Rural Phone Technology Options

Being off the power grid generally also means that we are off the telephone grid. In my way of thinking, lack of phone is a much more serious problem because power is easier to fix than phone. Today let's take a look at the various options that exist for getting off-grid phone service.

Normally (that means city) phone service runs along wires buried in the ground or suspended on telephone poles. These wires will typically enter your property in a skinny green metal box where a lineman can then run one or more telephone lines to a connector on the side of your house. The green box is put on your property by the developer before the house is built.

Off-grid is a different matter. There is no developer to pay to have the phone company install wiring, so if you want wires, you will have to foot the bill yourself. Prices vary from one region to the next but in all cases the cost will be impressive. It will not benefit the phone company to run wire for a single customer, so you must pay for the project yourself.

In some places you can run the wire yourself and the phone company will even give you the wire. They only need to specify the depth of wire placement and will need to inspect

the work before the wire is covered. You will need to get permission and have easements established along the path that the wire will follow and a power trencher is a virtual necessity so you will need to rent or purchase equipment to do the job. Crossing a black-top road will require a professional help and more permissions than I would care to undertake. A county gravel road might be as bad. A private gravel road is less of a technical issue, but permissions from owners must still be secured. Any overhead run on poles is likewise out of the question for the "do-it-yourselfer" for primarily liability and maintenance reasons. If all of this sounds like a lot of work and a bunch or money, you're right on both counts. Which is the reason there are some alternatives.

The first alternative most people will consider is cellular telephone service. Since cellular radio does not depend on wires to the customer's site, there is no big up-front investment in bringing an off-grid customer on line. The standard rate plans, with fairly high costs for each minute of use, have given way to plans that might even be affordable as the primary phone service to a rural property.

Naturally, there are drawbacks to cellular. In some cases the special rate plan may only apply to digital calls. Calls that originate in an (older) analog only service area may not be

covered. Since the digital system is only in metropolitan areas, it is likely that your service will be analog. This could impact the cost effectiveness of such a plan very badly!

And a cell phone is just a phone. You can forget about surfing the web. Oh yes, there are cellular modems, but read the not so very fine print carefully. On a very good day you might get a 4,800 bits per second connection speed on a cellular modem as compared to the 33,600 bits per second that is now the standard for hard-wired modems. So to download

this newsletter on a cellular modem would take more than 40 seconds.

But cellular is not the only radio telephone solution. A number of companies provide products called "Wireless Local Loop" (WLL) systems to provide radio interconnection

between telephone central office equipment and customer homes and businesses. These systems are particularly popular in developing countries where telephone service can be provided without installing thousands of miles of wire.

The way a WLL system works is this. First, we need a phone company. Phone companies have buildings with a computer in them that is called a Central Office (CO). A CO is just a really big switch. It listens to off-hook telephones and translates the keypad button presses into directions to connect to on-hook phones which it then sends a ring command. Someone picks up, and we have a route between two phones. [note: this isn't really how it works, but it is conceptually correct and once upon a time it really did work that way]

A WLL only replaces some of the wire, but to do that it has to "fake" some of the features of a CO. That makes it a bit complicated to build, but really simple to use. A WLL comes out of the box in two pieces. One is attached to the telephone company wherever you can find a telephone wire. This can be at a neighbor's house, a nearby business, or it can be tacked to a telephone pole (the must be done by a company lineman).

The other end of a WLL system is placed at your homestead where you need telephone service. All it needs is power and a clear line of sight (more on this later) to the other half of the WLL equipment. These two pieces of equipment, one at your homestead and the other attached to telephone wiring, provide a two-way radio link that acts just like wire.

Standard telephones, fax machines, answering machines and computers can be connected at the homestead end and will operate just like they were wired direct to the phone company. Well, almost.

Two different standards are used for WLL equipment. Older systems use lower frequency radio signals around the 49 Mhz band. Compared to wire, these low frequency systems are

more prone to electrical interference and do not provide nearly as high a data rate for computer communications. A 49Mhz system will perform well for voice, will be adequate

for fax and will likely make you impatient when used for computer communications.

Newer equipment is based on Spread Spectrum (SS) signalling in the the 900 Mhz band. These systems provide superb signal quality and will support data rates far higher than normal telephone connections allow. A 900Mhz SS system will perform as well or better than any wired phone system and will even support an ISDN connection for you truly serious data junkies.

Installation of either system is pretty straight forward, but there are some rules to follow, both technical and regulatory. Technically, the 49Mhz and 900Mhz systems are somewhat different because of the difference in frequency. The technical differences give rise to different regulations governing the use of these systems.

In a nutshell, the regulations are, surprisingly?, simple: thou shalt not interfere with thy neighbor's signal.

The 900Mhz equipment that uses Spread Spectrum signalling is inherently a non-interfering technology so the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires no licensing or registration of any kind for the operation of 900Mhz SS equipment. [the equipment itself is type rated with the FCC by the manufacturer]

The 49Mhz equipment is a different matter. These systems can interfere with one another and with other authorized uses of the same frequency band, so the FCC requires a "frequency coordination" within an area to keep folks from stepping on each other. This is done by listening on a range of frequencies and picking one that seems to unused. This assignment is then reported to the FCC so that others may avoid that frequency in the same geographic area.

Which ever system is employed, there are some common characteristics that will control how the system is installed. Remember we said the two parts of a WLL must have a clear line of sight between them? Well, here's the reason. A 900Mhz radio signal follows a path that is every bit as straight as a ray of light, so you must have a completely unobstructed signal path: if you can not see one antenna from the other then the antennas can't "see" each other either. The word "see" in this context is to be taken literally. Can you see through a tree? Neither can a 900Mhz radio signal. This limits or WLL to what is termed (for obvious reasons) "line of sight."

Satellite TV antennas work the same way (on even higher frequencies than 900Mhz). On one system I installed, I had to move the antenna about 6 inches one direction because it was aimed directly at the trunk of a large fir tree on a neighboring property. In one place I

had near zero signal and six inches to the left I had near maximum. Line of sight!

Which brings up an important point. You do not need to be able to see the other antenna with your naked eye. Feel free to use binoculars or a spotting scope. I certainly could not see the satellite 22,000 miles away in the example above and relied entirely on the receiver to aim the antenna.

In flat, open country, line of sight is probably about 7 to 10 miles depending on how high a pole you mount the antenna on--the higher you go, the farther your line of sight. If you live on a hilltop, you might get 30 miles.

The 49Mhz signal is much less a "line of sight" beast. It will go through some objects including smaller trees and will bounce off and around larger obstructions. But "cheating" will cost you in signal quality, so it is best to stick with a clear path if you can.

The least attractive features of WLL systems is, you guessed it, the cost. A dual line system, which is my own minimum requirement, will cost anywhere from $4000 on up

depending on vendor, model, and installation issues (like range). To put this in perspective, keep in mind that running wire is a "dollars per foot" sorta' deal, so even a one mile run could exceed the cost of a WLL system.

In case you haven't noticed, I consider it a personal failure if I can't build it myself (just kidding, sorta'). What would it take to build our own WLL?

First, let's start with a 900Mhz SS wireless telephone from a phone store. Some of these have pretty good range. One such phone has a measured range of a couple miles. If we could hack in a better antenna for both the hand-held unit and the base station we might have a WLL solution capable of several miles. Even if a better antenna did not improve range, we would need an external roof mounted antenna to get good line of sight.

The base station for the phone would be placed where it had access to the telephone line and the handset would be located at our homestead. Since the charger is usually part of the base unit, we might need two complete phones. We'll use one of the base units just to charge the handset.

We'll need to replace the antennas with directional antennas that will then be aimed at each other. [Note: this probably violates FCC regulations as the equipment is certified for the particular antenna it comes with, but as long as it causes no interference it will never be known] Hacking the antennas into the base and hand unit would require a bit of radio skill but the parts would be real cheap.

Alas, this scheme will likely not pass data at all and will be tricky to interface to a computer modem anyway. On the other hand, this could be a very inexpensive approach, well less than a thousand dollars, to get a good quality voice (only) connection.

What if we turn this around and design first for the data connection and see if the voice connection comes along for the ride?

This gets really weird. Ever hear of Voice of IP? VOIP is where we transmit voice communications over Internet Protocol (IP), the way computers communicate on the internet. If we had two computers, one at our homestead and one at a telephone connection, we could transmit voice between them if they were connected with a computer network.

With a radio modem we can do just that. There are several plug-in cards for PCs that allow two computers to be networked together without wire -- radio spans the gap where wire is normally used.

We then add a telephone interface card into each computer and voila! we have a wireless internet connection and a standard telephone interface in one unit. Any standard telephone can be plugged into the telephone interface card and used just line a hardwired phone. Including a pair of directional antennas, such a system costs about $2000 at current prices.

Once you have the telephone interface cards, you can also make use of the (dozen or so) internet long distance telephone companies. These folks work just like the long distance phone companies except that the calls are routed, for free, across the internet.

A "build-it-yourself" offgrid phone is not the right solution for most people. It is simply too involved technically. An off-the-shelf WLL or a modified portable phone however is an option suitable for nearly anyone.

Survival Communications

This is the only book in the category that I am aware of, and is an important book for anyone interested in emergency preparedness. Note that the author only deals with survival communications as the title promises, which does not include normal phone service and such.

Buy it at Amazon for $19.95

Rural Telephone and Internet

This little gem, well it's actually 200 pages, has just about everything you need to know to make phone calls over the Internet. Why would you want to do that? Two reasons: long distance is FREE (or nearly so) and an Internet connection may actually be easier to get than a phone line! The CDROM included with the book has a bunch of useful software. A bunch more can be downloaded from the Internet.

Buy it at Amazon for $23.96