Ah, the joys of rural broadband. Time Warner
Cable's RoadRunner service gives us an extremely low upload speed
at The Farm. It might actually be possible to upload a podcast to
LISNews faster using a 56k modem.
For now compression is going to be harder than listeners are used
to as of late. The file size cap on the Drupal end of things is
twenty megabytes. To ensure an upload does not time out it may be
necessary to keep files under ten megabytes. While this does not
mean a shift to the harsh encoding settings of 11.025 kHz mono with
an 8 kbps sample rate, it does mean a change.
Is there a way around this? Unfortunately, there is not such yet.
Switching to dial-up networking would make the situation worse.
While satellite Internet service is in use in some parts of
Ashtabula County such is expensive yet restricted. Spending one
dollar per megabyte with a cap of five hundred megabytes per month
is just not possible as there are no greenbacks behind the budget
but instead only moths. The only mobile broadband provider with
consistent coverage of The Farm is Verizon as we have learned
experientially that iPhones utterly fail here. While Verizon's
mobile broadband solution would solve the problem the issue arises
that there happens to be no funding available to cover such an
expense for LISTen.
Eventual solutions that may have to be considered might well
include file transfer via UUCP and a dial-up modem to a remote
server that can be remotely accessed over an SSH session either
tunneling X11 or using a text-based browser. Theoretically a shell
account could also be used for this as an upload through a Lynx
session to LISNews would be possible. There are
some providers out there. Unfortunately there is insufficient
data on-hand as to this which means further investigation would be
required prior to potential use.
In the midst of operating the farm, we have yet to carry out a
Skype trial. TeamSpeak seems functional when used in conjunction
with World of Warcraft but that may not necessarily be indicative
of overall infrastructure possibilities. The fallback all along to
Skype was to shift to AOL Instant Messenger voice chat but that has
not been tested either. Until that is resolved the only way an
interview is going to happen is if somebody is in studio. With
Erie
International Airport within easy driving distance such merely
becomes a matter of initiative and cost. Cleveland
Hopkins International Airport would also be doable. Their
respective short codes are ERI and CLE.
No submissions have been received yet via mail. Folks are probably
shocked at that. Simply put, physical media remains the easiest way
to get large data files into rural areas. Ashtabula County most
assuredly does not have the same quality of service in terms of
Internet access that Cleveland or New York City might have. The
number to call for leaving voicemail, which we can download as MP3
files thanks to Google Voice, is 702-714-0397. While we previously
had foreign numbers via Skype, financial pressures caused those
services to be cancelled.
There is still plenty of work to be done and there remains much to
be investigated. New challenges arise from operating in a rural
area. Hopefully they will be mitigated soon.