Anyone who's tried to tune in to our little show here during peak hours and waited half a minute before getting a signal has experienced firsthand one of the biggest drawbacks of DSL: your available bandwidth is limited primarily by your effective physical distance from the phone company's nearest central office. What's that mean? Well, it means that AtAT originally couldn't get a pipe wider than 768K without picking up our compound and moving it several thousand feet to the left. And it also means that ever since April, when the phone company decided to screw around with some equipment or wiring or something, our effective distance shot up another 4,000 feet-- thus knocking our maximum bandwidth down by 67%.

Of course, it also means that there are plenty of people who live more than 18,000 feet away from their nearest central office and therefore can't get DSL at all. (Given our headaches with the technology, we're starting to consider them the lucky ones, but that's beside the point.) One such soul is longtime tech pundit Robert X. Cringely, who finally got fed up with not having access to any viable broadband Internet service and finally took matters into his own hands-- with a telescope, a phone, a pair of AirPort Base Stations, a couple of directional antennas, some household bleach, three sticks of chewing gum, the ink cartridge from a ballpoint pen, and the channeled spirit of MacGyver.

Many thanks to faithful viewer Jens Baumeister, who pointed out Cringely's latest column, in which he details his inspiring workaround of DSL's distance limitations. Basically, it works like this: Cringely lives on a hill, and used his telescope to scout out residences in the valley which would be close enough to the central office to qualify for DSL service. Then he started calling these people on the phone and explaining what he wanted to do-- basically, pay to give the person free DSL service if said person would then let Cringely piggyback off the connection. Eventually he found a taker, and then built a ten-kilometer line-of-sight AirPort link between the two houses using seriously souped-up Base Stations to create his "802.11b wireless link from Hell." And there you have it: how to circumvent DSL's distance requirements for only a couple thousand bucks. Enjoy!

Sadly, since AtAT's compound isn't located on a mountaintop, Cringely's approach wouldn't work for us, but a permanent fix for AtAT's bandwidth issues is in the works. With luck everything will be spleftier than ever by the time the Expo rolls around. Keep your fingers crossed, and hang in there.