Rural...err Real Internet Access!!!

[Matt Meiser]

If you've been around here for a while you know of my many trials and tribulations over the last 10 years for internet. First we had satellite, then Sprint offered 3G which for the time was great until they capped it. By then I was telecommuting and we tried a local wireless internet service that never, ever worked and were forced to go to a commercial 3G service that was costing us $170/mo (and who tried to bilk me for "damaged" equipment and termination fees when I left.) Then Verizon announced manageable caps and overage fees we could live with and finally 6 meg...no wait 3 meg...no wait 1.5 meg...sometimes 0 Meg DSL from Frontier.

That's about to change...
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Cable company is telling us we should be up and running by the end of the year. They are doing several underground conduit installs right now where they can't get to poles. In this case that pole he's digging by is literally the end of the road for one power company and the other power company's first pole is about 100 yards south. I'm told once we see them hanging wire, call for an appointment because it will only be a week or to at that point. Dec. 24 marks 10 years of waiting for us.

Now, do I want the 22 meg plan? 33? 66? 110?

[Larry Browning]

Oh, man you are gonna be in hog heaven! We could only get dial-up for several years out where I live. I even had 2 land lines with one dedicated to internet. Then one day cable system got upgraded to allow for high speed internet. What a great day that was! We went for 56k dial-up to around 10meg. They have upgraded service several times since and now we are at the middle level with about 30meg. It is all we need, it rarely goes down (maybe 2 or 3 times a year) and when it does, we get it back within a few hours. We have been known to stream 3 different videos at the same time without any problems.
I also telecommute some and I really can't tell the difference from being at work or at home.

[Art Mulder]

Matt,

It ain't just rural... I live *in* a city. Population of over 300,000. I live only 3.5km from the University. My house is not quite 30 years old.

Yet with Bell DSL I can't get more than 6 Meg. They just don't seem to have any interest in upgrading my neighbourhood.
(and I'm just wary of switching to cable, as I've heard too many conflicting reports.)

Congratulations on your upgrade!

[Larry Browning]

Matt,

It ain't just rural... I live *in* a city. Population of over 300,000. I live only 3.5km from the University. My house is not quite 30 years old.

Yet with Bell DSL I can't get more than 6 Meg. They just don't seem to have any interest in upgrading my neighbourhood.
(and I'm just wary of switching to cable, as I've heard too many conflicting reports.)

Congratulations on your upgrade!

Art,
YMMV, but everyone I know that has switched from DSL to cable has been extremely happy and wondered why they hadn't switched long ago. I think it is just better technology. It is faster and much more reliable. It may be different where you live though.

[Pat Barry]

Matt, Are they putting in fiber optic? My cabin in northern Minnesota has a fiber optic connection already to tap into, right outside my door. All I need is to have them hook it up. I didn't ask for it, they just put it in. I'm just too cheap to spend the money for a higher speed access at the cabin than I have at home thru DSL. I can get TV, Internet, Telephone. Its just too much too spend for weekends. Up to 25 Mb @ $74.95/mo.

[Matt Meiser]

Don't know for sure, but they did a project out west of Toledo in a similar area this past summer and did fiber there. I suppose it depends some on what they are connecting us to where the project starts a few miles away. I've got a couple friends with service from them, one in a neighborhood built about 10 years ago and one in the 50's. Both say the service is great and they consistently get the speeds they pay for.

We'll probably stick with DirecTV for television--for one we are under contract for over another year, but also we are satisfied overall with the DVR service.

Got a little scare as Frontier tried to stick me for auto-renewing 1 year contracts on DSL, but had the decency to remove the 1 year auto-renewal when I called a couple weeks ago. They even offered a $20 credit for the inconvenience.

[George Bokros]

I have earthlink internet over Time Warner cable. I just ran TWC's internet speed test today and my download was 16.5mps and upload 1.08 mps. When I worked I did do work from home on weekends and occasionally during the week and my speed was actually faster than I had at the office. The reason I did the speed test is TWC is offering internet at $14.95 / month. What I found is that the $14.95 is for 2 mps, to get 20 mps it would cost me $44.99 but for only one year then it would go to $54.99, I pay $41.95 per month for the earthlink over TWC and that cost has been the same since 1999.

Matt I think you will be happy on the 22mps plan.

George

[phil harold]

9 years I am still waiting
verizion is my best option so far

[Brian Elfert]

I switched from Centurylink/Qwest DSL to Comcast Cable Internet about two years ago. One minor outage with Comcast in the past two years. I never notice any slowdowns and it is noticeably faster than my DSL. Cable Internet was really bad in the early days, but it it very solid now. I mainly switched because it was cheaper than my DSL connection when bundled with my cable TV.

I know of a Scout camp in very rural northern Minnesota that has fiber optic Internet. I was shocked when I heard that as the administration building is at least eight miles from the nearest paved road and they have about a three mile private road to the admin building. They had been using satellite Internet and AOL dialup before that. (Internet is for staff use, not for the campers.)

[Rich Engelhardt]

I got cable in 1995. (Time Warner)

That was back when only Akron Ohio and some city in Florida had the infrastructure in place for cable internet.

For the first few years it was great. Then as more people signed on, the speed began to degrade.

You shared a 30Mb connection w/the block.

My basic 1.5Mb DSL was faster than the cable.
Outages were terrible. They only buried the cable about a foot under the ground & something was always chewing through it or water would seep into the connectors and corrode them.

Plus they did away with the local repair service and all repairs were handled via the service desk in Florida.

My cable modem ( A Motorola) also went out once and I was told there was a three week wait for a new one. I bought my own <--Important point! (A Toshiba).
When I stopped my cable service, and turned in my Motorola cable modem, they claimed they never installed Motorola equipment and as much as accused me of buying an old piece of broken equipment to turn in. I went back and forth with them on that and finally someone admitted that at one time, early on, they had tried Motorola but all of them had been replaced by newer equipment. They said the only was I could have been issued a Motorola would have been if it had been installed prior to 1999.
I told them it went in in 1995, but, for some reason their records didn't show that.
Rather than argue the point, I just gave them my Toshiba since I figured I'd never use it again.


BTW - I also dealt w/Time Warner on a professional basis at a number of customer sites.
Their tech support was horrid.
They always claimed the connection problems were on the customer side of the equipment when the customers would call them.
The customers would then call us in to check the equipment - which was always working fine.
They by some mystery, the connection would all of a sudden come back up.

For reasons only know to God and Time Warner, they refused to issue static IP addresses to customers, they insisted on issuing a reserved DHCP address.
When ever the connection was dropped for what ever reason, and a new DHCP address was obtained, it was never the one they had been assigned.

Sorry to be so long winded....I really hated dealing w/Time Warner

[Don Morris]

Matt,

I know your pain. When I was assigned to Italy, 1988-92, we lived in Naples. We waited for two years before we had a phone. And of course, there was no internet, they didn't even have lead free gas. Had to sell our US cars and buy European spec. cars. On the other hand, we found out, sometimes not being "connected" isn't so bad.

BTW, I bought a used BMW 520i that seemed to settle in around 85 mph on the Autostrade (highway) and a 4 banger "in town" car you don't even know the brand over here.

[Ole Anderson]

I have had Comcast for at least 25 years, and currently get a 20 meg connection. Overall quite happy. BUT; I also have Xfinity home security. When I leave town for an extended trip to FL I put the phone and TV on suspension to save about $100 per month. So far they have been unable to get it right and I keep loosing my ability to live view my camera. I have probably been on the phone 25 times with them to try to rectify the problem to no avail. You can imagine how high the frustration level is. Every time I get disconnected, I have to start from scratch when I call back. As I type this I am on the phone with them now (59:17 and counting) waiting for them to try to fix the problem. He is even conferencing me in on his discussions with other "experts", something they have not done before. I do have a guy that is really trying, but we'll see. Matt, which cable provider will you have?

[Brian Elfert]

I got cable in 1995. (Time Warner)

Cable Internet was really bad in the 1990s and the first part of the 2000s. Comcast installed fiber to the neighborhoods locally about a decade ago. There are smallish enclosures on the sides of roads every 1/4 or 1/2 mile where the fiber converts back to coax for local distribution. I think the enclosures have a small backup generator as they have gas meters at them.

I assume the reason TW didn't want to issue static IPs was to prevent people from running servers and using extra bandwidth. DHCP should generally give you the same IP at every lease renewal unless your computer is turned off for a period of time. If it didn't then TW's DHCP was really screwed up, or they intentionally changed the IP address often to prevent running servers.

[Matt Meiser]

Matt, which cable provider will you have?

Buckeye Cablevision which is the dominant player in the Toledo market.

[Matt Meiser]

Cable Co is still chipping away at the install. The big holdup seems to be one of the 2 power companies in play here needing to replace poles which they do at a rate of about one every 2 weeks. 2 weeks ago we got postcards in the mail announcing an early spring completion date. And yesterday they came through hanging stuff off the poles. Since there's a pole well into my yard they stopped to talk to me and see if I thought they could drive up to it or if I thought my yard would be too soft (it would.) Turns out they aren't hanging coax, but rather a steel cable which will be supporting fiber!