Need help/ideas on high speed internet for mining farm in remote areas

[Wudcutter]

Hello, I'm new to the forum, second post. I'm looking at developing some really low cost power running natural gas gen sets. Biggest obstacle is high speed internet service.  Regular cable internet is not available.  Is anyone using any kind of satellite or cell phone services to run a mining center?  I will also looking at point to point radio. Looking for ideas. Was told by large mining company they tried sats, down time killed profits. Most of the oil and gas facilities where the cheap gas is, are very remote, little or no cell service. Help!

[philipma1957]

Hello, I'm new to the forum, second post. I'm looking at developing some really low cost power running natural gas gen sets. Biggest obstacle is high speed internet service.  Regular cable internet is not available.  Is anyone using any kind of satellite or cell phone services to run a mining center?  I will also looking at point to point radio. Looking for ideas. Was told by large mining company they tried sats, down time killed profits. Most of the oil and gas facilities where the cheap gas is, are very remote, little or no cell service. Help!

How much down time for satellites 🛰.

How many miners?

1000 s19s

or something bigger?

[mikeywith]

The problem with the internet over satellites is not the downtime, it's the latency, it's above 500ms on average, imagine you mine a block and it has to go from your miner, to your router, from your router to the dish installed on your roof, then travel over 20,000 miles to orbit where the geostationary satellite is located, and then comes down another 20,000 miles to the NOC placed on planet earth, and then from there it gets sent over the regular internet, that is a lot of traveling, certainly not good for mining by any means, unless this technology has improved substantially since I last read about it, which I of course doubt.

The best option for mining in a remote area would be the use of Point to Point communications, they are cheap and easy to install, but depending on the nearest source of the internet from where you are located and also the geographical location and the existence/absences of mountains and other obstacles - P2P might not be feasible, you need to hire a professional who would then need to visit the site and evaluate the situation, but before you do that, simply ask about the nearest source of internet.

The second best option would be using cellular data (3g/4g), the problem with those is that they are somehow expensive and most data plans if not all don't have an unlimited quota, so you will have to pay for every byte, so you need to do the math:

It is safe to assume that each miner will use 4kbps, that is roughly a 50MB per day, say you have a 100 miners that will be 5GB per day, so if your provider charges 2$ per GB, you will need to pay $4 a day or $120 a month, some providers charge over $10 per GB so that's $600 a month, you need to ask your ISP about the cost, you could, of course, set up a mining proxy and then all of the 100 miners will consume 50MB a day.

[BitMaxz]

500ms pretty high ping you will get some high hashrate spike if you running a huge amount of miners.
But If you know some nearby cell tower you can use that location to change the direction of your satellite straight to that location. This will help you increase the signal quality.

Are you going to use the satellite as a repeater/booster? Much better check your location and try to check which spectrum signal available in your area.

Since it's wireless like the above said if you are going to use prepaid sim card with 3g/4g your internet data is limited but there are other options to get unlimited internet.
Sample AT&T if you are living in the United States you can get an unlimited plan for 4g/5g network(5g is better if you can get this signal and I believe you can get less ping) but the only problem they only offer this on companies or to business owners. If you can provide business proof then you can get this unlimited internet data plan(Enterprise/Corporate sim card).
So, you don't need to worry about the data cost because you are going to pay it monthly without extra charges.

[mikeywith]

But If you know some nearby cell tower you can use that location to change the direction of your satellite straight to that location. This will help you increase the signal quality.

Will the tower by any chance be tall enough to reach the orbit? I bet not, then he can't do such thing, there is no short cut, in internet over satellite, the dish must be pointed to the geostationary satellite which is located in the orbit.

If you are talking about CPE/AP used for PTP communications, then that also won't work that way, even if there was a tower nearby you won't be able to connect to it unless that tower has the required equipment and then whoever owns it must allow you to access it, think of these dishes, satellites and CPEs is a way of replacing the Lan/ethernet cable, so instead of running a cable 20,000 miles to orbit it gets replaced by a dish or running a cable for 1 mile at your farm or summer house because the pool (I mean swiming pool not mining pool, miners probably can't think of any pool but the mining once ) is too far from the router - you use CPEs for that, but that doesn't give you the ability to point any of those at any tower and then receive an internet connection.

Sample AT&T if you are living in the United States you can get an unlimited plan for 4g/5g network(5g is better if you can get this signal and I believe you can get less ping)...

Well that's going to be perfect for him, any clue about prices? I think it all comes down to these data plan prices, if he has 1-5 miners only, he might not fully utilize the unlimited quota, if he has 100-200 gears, then that would most likely be better, but there is no way for us to answer this until we know the prices of those plans and the number of gears he is planning to run.

[Artemis3]

Well if Elon's low orbit Starlink becomes operational worldwide next year as promised, at least the latency will be a thing of the past (20ms is the promise, math says ~5ms is the physical limit). Not to mention the install which is absurdly simple compared to common geostationary links.

Besides them i think there are a couple of minor players as well, but Elon has quite the advantage by having the capacity to install the sats by his own means.

Of course the oil/gas industry faces the same problem everywhere, think of the open sea platforms...

[BitMaxz]

~snip~

Well, I'm just comparing them on antennas like outdoor parabolic/yagi antennas with 24dBi(I have experience of these) that have a frequency range of 600 MHz to 6500 MHZ and it can reach around 20km range. So if you know the cell tower location you can change the position of these antennas and pointing it directly to the cell tower. If the satellite is different why would they suggest to point this satellite to tower?

About AT&T what I remember is around $40 a month it includes mobile phones or modem available from AT&T.

Looks like I found it from here https://www.att.com/shop/wireless/features/data_unlimited_enterprise-sku6320341.html
You must buy a device from them to be able to get this unlimited plan but they have a plan where you don't need to buy a device from them I just can't find the page.
T-mobile also has a business plan but the price is private except for magenta plan that includes call, text, and unlimited data.
If he is living in the US then he needs to contact T-mobile to ask the price. Other networks also have a business enterprise plan you just need to be wise on choosing which one is offering better and cheaper monthly plans.

[mikeywith]

Well, I'm just comparing them on antennas like outdoor parabolic/yagi antennas with 24dBi(I have experience of these) that have a frequency range of 600 MHz to 6500 MHZ and it can reach around 20km range. So if you know the cell tower location you can change the position of these antennas and pointing it directly to the cell tower. If the satellite is different why would they suggest to point this satellite to tower?

There is a confusion here which I am trying to clear, the antennas you are talking about are cellular signal boosters or PTP Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz), what OP is asking about is the ku band satellite dishes up to 14 GHz, those can't be pointed to the tower (well they can, but there is nothing to communicate with there), on the other hand, the parabolic antennas can't be pointed to the geostationary satellite, so these two have completely different applications.

About AT&T what I remember is around $40 a month it includes mobile phones or modem available from AT&T.

That's pretty cheap, especially if it includes a modem, and just in case for whatever reason he doesn't get a proper signal, he could use a signal amplifier like the one you explained about above.

[NotATether]

The catch with using cellular data is network latency. OP mentioned he's in a place where cable internet is not available so I doubt that cellular data has good ping times over there. You would also need devices to contain all of those SIMs or microSIMs since the miners are not all going to be near each other, and even if they were, having hundreds of clients connecting to wireless access points is a latency bottleneck. I don't think production miners even connect to wireless networks. But even if there are some that do, you are suddenly looking at hundreds of dollars in expenses of access points, one for each nearby cluster of miners, and hundreds more for more APs to boost the signal range so the data transmission speed doesn't get saturated by all the miners connected there.

[mikeywith]

The catch with using cellular data is network latency.

4G has an avereage latency of 50ms, it's more than fine for mining purposes.

I doubt that cellular data has good ping times over there.

There is really no correlation between these two, where I live there are places without electricity infrastructure and yet the cellular signal is great, you could be living downtown and have a terrible signal, at worst case scenario he could get a cheap amplifier.

You would also need devices to contain all of those SIMs

All he needs is a single GSM model with an ethernet port (most of them have it), then a wire from that GSM model to a switch/router then hardwire the miners from there, there is no extra cost in setting up a LAN over cellular as opposed to cable/ADSL/Wimax, the same basic equipment is needed in the inside.

[Wudcutter]

I like this last idea. I'm going to try to test it this weekend with some S9's. I snagged a RV-50 cell data modem yesterday from a site where it was not being used. Its one of the few out of hundreds we use not on a private network. I'll post the results.

We have dozens of gas sites we want to look at for these small farms. High speed internet is the biggest hold up.

Thanks for all the ideas, keep them coming!!