that the Internet is not only appearing in remote areas, it's fulfilling the promise of bringing people closer together. We update last week's article on 56K modems, report that Netscape now supports PNG, explore the bandwidth capabilities of residential phone lines, and reveal options for viewing the Web offline.
Contents: NetBITS Updates/20-Nov-97 56K Speed Jockeys Respond No Back Roads FAQtoids 009
Copyright 1997 TidBITS Electronic Publishing. All rights reserved.
For back issues, searching, and info:
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NetBITS Updates/20-Nov-97
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Hiatus for American Thanksgiving -- We'll be skipping what would have been our 27-Nov-97 issue in favor of turkey for some of us, Tofurky(tm) for others, and gluten-free corn mush for Glenn. We'll be back on for three weeks in December (the 4th, 11th, and 18th), and then off during the busy holidays when we encourage all Internet users to step back from the screen and spend time enjoying the holiday season with family and friends. [GF]
Pee En Gee - See Ya Real Soon! -- Delightfully, I was wrong about current browser support in the NetBITS-007 article on graphic file formats for the Web. The recently released Netscape Navigator 4.0.4 update - which includes a variety of bug fixes - slipped in Macintosh and Windows PNG (Portable Network Graphics) file support. Microsoft is lagging in supporting PNG in its current preview of the Macintosh release, but the final release of Macintosh Internet Explorer 4.0 is due late this year, and will probably be in parity with the Windows release, which does have PNG capability.
Both browsers support 2D interlacing - where an image gradually comes in by sending a few pixels over a grid, rather than sending a full line of pixels at a time - and there's a great page where you can both see if your browser displays PNGs and view a great illustrated example of this capability. [GF]
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56K Speed Jockeys Respond
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by Jeff Carlson
Last week's article about 56K modems prompted a variety of responses. A few readers praised the performances of their 56 Kbps modems, while others weren't so lucky. For example, one person reported buying a K56Flex modem because his ISP had adopted that technology. "Wonder of wonders," he writes, "the highest speed attainable for me is 31.2 Kbps! What gives?"
In this case, the fault may lie with the phone company's wiring. To take advantage of 56K technology, you must have uninterrupted copper wire running from your house through the cross-connect point (your neighborhood wiring hub) to the central office (or CO). If the phone company runs short of copper from the cross- connect point to the CO, they may start using tricks like squeezing two lines onto one, which is fine for voice-quality transmissions, but noisy for high-speed modem communications. For more detailed information, see the FAQtoids later in this issue.
Other readers pointed out many modem manufacturers are hedging their bets with new 56K modems by making them upgradable to whichever 56K standard is adopted in the coming year. Global Village Communications seems to be offering the most flexibility to its customers by selling both a K56Flex modem and an X2 modem, both of which can be flash-upgraded to the new standard.
Jon Rust
K56Flex is not limited to 53 Kbps. X2 is limited, but the developers at Lucent and Rockwell did their homework. They do not break FCC regulations when they run at top speed. Of course, in the real world, you'd never see a 56 Kbps connection anyway. Phone lines just aren't that good yet. An additional point in favor of K56Flex is the lower latencies. As TidBITS pointed out recently, latency is what's killing modems. (See TidBITS-367.) With my K56Flex connection, I typically see ping times at around 90 ms. Compared to the 130 to 140 ms ping times from X2 (I've heard from several people, but never tried myself) and all 33.6 modems, this is quite an improvement. It's still short of ISDN though (about 25 ms). Quake is much more playable with 90 ms pings.
For more information on the K56Flex technology, see the Rockwell white paper below, which has moved to a different URL than the one reported last week.
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No Back Roads
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by Jim Heid
On the Internet, there are no back roads. If you have an Internet connection in Jackson, Montana (population 38 people, 53 dogs), you can be as much a part of the information age as if you live in Manhattan.
In fact, the Internet directly addresses the unique challenges rural areas have: geographic isolation, small schools and libraries, few stores, and fewer sources of news. Given this, you could argue that having Internet access in a rural area is even more important than having it in an urban area.
Although urbanites have enjoyed the benefits of the Internet and online services for years, many rural areas have only recently become wired. Major online services and national service providers haven't been interested in creating local dial-up access points for small towns. The 38 people who live in Jackson, Montana don't represent a large enough customer base for America Online and AT&T WorldNet. As a result, rural dwellers have had to make expensive toll calls to get online. "Unlimited access" pricing means little when you're paying a dollar per minute in long-distance charges.
But country dwellers are by necessity self-sufficient. They make things happen themselves because they know outsiders won't do it for them. In dozens of small towns and cities, people who believed the Internet could benefit their communities have worked together to bring local access into their area. These digital barn raisers are the unsung heroes of the Internet age.
Last July, I embarked on a seven-week, 26-state, 9,400-mile trip across America - from California to New England and then back again - to meet people who have brought Internet access into their area and people who have taken advantage of the access to do remarkable things. Together with my wife and colleague, Maryellen Kelly, and my standard poodle, Trixie, I went from small town to small city to research and document the Internet's arrival in - and impact on - rural America, posting the results of our explorations on a Web site that I created during the trip.
My goal for the trip and its Web site were to document how rural America is connecting itself to the Internet and to discover how the Internet is influencing small towns and cities. During the trip, I visited with and interviewed various rural-access pioneers and then posted stories, RealAudio interviews, QuickTime VR virtual-reality movies, and digital photo albums about them and about interesting places along the route.
In Ritzville, Washington, Becky Lyle, wife of a fourth-generation wheat farmer, struck a deal with Brigadoon, a Seattle-based service provider that establishes partnerships with rural areas. She then went on to create an award-winning Web site for wheat farmers.
In Dillon, Montana, Ken and Nellie Bandelier, two retired educators, obtained a federal grant to found Dillon-Net, which has established over a dozen public-access sites. Throughout rural Beaverhead County, an area the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined but with a population of just 8,000, you can walk into public offices and libraries and get online. Dillon-Net also has six notebook computers that residents can borrow for one week; there's a waiting list for them.
In Cascade, Idaho, logger-turned-science-teacher Clinton Kennedy convinced the school superintendent to install a phone jack in his classroom so that students could do research on the Internet. Student Ben Plehal built a Web site for Cascade High School's advanced biology class - and won a national educators' award for it.
Two small cities that we visited have taken the concept of self- sufficiency to the limit. Two years ago, the residents of Cedar Falls, Iowa voted to build their own fiber-optic network. Now the local utility company offers not only cable TV, but 10 megabit- per-second Internet access - for $29 a month. People are moving to the area to take advantage of the kind of broadband access that major cable companies are just beginning to provide. High-tech buildings are springing up in the cornfields. Locals refer to the area as Silicorn Valley.
Glasgow, Kentucky has performed a similar miracle, wiring a city of 14,000 with fiber and offering 4 megabit-per-second access for $11 a month. It, too, is attracting new businesses. (Incidentally, Kentucky has some of the best town names in America. Dog Walk. Paint Lick. Rabbit Hash. Belcher. Dot.)
In some cases, local or state governments are getting involved. The Kansas State Library system operates a service called Blue Skyways, which provides a Web presence for towns with populations as small as eight. Volunteers John and Susan Howell spend their weekends driving across Kansas helping small towns establish their own Web sites. She's a retired newspaper editor; he's a Unix systems engineer with Boeing.
Technology skeptics may decry the Internet's arrival in the boondocks. "People won't socialize anymore," they snarl. "They'll just stare at their screens." Wrong. In many of the towns I visited, Internet access has brought residents together. Ritzville, Washington, holds a monthly Internet night, where people get together and swap URLs and tips. In Cascade, Idaho, the Chamber of Commerce commissioned a group of high school students to develop the town's Web site. Back in Kansas, John and Susan Howell enjoy getting old-timers to share stories with the kids who are helping to build the town's Web site, thereby closing a generation gap and also proving to the kids that there is something interesting about their particular speck on the map.
Other skeptics fret that the fabric of small towns will be ripped apart as the forces of the outside world push in. Wrong again. For one thing, the idea that there is a universal "small-town fabric" is an urban myth perpetuated by Norman Rockwell. Every small town is different, and some have a fabric of decay that could stand to be ripped apart.
But more to the point, no one I visited with saw the Internet as some external evil that would ruin their town. They looked upon the Internet in the same way that their predecessors looked upon the railroads: as an essential connector to the outside world, as their town's lifeline. Towns along the tracks flourished; towns that the railroad passed by withered.
Writer John Steinbeck concluded his masterpiece of an American travelogue, Travels with Charley, by saying, "Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased." This certainly applies to the "No Back Roads" trip. The places and people we visited are burned into my brain - and bookmarked in my browser.
We're keeping in touch. In Ritzville, Washington, the wheat harvest came two weeks late this year, but they had a fine crop. In Dillon, Montana, the Bandeliers have added seven new public- access sites since I was there. In Kansas, Boeing has generously given John Howell a one-year sabbatical to assist the Blue Skyways project full-time. And Ben Plehal, Cascade, Idaho's high school webmaster, has begun his first year of computer science studies at the University of Utah.
Journeys are about discovery, about lives touching briefly and then parting - except on the Internet, where distant lives can intertwine, and where a journey of discovery never has to end.
[Jim Heid went online in 1981 with a 300-baud, manual-dial modem. He writes for PC World and Macworld magazines, and is the author of HTML & Web Publishing Secrets (IDG Books Worldwide, 1997). He and the rest of the "No Back Roads" crew live in a town of 398 people on California's Mendocino coast.]
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FAQtoids 009
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Question: How fast is a residential phone line? Bill Williams
Answer: First off, a quick bit of terminology. We generally talk about modem speeds, but that's deceptive. Speed is a measure of distance divided by time - kilometers per hour, for instance. However, distance has nothing to do with modems. The correct term is throughput, since the question is how many bits a modem can transmit in a period of time, generally measured in kilobits per second or Kbps. In future issues of NetBITS, we'll continue to cover issues surrounding the modems and other devices that so many of us rely on for our Internet connections.
Residential phone lines are specified to have a nominal throughput of 64 Kbps. "Nominal" in this case means that your phone, called Plain Old Telephone Service or POTS, is allotted 64 Kbps in the phone company's internal switching network; it doesn't mean that you can use all that bandwidth. (It's also true that copper wire can carry much more data than that, but we'll address that subject in future issues.)
There are a variety of standards - some enforced by federal powers, others accepted by industry organizations, others peculiar to individual pieces of phone equipment - that allow calls to travel seamlessly from one part of the world to another through many different switches, fiber optic lines, wire, and other systems. The details vary from country to country as to what a dial tone sounds like, along with some of the issues of voltage, rings, and so forth. But underlying principles allow voice calls to work to and from anywhere.
There's no guaranteed way to test the throughput of your telephone line, although most connection programs (and a few modem displays) report the "speed" at which a connection has been made. Our late colleague Cary Lu was working on a book called The Race for Bandwidth for Microsoft Press at the time of his passing, and he had provided some insight into this issue. Only a small percentage
* - probably less than 10 percent - of all phone lines in the country are capable of going beyond 28.8 Kbps. In other words, that 33.6 Kbps or 56 Kbps modem you bought probably won't increase your effective throughput much, if at all. In addition, some 56 Kbps modems are limited both by federal regulations - the Federal Communications Commission has set the maximum throughput at 53 Kbps for now - and by practical limitations in the quality of copper, switching stations, and differences in systems. (See Jeff
Carlson's article in NetBITS-008 and his followup in this issue for more on this subject.)
If you believe your phone line is delivering less bandwidth than it ought to be, most phone companies will come out and test the quality of your line (possibly for a fee). However, even if they find problems, improving the bandwidth capabilities of a phone line can be an expensive and frustrating process. It's worth asking the phone company to check into the problems, especially if there's no fee, but going beyond that may not be worth the expense.
Adam and Tonya Engst live in a relatively remote area and have run into these problems. Using 28.8 modems, they see throughputs of 26.4 Kbps at best, and usually less. The problems in their case are related to old, possibly damaged copper wires to their house, plus the effect of a pair gain device, which enables the telephone company to squeeze more calls onto a smaller number of wires. It's an efficient use of resources for the telephone company, and the reduction in quality generally isn't a problem for voice calls. However, data calls are more problematic, particularly as you try to increase throughput with the newer modems. [GF]
Question: How can I print or read a Web page offline? Charles Redway <100104.2413@compuserve.com> asks: "How can I save a page for reading or printing later? Not just the text but the whole page with its pictures and graphics in the right place. Is there some nifty bit of software that can do this?"
Answer: There are a few strategies to do this, depending on whether you want to read offline and print, or just print. If you want to do both, there are several programs that can download pages and graphics for offline viewing. In fact, this feature is built into the subscription feature of Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 for Mac and Windows, and it's the raison d'etre of the bi- platform product WebWhacker. (There are many others.)
With most offline Web browsing programs, you choose a given starting point, like a home page; choose the number of links away from this page to follow, or the depth; and whether to follow links that lead the downloading program off the site that you start it at. The program then reads all the links on the starting page and downloads every image, changing all the HTML and image references to work locally off a hard drive.
If you've set up options for the offline browser to follow links, it will download all the HTML and other files linked from your starting page as well. If you set the depth deeper than one level, it will repeat the process with each of these linked HTML pages, following all their links, too. This can rapidly become exponential in nature.
Most of these programs allow a timer option so you can automatically check for changed pages and download those new ones without manually intervening.
If you're just interested in later printing, you can use a feature of the PostScript printer driver software in the Mac OS and in Windows 95 to save a PostScript file for later downloading rather than just printing it. The options are different for each version of the driver, but you can go into Options, Page Setup, or Properties, and set the output to a file rather than to a printer. Using a PostScript file downloading utility, like Adobe's Font Downloader (Mac only), you can print the file whenever you choose. [GF]
[Please send us any and all Internet questions whose answers have
evaded you in the past at
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