I know everyone (including me) likes the speed and convenience of dedicated internet access, but I can see many cases where it's difficult to justify that expense, yet having any access would be very valuable.
On our ward's machine, I've always had a dial-up networking connection defined that I could use in an emergency. (Here I go, publicly confessing my sins...) While not available for general use (it's my employer's "traveling/emergency" account, and provides no filtering, or, obviously, firewall) it has been of great value on several occasions over the years. It's painful to use, but much better than an hour's drive home and back!
My thought is... The church already uses a dial-up networking infrastructure with MLS (I don't know what the cost is, but imagine that it's not much, since AFAIK the modem banks are all shared with other service providers) -- why not provide limited, filtered Internet access the same way? No, you don't want to tie up your ward's phone line while people "hang out" on the web, but for most things it would work adequately, at a cost that has to work out to lless than 5% of providing every building a broadband connection.
Not only is this option nice from an economic standpoint (It's even harder to justify a big Internet expense for our remotely-located branch, much as I love them), but in some cases broadband connections simply aren't available. At one site I evaluated we couldn't even get a T-1 (or satellite); our best option was $450/mo ISDN!
I'm sure I'm not the first person to consider this, so I assume there's something I don't know that makes it a not-very-desirable option to the church I.T. dept. Anyone else have opinions or knowlege here?
Dial-up?
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russellhltn
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Do you have Sprint? I've seen prices in the $50/month range for that.cboling wrote:At one site I evaluated we couldn't even get a T-1 (or satellite); our best option was $450/mo ISDN!
I think the biggest hurtle is the financing one - piggybacking on the existing MLS connection would put the ward usage in someone else's budget. From a technical standpoint, I don't see any problems since I believe the MLS connect is a Internet connection. All we need is to have the filters adjusted to allow LDS only sites.cboling wrote:I'm sure I'm not the first person to consider this, so I assume there's something I don't know that makes it a not-very-desirable option to the church I.T. dept. Anyone else have opinions or knowlege here?
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cboling
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Unfortunately, the only provider with coverage out there was the Nextel IDEN network; PCS was useless. This was a couple of years ago, so things might have changed.RussellHltn wrote:Do you have Sprint? I've seen prices in the $50/month range for that.
Good point. Although, if headquarters is not charging the stakes for the routers (as I understand is the case), they could provide quite a few months of free dialup for the price of one of those!piggybacking on the existing MLS connection would put the ward usage in someone else's budget.
