The LTE Difference

I'm lucky to have a fabulous place to shelter for the COVID - a cabin in the woods in a national park. It is normally a quiet place, distanced from trails, but these days it has been unbelievably quiet, especially that the park has been closed for the public. It is like I had the entire planet to myself, an introvert's temple. And despite the physical isolation, this place has been for many years the center of my private R&D. This is where I learned and understood low power wireless technologies, developing a foundation for what has now become the official Bluetooth mesh.

For the last 25 years it has also been a test bed for a number of rural Internet access technologies. In 1995 it started with a dial-in 56k modem over an analog phone line. It worked, albeit shaky. Also there was no cell coverage, so I was disconnecting often to allow friends and family call us on the very same landline.

Around 2000 I managed to convert the analog service to a digital ISDN 2B+D, which offered two 64kbps digital channels. The upside was clear: no disconnects: I could use the aggregate 128kbps and one channel was disconnecting (dropping the speed to 64kbps) on an incoming voice call. I also had a WiFi-to-ISDN router with auto-dial, so from a client device perspective, it was behaving almost like a dedicated fixed line service.

The next upgrade was around 2005 - the DSL line. Which has been in service until today, but when the contract runs out I will not be extending it. The reason is: for the last 15 years the speed could not be increased. It is ~4Mbps downlink and ~0.5kbps uplink. And it breaks down very often, as the line runs for several miles on telegraph poles through the woods and meadows. Every now and then it is torn down by a falling branch or a junction box gets wet and attenuates the signal. I'm the only customer on that line, so of course my monthly payments do not justify running a fiber line from the exchange.

Fortunately LTE has came around recently. As the cabin is in a fairly deep valley and there is still no cell coverage indoors, I was skeptical of moving to LTE as the primary Internet service. But it turns out to be very fast and reliable, reaching 10x the DSL speeds and with less latency. And of course the wireless link is not prone to rain or falling tree branches. See on the attached screenshot the upper numbers are from the LTE service, the lower from the DSL.

It has become like almost everywhere else: wireless wins hands down. There is still some old school thinking that wires are more secure and more reliable, which is no longer the case. Wired communication is usually unencrypted, so anyone with a physical access (think about a 10-mile cable through the woods) can tap in. Wireless also turns out to be more reliable. It is much harder to interfere with a wireless link than cut a cable.