Yannblog

The personal website of Ian Littman

Archive for category Tech

WiFindings, August 10th

Aug 10

Posted by Ian Littman in Tech | 2 Comments

Just came home from HEB in town. Decided to open up iStumbler shortly after embarking. Didn’t see a whole lot of consumer wireless networks, but wasn’t particularly looking for them. I did, however, see a good portion of the SSIDs of my ISP, Bee Creek Communications. So in about ten minutes I gathered information on five different towers, with eleven different discrete SSIDs. I know I’m missing one or two, but that’s all my laptop (a white MacBook, nothing special) picked up. You’ll probably see most posts about this later as I get back into wardriving (though I don’t actually connect to these networks…just drive by them).

So below are the APs my computer “saw”, along with their channels. To my knowledge, all SSIDs of similar naming (e.g. North Fbg. A and D) are on the same tower, just on different radios/antennas. Also, to my knowledge my provider only uses 20 MHz channels to deploy its service, rather than economizing on spectrum by using smaller bandwidths. So if they’re broadcasting on channel 1 (this is all 2.4 GHz stuff) then channels 1-4 are all at least partially occupied. See this diagram for more details.

SSID – Channel
Hayden Ranch – 9
Hospital A – 9
Hospital B – 7
Grapetown – 11
Grapetown B – 2
Morris Ranch – 3
Morris Ranch B – 7
North Fbg. A – 7
North Fbg. B – 1
North Fbg. C – 11
North Fbg. D – 4

Note that on the North Fbg. tower all frequencies are used in the 2.4 GHz band. Not the best use of spectrum, I’d say…

Tags: , ,

As It Turns Out, HughesNet Is Horrible, Rest Stop Edition

Jul 22

Posted by Ian Littman in Tech | No Comments

I pity him, to think how, with no man to care for him, and seeing no companion’s face, suffering, lonely evermore, he is vexed by fierce disease satellite internet service, and bewildered by each want his ire as it arises. – Chorus, Philoctetes The Man With HughesNet, a Greek tragedy

Okay, so maybe not everyone using HughesNet is suffering, always lonely, is stuck on a deserted island and has a bunch of people in the background chanting about his doom. Still, the plight of someone on HughesNet these days can’t be overstated by much. Hence the excerpt from a play that I acted in my sophomore year in high school. Four years later, I had to Google it to make sure I got it word for word, but I was close enough to find the passage.

What does this have to do with my short, albeit rather painful, experience with HughesNet? Not much, other than the painful part. In fact, the rest stop west of Eden, TX, while remote, is quite different than a deserted island. For one thing, the structure on which the internet satellite dish was purched was well-maintained. Second, US-87 runs by said rest stop. Third, the Texas Department of Transportation instituted the free wireless hotspot as a public safety measure, seeing as how some carriers’ cell phones (ahem, Sprint…ever heard of roaming on Five Star Wireless in the Eden area?) just flat out don’t work around those parts. Of course, you can’t use any sort of voice communication technology over HughesNet, but I suppose that’s beside the point. Still better than a deserted island with vipers and no free public WiFi, right?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , ,

That’s Comcastic (in a good way)

Jul 12

Posted by Ian Littman in Tech | No Comments

So I’m back in my apartment in Colorado. And, as usual, I’ve got my ear to the ground on tech. Especially since, mysteriously, my quite-reliable router had dropped off the ‘net sometime a few weeks ago…or so it seemed.

What had really happened is the modem has been kicked off the network for a bit, been reassigned a new IP address, and I had forgotten to set up DynDNS again on my router (easy to overlook when you’ve had the same IP for months on end). So in reality the internet at my place was hunky dory…I just didn’t know where “my place” was on the ‘net.

So what was the cause of the modem reboot and subsequent switch from 76.xxx.xxx.xxx to 67.xxx.xxx.xxx for my IP address (people with 24.xxx.xxx.xxx addresses probably didn’t see a change; they’re still around here)? A DOCSIS 2.0 upgrade, as a matter of fact.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Big Spring, TX (aka I Get A Networking Green Belt)

Jul 9

Posted by Ian Littman in General, Tech | No Comments

So I’m here in Big Spring, TX on a mission trip at Gateway Baptist Church. I’m helping with sound and various other things. Lots of community events and a Vacation Bible School program are how my home church is ministering to the populace. So far, life’s good; despite hot sleeping quarters for the guys I think we’ve God through us has had a huge impact here this week. So far twelve kids have come to Christ; there will probably be more salvations before the week’s up. That’s really cool. I’ll link to a slideshow once I’m done here on Twitter (I’m leaving Saturday morning for Colorado).

So if you’re a techie and am wondering what the “Networking Green Belt” part of the post is, bear with me. First let me lay out the internet situation in Big Sprint: Alltel EvDO, Basin 2Way as a WISP, Suddenlink for cable, one or two numbers for dialup. Sprint (my typical cellular carrier) is 1xRTT-only here, as is Verizon for the moment (but they’ll be EvDO soon once they integrate Alltel’s network). Not sure yet abut Basin 2Way’s services and pricing, though I’ll bet it’s only economical for folks who can’t get cable. For cable, Suddenlink is the provider; I’ve detailed their pricing plans and traceroutes here, here and here. Please disregard the extraneous discussion about DOCSIS modulations. Dialup is one of two phone numbers to my knowledge, one for AOL and one for everyone else. This is one of the few areas where TOAST.net has no local numbers, depiste their aggregation of dozens of dialup access number providers. The numbers here are owned by SBC/AT&T, but not WorldNet. Fun stuff.

So back to my networking green belt.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Today’s Wireless Internet Adventure

Jul 1

Posted by Ian Littman in Tech | No Comments

Today I went over to one of my relatives’ house that’s too far away from the CO for DSL. My primary reason for going there (seeing said relatives) of course didn’t stop me from checking out how they connected to the interwebs. I knew they had a wireless setup from talking with them six monhs or so ago. Today I figured out just what that meant.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dialup Smackdown – Fort Pierce, FL

Jun 30

Posted by Ian Littman in Tech | 1 Comment

So I had some time today and decided to test every phone number I could (anything on TOAST.net’s partner networks). The results are below (yes, I used Excel; grab OpenOffice if you can’s read an XLS file). They represent several hours of work, a few hours off of my backup dialup account and a fair amount of data entry. Hope it’s worth something to someone 🙂

Read the rest of this entry »

AOL AWOL

Jun 28

Posted by Ian Littman in Tech | No Comments

As evinced by my last post, I’ve been mucking about with dialup lately. I’ve resurrected my TOAST.net account and run a few tests on it. Honestly, with the included accelerator, I could bear using the service if it meant the difference between $50 satellite and $8 dialup (pay by year). I’d have to go into town to do any big downloads, but I’d do that with sat internet anyway. You can’t run VoIP over satellite so the $50-to-$8 comparison stands.

Anyhow, after trying TOAST.net I thought “who are the big players in the dialup industry?” Here’s the list I came up with:

1) AOL
2) NetZero/Juno (the former has more access numbers)
3) EarthLink/PeoplePC

There are other dialup ISPs, but they pretty much are just the same as TOAST.net, albeit with different pricing, possibly a shorter list of access numbers and a different domain on the end of your e-mail address. As such, I’m sticking with TOAST.net, which I’ve had good luck with, for my emergency dialup/every-once-in-a-while newsgroup access/branded e-mail needs. Even Earthlink and NetZero share the 729-1999 number, and thus probably that USAWide backbone network and dialup performance.

However I was curious about AOL. From what I’ve gathered, they’re the only company in my area that actually has a different phone number for dialup access than 830-729-1999. As such, their service would be running on different equipment, with possibly different performance characteristics.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , ,