Our phone company has a sense of humor....

[amirm]

Maybe your son can talk to this guy and setup himself and his unserved/underserved neighbors with their own Internet service. The fact that ISPs get away with the BS that they do is all the fault of the FCC and their incompetent surveys of service areas. The FCC needs to have the legal authority to pound the bejeezus out of these companies for their horrendous business practices.

Yeh, I read that and forwarded it to my son. There is a big difference in their situations though. The guy in that article is living in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in silicon valley. And in denser area than where my son lives. There are however similarities in how close the Comcast line ends to where my son lives yet they won't extend it.

 

[amirm]

We dropped "landline" voice service years ago, using cellphones for voice.

We don't ever use the land line either but have it for emergencies. They are charging $20/month for it. I am tempted to drop it though as I am not sure it will be working during a disaster when our cell phones won't.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Yeh, the state of DSL offering is really sad. My son bought a new house a few weeks ago in rather remote area. I warned him to call in advance to make sure there is high speed Internet. They did and Comcast told them they definitely offer it. They buy the house, call to get service, only to be told Comcast does NOT offer cable service there at all! They go to the phone company and get a crappy 6 mbit/sec service for $60/month. To augment that they, are using T-mobile wireless.

Same thing happened to me. It does no good to call. Talk to previous owners or neighbors as that is the only way to know. In DSL areas, usually if someone moves they won't offer the service to the new owners.

 

[Alice of Old Vincennes]

Treat internet like electricity. Infrastructure for high hanging fruit must be subsidized with tax credits, grants, etc. No business can afford to run fiber optic in isolated areas. Efforts used in past with "auctions" for rural territories has not worked. Poorly capitalized companies won bids and did not produce.

 

[Blumlein 88]

My buddy rented a 11th floor suite in a city of ~1 million and his building had 2 wire non-twisted pair wiring and the DSL provider (Telus) said they had no plans on swapping out the wiring for something from this century never mind from the moon landing era at best.

Wonder if there is anyone with whom he could share a wireless connection. The 11th floor should give him lots of possibilities if anyone in the city gets good service.

For Amir's son same thing. If someone has good speedy service within several hundred feet and would share with him, pretty easy to connect with some small wireless devices from Ubiquiti or Mikrotik.

 

[Doodski]

Wonder if there is anyone with whom he could share a wireless connection. The 11th floor should give him lots of possibilities if anyone in the city gets good service.

For Amir's son same thing. If someone has good speedy service within several hundred feet and would share with him, pretty easy to connect with some small wireless devices from Ubiquiti or Mikrotek.

Hehehe.. when reading your idea but it's true. A Yagi antenna aligned to the endpoint and add on the req'd send receive gear and voila.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Hehehe.. when reading your idea but it's true. A Yagi antenna aligned to the endpoint and add on the req'd send receive gear and voila.

There are off the shelve solutions that reach several miles in line of site. Not terribly expensive nor large. They don't require a license to use in most developed countries. I use a pair to connect up the street with about a 240 mbps connection. The other end has 1 gig fiber.

Here is one Ubiquiti Litebeam that is around $75 each. A pair would bridge a few miles. Close in you can get 240 meg it will drop some with distance, but can provide good results. This unit is about 10 x 14 inches and 8 inches front to back. Propriatary 5 ghz connection. They also make Nanobeams and Nanostations for a smaller package that works over pretty good distances as well.

 

[delfuego]

Need to call and pester them for a discount.

For sure. Try to get the "customer retention" group. They have different/better discounts they can apply that the normal CS/sales agents do not.

broadband in the US is 25mb down / 3mb up minimal or they cannot call it broadband. https://broadbandnow.com/report/fcc-broadband-definition/

CenturyLink is terrible, however if you can get their Fiber+ service, it's not bad. Different support and engineers, almost a different company...

 

[Doodski]

There are off the shelve solutions that reach several miles in line of site. Not terribly expensive nor large. They don't require a license to use in most developed countries. I use a pair to connect up the street with about a 240 mbps connection. The other end has 1 gig fiber.

Here is one Ubiquiti Litebeam that is around $75 each. A pair would bridge a few miles. Close in you can get 240 meg it will drop some with distance, but can provide good results. This unit is about 10 x 14 inches and 8 inches front to back. Propriatary 5 ghz connection. They also make Nanobeams and Nanostations for a smaller package that works over pretty good distances as well.

View attachment 248945

Cool! This technology is fun stuff. Aligning it etc is all part and parcel of it. I used to install 10 foot spun actuated dishes and 12 footers for the mesh type and get a buttload of satellite TV channels and then we went VideoCipher sales and that was apparently illegal. I was there for the pioneering per say of the TVRO business before it was all encrypted in real time keys or something like that. Before that there was a engineer in Montana or something like that and he cracked the keys and reverse engineered the satellite reception hardware and reproduced them for sale in the central BC region. He was operating across North America is what the legend of him was at the time. We had music channels, movie, TV, sports, porn etc... etc... all prior to the internet.
The pic of the hardware with rear panel accessible cartridge is here.>
We sold a cartridge for C$1200 in the early 80's plus installation right to the dish mount and alignment if required.

 

[Blumlein 88]

I was surprised at the Mikrotik wireless wire units. A pair are around $225, and connect over 60 ghz for full duplex 1 gigabit speeds up to 200 meters and a substantial portion of that to 400 meters. Sometimes between buildings on the wrong side of a street or factories where digging a trench is a no go these are enough at those distances to be quite a bargain to extend networks.

Now this frequency does suffer rain fade in heavy downpours, but includes a 100 meg fallback connection over 5 ghz in those conditions.

Wireless Wire | MikroTik

1 Gbps full duplex without cables!

mikrotik.com

 

[DWPress]

I'm in hell. I purchased my property in the middle of nowhere in a river valley over 30 years ago before the internet was a "thing". The ONLY internet I can get is through a 4G connection and AT&T are the ONLY providers in the area. It's all about geography, winding river valley in thick woodlands and a ski resort hill on one end, not enough population to invest in buried services. What's worse is this past year (despite profits) cracked down on all the high GB plans they sold during Covid to resellers.

I currently limp along with a household of four on 2 100GB plans for $200/month and have serviceable 6/4mb speeds + phone plans for 3 of us. A year ago I had a pretty much unlimited plan for $90/month but it vaporized pretty much overnight when AT&T pulled the plug on many smaller companies leaving thousands scrambling for alternative service.

 

[amirm]

CenturyLink is terrible, however if you can get their Fiber+ service, it's not bad.

Yes, they have a "Quantum" division that offers fiber closer to town. My other son got their gigabit service for I think $60/month. He likes it since it is symmetrical gig up/down unlike Comcast cable as you probably know. He works remotely so uplink speed is quite important to him. Come to think of it, I could use it too for youtube video uplinks as currently it takes a long time.....

 

[amirm]

I'm in hell. I purchased my property in the middle of nowhere in a river valley over 30 years ago before the internet was a "thing". The ONLY internet I can get is through a 4G connection and AT&T are the ONLY providers in the area. It's all about geography, winding river valley in thick woodlands and a ski resort hill on one end, not enough population to invest in buried services.

We too are in remote area although not nearly in your situation. We got lucky that the power company decided to bury their cables and Comcast followed (as they usually do) and laid their cables in the same ditch. Overnight we went from crappy DSL to wonderful cable Internet (in contrast). When we first moved here, our only Internet was 3G service at 100 kbits/second! And it would die half the time!!!

 

[DWPress]

We too are in remote area although not nearly in your situation. We got lucky that the power company decided to bury their cables and Comcast followed (as they usually do) and laid their cables in the same ditch. Overnight we went from crappy DSL to wonderful cable Internet (in contrast). When we first moved here, our only Internet was 3G service at 100 kbits/second! And it would die half the time!!!

Ah yes, I remember limping along on 3G - with a 30" tower and booster we were lucky to get 120 kbts/s. I've been at this cellular data game a long time now.

I had to abandon the (8 wire) buried phone line soon after cell phones became somewhat reliable (because of swamps and the tendency of county plow trucks to dig up shallow buried cable) but remember well the sound of a modem screeching late at night trying to download the latest listserve posts at least...

Was it Clinton who first used it as the perpetual election stump speech to bring the internet to rural America? I forget, it's been so long now.

 

[Blumlein 88]

I'm in hell. I purchased my property in the middle of nowhere in a river valley over 30 years ago before the internet was a "thing". The ONLY internet I can get is through a 4G connection and AT&T are the ONLY providers in the area. It's all about geography, winding river valley in thick woodlands and a ski resort hill on one end, not enough population to invest in buried services. What's worse is this past year (despite profits) cracked down on all the high GB plans they sold during Covid to resellers.

I currently limp along with a household of four on 2 100GB plans for $200/month and have serviceable 6/4mb speeds + phone plans for 3 of us. A year ago I had a pretty much unlimited plan for $90/month but it vaporized pretty much overnight when AT&T pulled the plug on many smaller companies leaving thousands scrambling for alternative service.

If you are getting 6 meg speeds, you likely would benefit from one of those Wilson cell phone boosters. You have to have a modicum of signal to boost effectively. You likely could get 20-25 meg service that way.

I was in that situation. I could do phone conversations outdoors at my house and data was slow (100 kbits or so). Indoors phone conversations were iffy and data was not possible. With the Wilson 4G booster in the same room as the indoor re-transmitter I would get 25-30 meg service down and 10 or so up. Won't help your data cap however.

Also multiple devices can use the Wilson boosted signal at the same time.

 

[Prana Ferox]

I pay $80/mo for Verizon FiOS 1Gbps. Admittedly I'm in the suburbs of a big metro. Because I occasionally work from home, it gets expensed anyway.

Without getting too political, where this discussion usually breaks down between EU / US is realizing that in the US there's 'my internet is bad because I am poor' and 'my internet is bad because I am rural.' Hard lines suffer from the tyranny of distance; generally Euros misunderstand the sheer size scale of this country and the quantity of people who live in low population density areas. For both poor and rural there is tons of money and dozens of programs to get better cheaper internet access, but they are also not necessarily easy to use.

 

[DWPress]

you likely would benefit from one of those Wilson cell phone boosters.

Oh yes, I've been using these for years. Worse, I need one for each building just to get phone coverage inside, steel roofs don't help.

generally Euros misunderstand the sheer size scale of this country and the quantity of people who live in low population density areas

True enough. I recently returned from a 4 week trip to the EU. I picked up a cheap Vodafone SIM card in Barcelona, stuck it in my iPhone and had more than enough voice and data (100GB) with hotspot and roaming for about $40. I was all over Spain, southern France and the French alps and even though it was spotty in the alps the service was still comparable or better than what I get here.

Yes, the US is huge by comparison and once upon a time we were the envy of the world with our telecommunications system with probably billions of dollars of now obsolete copper buried in the ground. Now the telecoms must rely on tower coverage and the US is struggling to catch up with the infrastructure easily created by smaller, poorer countries who can more easily service their populations - quite a few of these countries in Asia, S America and Africa were able to completely skip the investment of time, labor and materials of a hardwired network.

 

[tomtoo]

I just realized it says "up to" 3 mbit/sec. They don't even feel comfortable guaranteeing that!!!

I love this, wonder when water supplyer change to up to 30l per day, or power to up to 15kW per day.

 

[Berwhale]

I'm paying for 550/75 on gigabit capable fibre in the UK. Average monthly cost is £37.50 (I have a 50% discount for the first 6 months of a 12 month contract) and this is broadband only (I have Freesat and Freeview for TV and use VoIP for home phone connection).

The speeds are minimum guaranteed and tests always say i've got more, e.g.

There's another broadband provider laying fibre in my area, so I should be able to move to them at the end of my contract and get a 900/900 symmetrical connection for the same price.

 

[Marc v E]

Oh yes, I've been using these for years. Worse, I need one for each building just to get phone coverage inside, steel roofs don't help.



True enough. I recently returned from a 4 week trip to the EU. I picked up a cheap Vodafone SIM card in Barcelona, stuck it in my iPhone and had more than enough voice and data (100GB) with hotspot and roaming for about $40. I was all over Spain, southern France and the French alps and even though it was spotty in the alps the service was still comparable or better than what I get here.

Yes, the US is huge by comparison and once upon a time we were the envy of the world with our telecommunications system with probably billions of dollars of now obsolete copper buried in the ground. Now the telecoms must rely on tower coverage and the US is struggling to catch up with the infrastructure easily created by smaller, poorer countries who can more easily service their populations - quite a few of these countries in Asia, S America and Africa were able to completely skip the investment of time, labor and materials of a hardwired network.

And here I was thinking that the SpaceX Starlink monthly contract of $90 was a bit expensive. When they reach a constant of anywhere between 500mb and 1gb they hit gold.