I've been desperately trying to get some internet at the house and it looks like Viasat might be able to service us (we'll find out on Monday).
In the meantime, I found out they have a browser that they push on their customers and it's actually pretty good.
It's Chromium-based, but they fold in a few things like
- blocking ads
- blocking video autoplay
- block video preload
Since their customers all have monthly quotas, often quite low, their browser is designed to block a lot of bandwidth vampires. Though not aiming to be a privacy browser, that is a side effect to some degree.
https://browser.viasat.com/
I'm liking it so far.
I just downloaded it to try.
Side comment -Their icon shows up well at a small size on my size dock (Mac). One of the best I've seen, ever. Whoever designed it is close to genius.
If you're going to be on metered bandwidth, wouldn't pi-hole be worthwhile?
https://pi-hole.net/
>> pi-hole
OMG. I know it's been mentioned here before, but I didn't want to run a whole computer just to put that on the network. But then littleman posted about the power draw of his Raspberry Pi setup, so removes a lot of that concern.
What I would *really* like is to figure out how to block
- updates in general, but especially from Apple. For the same app, the Android update will often be 6-10MB and the iPhone update will be 100-300MB.
- iCloud. This is the bane of people offering internet to strangers.
Apple users tend to be massive bandwidth hogs because of how much talking to Apple their devices do. Almost all of them are set up to backup photos as soon as they have a wifi connection, for example. But Apple is sneaky. They keep changing IPs and don't publish lists, so blocking those things is tough.
Next priority would be to block every other cloud storage system - Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive.
Typical scenario here for people with a bandwidth quota on satellite internet is:
- guests get a daily allotment. On a 10GB/mo plan (often the only plan available), that's going to be about 300MB.
- house holds four people.
- every person takes 25 photos during the day = 100 photos.
- average photo is 3MB * 100 = 300MB
- guests return to house and phone immediately senses wifi and starts uploading photos
- quota is exhausted by the time photo upload is complete
- guest calls property manager and says the internet doesn't work
- manager explains that they have used their daily quota
- guest complains that they have not been on the internet at all
This all gets worse as they increase speeds without increasing quotas proportionately.
Even without a quota on bandwidth, the network is commonly saturated for a couple hours after people come in for the day and we have to throttle them so we can use the internet.
TLDR - our overwhelming issue is guest *uploads* not downloads.
> I didn't want to run a whole computer just
I know how you feel. It is an added layer of maintenance and self-support. I've avoided rpi network management apps (very popular on smarthome stuff) because of that. That said, when (not if) my predatory isp starts talking billing tiers, I'm going to have to reconsider.
Anyone here running pi-hole? LM? Dras? Torben?
Basically, pi-hole is a local DNS server that sits between your public-facing router or access point and the internet.
How a Single Raspberry Pi made my Home Network Faster
https://brianchristner.io/how-a-single-raspberry-pi-made-my-home-network-faster/
I'd like to know what effects it has on other, less tech-savvy, family member browsing. I've had to disable scriptsafe and ublock on the wife's sites because "they don't work like they're supposed to" issues. I'll be first to admit that proactive blocking can be a PITA.
I've never ran a pi-hole, though I'm sure my household would benefit from one. Ergo, if you have a linux server running in your house for any other reason you could just run the collective "pi hole' software on that with little extra overhead. Of course, if you don't currently run any linux server an actual pi would be the way to go. If you want to be as energy/cost efficient as possible you'd probably want to use the Pi Zero with a USB ethernet connection or you could run a Pi Zero W if all your stuff is wireless anyway.
First we gotta get internet. That's the big hurdle.
After that, figuring out how to configure the Pi-hole shouldn't be too bad. But it's nice to know that if we can get internet, but only at a small monthly allowance, that we could shave some bandwidth.
>> less tech-savvy
They're going to be denied access to, I think, essentially the same set of sites that we get denied access to already due to ad blockers. It looks from the screenshots that they get a message saying that the site was blocked and that they have to contact their network administrator.
I would guess that the first week would be rough, the first month inconvenient and that after you've whitelisted the things you want to whitelist, it should be less obtrusive.
>First we gotta get internet
Why might Viasat work yet Starlink might not? Viasat dish have a higher angle to clear the trees?
So actually, it's looking like Viasat will not, but Hughesnet might. We'll know for both by Mar 6.
Viasat and Hughes are both geosynchronous satellite systems. The bad part of that is the distance - 88,000 for a round-trip ping. The good part is they are stationary. If you have one hole through the trees that you can thread, you've got service. Our previous satellite service, the guy threaded a hole that wasn't even obvious to me at first.
Starlink satellites are in low-earth orbit and they traverse the sky about every 7-8 minutes and, because the earth rotates under them, the line of travel is always changing. So for Starlink you need a cone of visibility. At Phase 1, to guarantee that you always have one satellite in view, you need a completely clear view of the sky in a cone that is about 65 degrees off vertical (or 25 degrees elevation to state it the other way). By the later phases that angle will increase to 50, possibly even 40 degrees off vertical. But it's the whole cone. You never know where a Starlink satellite will be.
Or put another way, if you have a dense thicket of trees around you for 360 degrees and you have a 1-meter hole in the right spot, you have 100% service from Hughes or VS. If you have an areas that is completely open except for a single tree that blocks out some of the sky, you have intermittent service from Starlink (and the more satellites they add, the less intermittent it will become).
If you want a really clear visualization, you can see this really easily for free by downloading their respective apps. It's kind of fascinating totally apart from my current needs.
I find it mind-boggling that I can carry in my pocket, a super computer capable of finding its exact location on the planet and then running an algorithm using that location data and what it knows about the position of the satellite to locate the exact location relative to you then, using the pocket super computer's onboard compass, accelerometer and camera, get a view of the scene in front of it, and superimpose the location of a satellite 22,000 miles away in space, 88 times further away from me than the International Space Station. It makes me feel like I'm on a Star Trek away team... with just a *slightly* better chance of tapping into a planetary data web.
Viasat
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.viasat.mite.android&hl=en_US&gl=US
- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mite/id859724760
Starlink
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.starlink.mobile&hl=en_US&gl=US
- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/starlink/id1537177988
I'm now a step closer to using pi-hole. There is an existing script for toggling pi-hole via smarthome hardware. With it, I could choose when I wanted it to operate, even voice-control it with Alexa.
Any progress on internet access, EG?
Yes.. after the Viasat failure and three hours of trying to shoot the holes, the Hughesnet tech found a spot.
I was meaning to post something. It is MUCH better than the satellite we had in the past. For one, we get 100GB instead of 12GB. But the speed is good too. The latency is high, obviously, but that's only an issue for doing command line stuff via SSH and, to a lesser extent, for video conferencing.
So overall, we're quite relieved.
What are Hughes price brackets now?
The residential plans max out pretty low, so I don't really know about those.
The big difference is that with residential, your "bonus" GB are basically usable midnight to 8am and with a business plan, they must be used between 9am and 5pm, which works well for us.
So when I say we get 100GB, we get 75GB that can be used anytime and 25GB that must be used between 9am adn 5pm local time. All the business plans are similar.
The Business 100 (our plan) is $200/mo with various rebates added in. So for the first three months of the 24-month contract, it's $150 and after 90 days we get a $200 gift card and that's the price we got by leasing the equipment rather than buying it outright. So, of course, they make it complicated.
If we upgrade to Business 150, they say it will be $270/mo or, if we extend our contract rather than switching over within the current contract, $260.
Here you go.
https://business.hughesnet.com/sites/business.hughesnet.com/files/inline-files/HughesNetForBusiness_Gen5Flyer.pdf
That gives business pricing and seems to be accurate, though interestingly is missing our actual plan.
You'll notice that lease vs buy on the equipment looks like a 15 month breakeven, but you don't get the free install, so it's actually a 30-month breakeven on a 2-year contract and the $100 "lease set up fee" was never mentioned and not billed, so we didn't pay that.
Thanks. I'm helping a friend who moved out in the sticks. He's signed up for Starlink and will likely go with that when it gets here. There is a local isp that he's just signed up with that has an oddball line-of-sight network on a nearby water tower, he says it is performing OK. But we know the guy and it is a shoestring operation at best. Starlink will kill that biz. I'd forgotten about Hughes.
Has he downloaded the Starlink app and checked his sight lines?
And is he... teachable? There are people to whom I have given the explanation that I gave above on in the Feb 25 post three times and they still ask me "Where is the Starlink satellite again?"
They can't wrap their head around the fact that the whole point of Starlink is that it is NOT geosynchronous and therefore is not in *a* place and therefore requires a large view of the sky.
I did an extensive search a couple of weeks ago during an extended Hangouts chat with a neighbor before his wife called for a "Starlink intervention" and found the best info I could find about obstructions.
See here
http://th3core.com/talk/hardware-technology/starlink-starts-to-deliver-on-its-promise/15/
Yeah, he's tech --he's the one that got my first domains on the internet (on a pharmaceutical company's server). That was before ICANN. Or hosting services. Or much of anything.
I've sent him your obstruction research.