Grapevine Telecommunications

Guerrilla Infrastructure

It's a tale as old as the internet... I live somewhere besides the hub of my local area's technological heartland... and the best I can do to get online is go piss up a rope. Though to be fair, I had, and lived with options for a while. Pre-Starlink satellite internet was one... and if you never experienced that travesty, know that you have lived a better life for it. Hughes Net is basically fraud. No court in the country will agree of course, because there's some clause deep in that contract you didn't read before signing that says something to the tune of:

We don't have to actually give you shit, and nothing we provide actually has to work, but we'll give you a box, and a dish, and you can pay out the ass for the next 2 years, or pay out the ass doubly in order to cancel.

But once that mistake was over, the next option was mobile tethering. Unlimited data means unlimited data on your phone, not on anything tethered to the phone, like a laptop. Various carriers had various schemes, and the classic "TTL max hops" trick seemed to work... kinda... maybe? I don't actually know since my carrier didn't give me a "data remaining" figure. Tethering would just stop working all of a sudden until the next billing cycle. Now one might be tempted to go for one of the many carrier's "5g Home Internet" plans. And I would too, except out here in 1-2 bar reception country, there's no way they have the infrastructure to support a bunch of home internet data hogs, so they just don't sell it. I'd have gone for a hotspot too, except those are still sold on the 2008 paradigm: pay per gig. Which is fine and dandy, except a gig of hotspot costs more than a decent lunch, and there's lots of fuckery tied up in billing and overage fees, and... blah, no.

"Oh, but what about Starlink?" What the fuck about Starlink? I'm not giving that grandstanding, nazi-fellating, attention-seeking, Thomas-Edison-imitating, innovation-stealing, memebrain-on-ketamine, greasy bastard any of my money. Even if it would get me almost decent internet for twice what it ought to cost. I will go to great lengths, even as far as giving money to BEZOS, just to keep from giving 4th-in-line-for-the-guillotine any money.

Oh, the ideal solution, (if you can even call it that...) is my local broadband provider. Oh they've got fucky billing, sign-up nonsense, PITA customer service, and all the ususal ComStar monopoly fuckery of your local cable company. But their service is good, reliable, and cheaper than the alternatives. Of course... they don't have any cable laid down my road. They have a trunk run down an adjacent road... but nothing near my house. After considerable browbeating, they did a survey, and offered to get me service!!! Install fees included 1,100 feet of trenching at $10/foot. O_o

So... I had to get Internet working, somehow, and beat the Starlink Set-up costs which were ~$3,000 at the time, or at least the $10,000+ it was gonna cost to get fiber to my house. Luckily, some of my neighbors had cable broadband, and I'm quite friendly with my neighbors. The solution was clear: Split the monthly cost of my neighbor's internet service, and just run a network cable to their house! Easy, peasy, lemon-squeezy!

Task at Hand

The obvious first idea went something like: "Hey, just rig up a Wi-Fi antenna to a big satellite dish and connect that way!" Well, my "Neighbor" who already had cable internet was almost a quarter-mile away, through woods. And a 2.4Ghz WiFi signal can make it through a couple wooden walls, but not 1000 feet of 2nd growth pine forest.

Just out of my own curiosity, I tried this with an old wireless-G router and the satellite internet dish I took down earlier. I could see that his network existed from about 400 feet away tops, but really needed line-of-sight to get any data through.

So, I need a wired connection. Surely I can just run a fiber optic line to his house right? Well no. Y'see, I happen to be on the wrong side of the road for that. I believe there is an avenue to get the power company to let me hang shit on their poles. But hours on hold, and some candid chats with linemen I approached in the wild, led me to the knowledge that there are laws where I live that REQUIRE the poles to be available for use... for a fee... and only installed and serviced by approved vendors. Oh, and the rental fee for using the pole would be on the order of thousands of dollars a month. Now, of course, the punk rocker in me was inclined to hang it up anyway, like "fuck 'em!" Or snake it through a drain under the road or something. I mean, how much can it really cost to rent a horizontal boring machine? (You don't wanna know) And besides, that shit gets the authorities on you quick, and there would be a literal string leading aaaaalllll the way back, straight to my living room. I picked my battles, and that wasn't one of them.

Okay, so, I need to get the internet across the road. First thought: WiFi! Second thought: WiFi... on the end of a 1000-foot network tether! But how do I power it? That's a long-ass way for a drop cord. Fortunately, I'm not the first person to have such a problem, and the IEEE has prepared a solution! It's called Power Over Ethernet! (PoE to it's friends.) Basically cram 48 volts of either DC, or low frequency AC (I don't know which) down the same wires that are carrying the signal. It's kinda surprising to me that works, but hey, I'm not complaining. And whadaya know!!! TPLink makes power-over-ethernet WiFi dishes for just such an occasion! (A Wireless Ethernet Bridge, if you're looking to purchase one yourself.) Added to cart, along with two PoE++ injectors. (The "++" means more jiggawatts)

But of course, the network aware among you are no doubt screaming, there's a maximum length for a run of ethernet cable. 100 meters. (Which I equate to 100 yards, which is 300 feet, with some margin in case I screw something up.) Fortunately, there's another product you can purchase: PoE Repeaters! Basically, takes the power from the incoming PoE, and uses some of it to retransmit the incoming data, while sending the rest on down the line. The ones I picked looked pretty skookum, were outdoor rated, said they could be daisy-chained up to 3 units long, so, added to cart. And to wrap things up I looked up what class of cable I'd need. I wanted gigabit ethernet to feed the theoretical 500Mbit that the wireless bridge was capable of. And to get gigabit over the whole 100m span, that requires CAT6 cable. So I did what any normal idiot would do, and searched Amazon for "Direct Burial CAT6 bulk spool" and sorted lowest-price-first. [foreshadowing] I mean, CAT6 is a standard, so all the CAT6 cable is interchageable right? [/foreshadowing] Finally, I ordered some 8p8t terminals (that's RJ45 to everyone who isn't an insufferable pedant.) Got the tool for crimping them, and hit CHECKOUT

Getting to Work

Parts arrived, and I got to work. In an uncommon stroke of good sense I decided to set up and test everything across my driveway before I snake a bunch of novice-made network gear over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house. I laid out and cut four 300-foot lengths of my CAT6 cable. After only a few screw-ups, I managed to crimp the RJ45 plugs onto them. Next, I went about setting up the wireless bridge. Because it was cold out, I used patch cables and the PoE injectors that came with the dishes and did the set-up in my living room. The dishes are configured out of the box as wireless access points (WAPs) and there was some configuring involved in pairing them up to just bridge the ethernet connection. Once that was done I did a speed test... 250Mbit/s. Somewhat shy of the advertised 500-something, but whatever, it worked, and I could troubleshoot it after install. Anyway, time to test the whole setup in the driveway! The system was set up:

Host computer --- patch cable --- PoE injector --- patch cable --- Host Dish --- Client Dish --- 300' cable --- PoE Repeater --- 300' cable --- PoE Repeater --- 300' cable --- PoE Repeater --- 300' cable --- PoE++ injector --- patch cable --- Client computer

Would you be at all surprised if it didn't work? Because it didn't.

Troubleshooting? More like a trouble-course-of-fire!

Most baffling to start with, was that it seemed nothing on the client side was working. The PoE++ injector had it's little blue light on, but none of the repeaters had indicators of any kind, and the dish was dead, no lights, no music. After meticulous unplugging and re-plugging, and checking continuity with my multimeter, I learned something new! So remember earlier when I said IEEE had made a standard for sending power over ethernet cables? Yeah TPLink looked at that standard and said... "Nah." There is another Power Over Ethernet method, one more secret, less standardized. Some people call it 24v PoE, some call it "Passive PoE." I call it A FUCKING PAIN IN MY ASS!!! GET WITH THE PROGRAM!!! So that was when I discovered that the dishes I'd bought weren't IEEE 802.3 compliant, and required additional adapters to do the PoE handshake, and to step down the 48v to the always-on 24v the dishes expect. This involed another Amazon shipment, this time including 2 different brands in case the non-standard-standard was different between brands. (luckily both worked)

So, with this squared away, the next problem reared it's head. The Client dish wouldn't turn on with more than one 300' cable in the chain. I tried several combinations of repeaters and cables, and found that only 2 of the cables I'd made would work. Taking the repeaters out for a sec, I connected the host and client computers directly with one 300'er at a time, finding that one would connect at 100Mbit/s, one would connect at somewhere between 15 and 50Mbit/s, and the other two would negotiate a 10Mbit connection, but wouldn't pass any actual data. Now to remind the reader, I had checked continuity on the cables, quite painstakingly with a multimeter. But I'm nothing if not a goober, and having never crimped an ethernet cable before, I figured I must have screwed it up. I cut and re-terminated the cables, to mixed success. I got one more cable to pass a trickle of data, but something was still wrong. Back to the research I came across a company called True Cable. And their brand is selling The GOOOOOOD Shiiiiiiit™ On their site, where they tutorialized terminating ethernet cable various ways, they mentioned that for performance-critical applications and permanent installations, the crimp-on plugs I was using weren't really the right ones. What they recommended was called a "Field Termination Plug." These are heckin' CHONKERS, they look expensive, they kinda are expensive, but hey, if it'll fix my problem, whatever. So, I hit CHECKOUT

One of the things about the Field Termination Plugs was that they didn't use a crimping tool, and they're less fiddly than the cheap crimp-on plugs. (Throughout troubleshooting, I found they can actually be taken off and re-used to a point.) And by replacing all the basic RJ45 plugs with Field Termination Plugs, I got data through all 4 of my 300' (Now slightly less than 300') cables. One remaining problem, none of them would negotiate a link at above 100Mbit, and they wouldn't necessarily get that 100Mbit/s every time. As you can imagine, I was getting fed up with this ordeal. But by a stroke of luck, the IT department at my work was doing a number of major installs, and they had cable testing equipment on-site. With some asking of favors, I was allowed to bring one of my problematic cables in and hook it up on the machine. Now, one thing that I had encountered over, and over, and over while researching possible causes of ethernet cable signal loss, was the recurring theme of a novice installer suspecting bad cable, and the problem being a bad crimp, or damage, or something similar. This machine could evaluate the correct wiring, the near and far-end crosstalk (indicative of a bad termination.) and it could even measure the length of the cable by how it attenuated the signal. My cable was crimped fine, but it read as 340 feet long. Which was interesting as I had measured it directly with my 300' mason's tape measure, when I made it, and had actually shortened it a good bit by this point re-terminating it. So, I went back to TrueCable and got more of The Good Shit™.

It's never the cable's fault, until it's the cable's fault. I got 2 spools of CAT6 direct burial from TrueCable, and it was obvious the Amazon seller was taking CAT5e or CAT5 cable and stamping the number 6 on it. Everything was different, the wires were thicker, the insulation was thicker, the twist rates were different, even the separator in the middle of the cable was different. I took my precious field term plugs off the cable, and carefully wrapped the crap cable back on its spools and initiated a return. I didn't put them on blast in the reviews because they didn't give me a hard time with the return. At the time I was more concerned with getting this damned ordeal done with than being petty. Using the TrueCable Cable, everything worked literally first time, no re-terminating, no nothing. Every cable negotiated up to gigabit speed, the Client Dish worked with the new adapter, and across the living room I got that same ~250Mbit/s as I had with just patch cables! It was time to install!

Installation!!!

After all those trials and tribulations, actually putting the hardware out in the woods went swimmingly! Except in a couple of places, I mainly ran the cable on the ground. Burying it would have been tree-root-central for the entire 1000' run. I made little wooden boards on stakes to mount the repeaters, and I used sections of an old tire to shield them from the elements. Swimmingly doesn't mean "Free of trouble" though. Remember I mentioned the field term plugs were big? well they were much too big to fit under the repeaters' liquid-tight fittings. So in a delightful little side-project I made a housing extension that would have enough room to fit the big 'ol plugs. And once I had made one, I made a silicone mold of it, and made 5 more. It was quite tricky, and it didn't work anyway. The plugs are off-center, and didn't clear the threads, so after all that I used flex tape. I was disappointed, but done is done. In a couple of places, I had to span a distance overhead, and fortunately enough, the woods themselves provide. You might think I mean I strung the cable between trees. And you would be correct, but more interestingly, I found a long length of steel cable buried under the leaf litter near a bunch of other scrap metal that had been dumped there by a previous owner. I spanned the biggest overhead span with this between two trees.

Another small detail I encountered, was the adapters that went from the IEEE compliant PoE to the bootleg-ass TPLink PoE, were not waterproof. So, to make an enclosure, I used some 3" PVC pipe, adapted it down to fit a rigid conduit gasketed fitting, and capped the top with a removable cap. Running both the in and out cables through the fitting, and the pipe stood up and strapped to a fence post, this worked quite well at permitting tool-less access as needed while keeping the adapters out of the weather.

After aiming, and getting everything installed, I did another speet test and I saw... 150Mbit/s. Not the ~500 I had planned on, but being above 100Mbit meant every link was negotiated at gigabit speed, and I presumed that was as good as I was gonna get with the ethernet bridge. Good enough, had enough, I had internet, and I called it there.

Adventures in Backwoods Broadband

I had some ideas about what might cause problems with this through-the-woods setup. I thought maybe a storm might bring down a tree and sever the cable. I imagined maybe someone hunting might find it and get sticky fingers. I wasn't sure how damaging a deer's hooves might be if it were stepped on. What I was not ready for was... BEAVERS!!! Yes, my first service interruption, my first repair call, was because of a beaver chewing through the cable. When I made that joke earlier, "Over the river and through the woods," one of the legs of the setup took the cable over a creek, and back down on the other side, just up the bank from a beaver dam. This ended up being a frustrating fix too, because there's really no standards-compliant way to splice a broken ethernet cable that I know of. The splices that are available cause some loss of signal, and as you might imagine I was not comfortable with any signal degradation. I ended up replacing the whole final leg of the run, which wasn't easy working over a creek. I also used fence posts to hold the cable up off the ground for further so as to not tempt the fuzzy rascals.

Lightning hadn't been a concern of mine either. The WiFi bridge components had been advertised as lightning resistant, on condition the ethernet cable used was shielded, (which the stuff I bought was.) The PoE injector too, was rated for lightning. Apparently what wasn't rated: The repeaters. I proactively connected the shielded connectors with a bit of wire to the repeater bodies, but I think due to having placed the cables on the ground, all the repeaters were fried by a nearby lightning strike. When I purchased replacements, the new repeaters had dedicated ground points, which didn't help. A thunderstorm the next year took the replacements out too. Since it was clear that the extra money I was spending on more stout and better-reviewed repeaters wasn't bearing out, my second set of replacements was the cheapest outdoor PoE repeater, and those held up until I decommissioned the system.

Interesting too, is what didn't take out the internet... A flood, for one thing. The pre-beaver setup with a good bit of cable, and the adapter enclosure all on the floodplain survived multiple floods before the rodents took it out. Also, two VERY large trees fell on the cable in two different storms. Neither one did anything more than smash the cable into the soggy dirt, no worse for wear.

Thoughts

An oft-cited origin for the phrase: "I heard it through the grapevine," was the first telegraph line that ran through California. It was called the "grapevine" because it was just run along the ground, over fences, trees, bushes, through creeks and rivers. And on that account it was notoriously unreliable and required constant mantinance and repair. I heard this story, and decided to name this operation after it. Owning, caring for, and feeding a mere 1/4 mile of internet infrastructure has given me a new appreciation for the royal pain in the ass infrastructure maintenance is. Everybody gets that the lines go down when a tornado rips through, but when power goes out because of a tree snake shorting power lines together, or you lose your internet to a beaver attack... the exasperation is incredible. And as such, when my local telco monopoly got the chance to collect some of my tax dollars in exchange for running fiber down my road, I jumped at the chance. Because I am well and truly ready for internet outages to be someone ELSE'S problem.