Rural Internet

[mddorange]

I am like Newbury, Centurylink could only deliver 1.5 down and .7 up for DSL at $49.99 a month. I went with AT&T Mobley for $22 and now get 8 to 30 down and 5 to 7 up and I can take it with me. I can even stop in the middle of nowhere and get online.

 

[vvanders]

One of the reasons to be excited for SpaceX, aside from being a US based company that's making huge strides in launch technology is that the lower launch costs are lining them up to launch StarLink in a few years.

Starlink (satellite constellation) - Wikipedia

It's going to be using phased-array antennas and a bunch of other cool tech but should have latencies in the 50ms range and plenty of throughput given the constellation's density. You'll be able to get fast internet anywhere a sat phone would previously work.

We somehow lucked out with the new house, they was a large infrastructure project back in '05 that brought a bunch of dark fiber out from Seattle to the peninsula. Despite being outside city limits cable company offers gigabit internet for $80/mo. Finally tested it over the physical wire the other day and seeing 600mpbs so I'm a happy camper.

 

[mddorange]

Here the power company, Tombigbee, is installing fiber to the bigger cities in my county. They offers 100 mb for $49 /month and 1 gig for $79, but they aren't going out into the country where I live until 3 more years.

 

[STx]

I'm on a wireless system which is supposed to be 10 MB / 3Mb it actually tends to run around 5/2 but they have been having issues the last 6-8 months also, high latency and repeated drops and reconnects.
Unfortunately hard wired copper is way worse not even a thought of DSL.
I doubt that I will ever see cable or fiber optic in my life here.
And AT&T is one of the weaker signals.

I wouldn't necessarily let this discourage me. I build a cellular controlled wild pig trap that runs over AT&T and because of the higher gain antennas used by the camera and box, I'm often able to get a strong data signal in areas where people have a hard time making phone calls over AT&T. The Mofi device has a pair of pretty high gain antennas and, if they're almost but not quite strong enough, Wilson Electric makes a directional antenna for about $100 that would solve the problem.

The Mofi also has the radio turned up to the highest setting allowed so, it's going to work a lot better than a phone would.

It's a mistake to assume that a weak phone signal means a weak signal period because a phone is designed around space and battery limitations that don't exist with a device like this. With a 30 day money back guarantee, I would try it to see what really happens. Experience with the pig traps that are installed in VERY remote locations tells me you're probably going to be surprised. The only place we have not been able to get one of the pig traps working was rural Mississippi but, they have a local wireless provider, C Spire, that has basically dominated that market and none of the national carriers have decent coverage anywhere in Ms, outside of the major metropolitan areas.

 

[STx]

The Mofi gives a pretty high level of control as well, letting you choose which particular band you choose to lock on to. I tested on the 5 that I had signal on this morning and settled on this one. One thing I found really interesting was that one of the bands was completely synchronous, giving me 15MB up and down.

 

[STx]

Here the power company, Tombigbee, is installing fiber to the bigger cities in my county. They offers 100 mb for $49 /month and 1 gig for $79, but they aren't going out into the country where I live until 3 more years.

A couple of the Electric CoOps in Texas have started building powerline data networks for their members. I wish ours would do that but, I think as the LTE networks are further built out, it will end up being a bad investment for the long term. The standard for 4G LTE maxes it out at 1GB, which will rival even fiber.

 

[rekees4300]

When 5G becomes widely available in a few years, it will completely change Internet access as we know it.

 

[shooterdon]

Following with interest. I see mixed review of this company but the 30 day trial is attractive.

May pull the trigger.

I have a Dish bundle and I constantly run out of internet capacity. If I had good internet I would drop the Dish TV in a heart beat. Dish will never offer good internet for that reason as many would stop paying for TV if they could stream effectively with the internet.

 

[Diggin It]

^^ They don't offer better because it isn't possible with satellite. Everything you do goes up to the satellite and then back down to the network center. And there aren't that many satellites, so traffic and bandwidth are limited. It's a fine service for those who don't have other options and can live with the costs and limitations. I did it for several years between the dialup and DSL eras. I made sure I did my heavier traffic usage things overnight during the un-metered hours.

I'll never have fiber here, but if they do something reasonable with cell service at a decent cost, I may look at that later. For that matter, if it wasn't for the $300 equipment cost, I may look at the OP's suggestion.

 

[STx]

There are some other providers that offer the same type of service without the equipment cost but, they charge $10 - $20 more per month for the same service so, you're paying for it one way or another. The Mofi is nice piece of equipment, it's modular enough that when technology changes in the future you can keep up with it. It also gives a lot of control over your Internet access so you can easily implement family controls if you want to. I think it was worth the $300 and since this service saves me $30/mo, there's only a 10 month ROI.

Here are a couple of other options -

Membership Plans | Unlimitedville - these guys have plans that use AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile or Sprint so they'll work just about everywhere, they're more expensive though.

4GAS(R) Internet |1-85-449-8888 | Rural America Internet - they have different priced plans with data caps but, I don't think they charge for equipment.