Creepy Crawly Internet

[TnAndy]

It's all about bang for the buck. And the ROI on building out rural communities is just not there. The CAF will help but still only mandated to 10 meg and the FED's tell you where to put the devices and who to serve. The cost to put fiber in the ground far out weighs the return. That's why the CAF Project got started, to subsidize the Telco's.

And ya know, I can understand it's not worth their time. WHY not just drop the service to rural areas ?
Insread, they "stick it to", by price gouging, rural areas. BIG billboards over in town (this was years ago) by LAST-CL "25MB DSL $19.99/mo"....while the best we could get was 528k for $50-60/mo (depended on what day you called and who you talked to as to how far they were going to bend you over). In town, they had competition....here, dial up was the only competition.

Now the guys that I lease my tower to have a 40MB plan for mid $30 range. Haven't talked to anyone in our valley that still uses DSL........so the phone company simply priced themselves out of revenue in our case.

 

[dmccarty]

I do blame the providers. I used to work for a telco, and their extreme short sightedness and poor leadership is why there isn't high speed available to everyone. Some telcos, DID build out fiber to every subscriber. Those telcos will survive. Companies like Windstream, who I worked for will not. LastCenturyLink. Good observation!

LastCenturyLink made me laugh. Some local wag here calls them CenturyStink. They won't improve access to us even though was have 1.5 mbps. People in more rural areas, with less density per mile, have faster speeds. :confused3: A small local company is somehow able to build a fiber network in the most rural part of the county yet LastCenturyLink can't get us to 10 mbps. :confused3:

We have been on a cell service for Internet for a year and it has worked well. We kept LastCenturyLink to see give the cell network a try and now will drop some of their services.

Later,
Dan

 

[truckdiagnostics]

Ubiquiti - Products

Our area uses a line of site radio. Your terrain would decide a lot on this methods effectiveness. It is actually rather easy to do. We had DSL cable in town 4 miles away. Put one on farmers silo, which was in town he had cable DSL. Put the other up on tower on our roof. Paid the farmers internet bill. He was happy to let me do it. Then two years latter these guys came in offered the farmer more money than I was willing to pay, basically they did what I did for a lot more people.
Mercury Network >> Mercury Network
I knew they where going to do it. In fact I tried to get them to do it for me, but at the the time they they didn't see the RIO.
The system works well. When we run pathping there network actually slows down when it gets into the city where IMO they do not have the capacity.

Ours slows down the most now from about 4pm until 2am, which it always did now just more. However, now it is slower during business hours, my guess is there are more people at home during the day using the internet.
I am impressed with how well it is working.

 

[kcflhrc]

I don't have a wired option at all where I live and I'm 20 minutes from the KC Metro area. I install Fiber to the home in subdivisions 10 minutes from my house. But I would rather live where I live than live where the fiber homes are. That being said there are a lot of options out there, so do what makes the most sense for you. Every area is different. Without broadband being regulated these companies aren't obligated to do anything. If the companies participate in the CAF Project they are obligated to do the work but the Government tells us where to put the nodes. So don't blame it all on the Telco's. And as far as dropping that part of the business, that will probably happen sooner than later. Then you will have something else to complain about. I'm quite happy with the AT&T wireless option and that makes the most sense for me. As far as the rural Coop's and such doing rural fiber, that's great.

 

[k0ua]

I sat there working for Windstream and watched Madison County Telephone in Huntsville Ar, put in fiber to every subscriber.. Little podunk Huntsville Ar. Pretty darn good. Bought a big backbone off of Windstream and away they go. I don't even know how Windstream is still alive. Glad I don't work there anymore.

 

[DKCDKC]

My DSL speed with Verizon hovered around 1.5 mbps down, usually lower. And there were frequent near outages. After some detailed conversations with the repair guys, the issue seemed to be my distance from the road. I'm close enough to the DSL remote box, but my driveway is a mile long with the phone and power lines under it. Consequently there are breaks along that drive where the phone lines are grounded or whatever. As time went on, the various connections would loosen and my speed would drop. I could literally have to call Verizon every few months for repairs along my drive or find another Internet source. I went with a Mofi drawing off a cell tower four miles away. I pay $60 a month for unlimited Internet with Verizon prepay. They say you get slowed after 25 gigs, but I've never noticed it and we use more than that. biggest issue now is the greater cell use during the day in this rural area - kids at home I imagine. So my speeds have slowed to 2 to 5 during the day, better at night. It isn't that bad given that, as prepay, I have very low priority on the towers. I've been offering a hill on my land for a tower but no takers. It's the highest hill for miles - but there are several other towers within five miles.

 

[TheMan419]

We have a fixed wireless provider in our area. It relies on line of sight to the tower. Unfortunately the trees around me mean I would have to put up a fairly tall tower. I cannot remember at this point how tall, but it was going to be cost prohibitive. No one else around to share the tower with.

We have decent AT&T Cell service. So I found Ubifi that has an unlimited plan with them. It is $100/mo. But I get about 20MB up and 7MB down. Invested about $150 in a directional antenna, cable, connectors.... that gets me the speeds. If I just left the unit inside I was getting 3mb.

We have DSL as an option, but it is 1.5 mb and a very unreliable connection.

I am working from home as a result of COVID. Speeds have remained good during this time. We stream TV now. So even if SWMBO is watching TV I can do the work stuff I need to do.

Now I just need to figure out how to work from home ALL the time.

 

[k0ua]

Towers like Rohn 25 towers are very cheap. Many places will give them to you if you will take them down. Not cheap to buy new but since the cell phone revolution many business's that had 2 way radio systems have abandoned them, and want rid of the towers. You will need a gin pole (expensive to buy) but sometimes can be found at hamfests for cheap, and a climbing belt (again expensive if you have to buy new) and a 200 foot rope and a groundman with an actual working brain. (hard to find sometimes) I have taken down thousands of of feet of rohn 25. You usually get the tower sections and the guy wires. Of course you will have to dig and install your own base and guy anchor supports at the new installation. Of course you need skill and experience in putting up towers safely. But like anything else it is a matter of gaining experience. Best done under the supervision of someone else already experienced.

 

[truckdiagnostics]

For me anyway, it wasn't mounting it on the silo for the first time, (I cheated and rented a man lift) or figuring out how to put up a tower, it was climbing up there to fix it. We only climbed it once and that was to take it down and i didn't do it. Necessity is the mother of invention! I am happy to pay my mercury net bill. The thought of climbing that or asking someone to climb it did not give me the warm fuzzy feeling I desire. I could have figured it out, but you need to have the training, the liability on something like that, we did what we needed to do, to get by for the 2 years. I am perfectly happy to pay my bill!
Ask a young kid how they think there cell phone works and they think it works by magic or where there electricity comes from, or there sewage goes. They are clueless, it is all magic. Sorry about that, bit of a rant.....

 

[TnAndy]

Towers like Rohn 25 towers are very cheap. Many places will give them to you if you will take them down. Not cheap to buy new but since the cell phone revolution many business's that had 2 way radio systems have abandoned them, and want rid of the towers. You will need a gin pole (expensive to buy) but sometimes can be found at hamfests for cheap, and a climbing belt (again expensive if you have to buy new) and a 200 foot rope and a groundman with an actual working brain. (hard to find sometimes) I have taken down thousands of of feet of rohn 25. You usually get the tower sections and the guy wires. Of course you will have to dig and install your own base and guy anchor supports at the new installation. Of course you need skill and experience in putting up towers safely. But like anything else it is a matter of gaining experience. Best done under the supervision of someone else already experienced.

Yeah, this was my first/only tower building experience. The first 50' of the tower is a surplus airport tower, about 3' between legs, vertical part is 3" pipe....really heavy built tower. The next 50' is lightweight Rhon....can't remember if it's 25 or 35. Assembled the heavy tower part and titled it up. The 'rock box', I welded those 4" pipe so one pivoted inside a larger short pc, then bolted the base plate down to another pipe. Had to use the 'rock box' for a base since no way to get ready mix up there. Built the box at my shop, used a dozer to drag it to the top of the mountain, then filled with rock.

The Rohn tower, we used a homemade gin pole with a pulley on it to haul the 10' sections up one at a time and bolt together.

For guy wires, built a contraption like this, (no concrete, not much way to drill in the rock up there), then pushed tons of rock on top with dozer, connected guy wire.

I climbed it a few times, but when I finally leased to the current ISP, I left all of that to them and haven't been up it in years now.

 

[k0ua]

I have never seen it done that way, but I can see the problem with getting concrete up that mountain. I guess you were a Marine? You certainly adapted and overcame.

 

[k0ua]

Some may be wondering the what and why a gin pole is called a gin pole. Actually it is an engine pole. Hence "gin" pole. It is nothing more than a lightweight aluminum 12 foot pole with a specialized clamping fixture on the pole with pulley on the top of the pole. The clamping fixture is fastened on near the top of the last tower section and the pole is run up slightly higher than 10 foot above the last section. The rope runs down the center of the pole and over the pulley. The free end is run down to earth by the tower man and the ground man fastens on the next section above center of the section. The ground man pulls up the section and the tower man guides and sets the next section on the last section and wiggles it down . The holes are lined up and 6 bolts are put in and nutted by the tower man. The tower man lets the pole down thru the fixture, secures it and carries up the pole and fixture up to near the top of the just set section and attaches the fixture to the tower, runs up the pole while securing the rope, and then lets down the rope to the ground man. Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

[k0ua]

Some have commented that after using a "gin" pole all day and coming down off of the tower, a good slug of gin might go down good.

 

[Alan W.]

Dont know if ours is fast or slow now. Wife is working from home and using our Hughesnet. She has had some long video conference meetings, so there aint any left for me.
I just use my phone. With the Wilson booster I get 2 or 3 bars of LTE and that works.

 

[TnAndy]

I have never seen it done that way, but I can see the problem with getting concrete up that mountain. I guess you were a Marine? You certainly adapted and overcame.

Well, I've never seen it done that way either, but this was my first & only tower build, so what do I know ?

I'm ex-Army, not Marine.....but I've always used their "adapt and overcome" slogan in a whole lot of things around here.....very little conventional thinking went into this place......ahhaahaaaaa

 

[truckdiagnostics]

Well, I've never seen it done that way either, but this was my first & only tower build, so what do I know ?

I'm ex-Army, not Marine.....but I've always used their "adapt and overcome" slogan in a whole lot of things around here.....very little conventional thinking went into this place......ahhaahaaaaa

Ah, I thought i was the only one that did stuff like that, Problem is with every success we do have our failures. My kids are good at reminding me of those. Or you end up sticking a ton of time and money into something and it doesn't work or not like you wanted it to. Then you got a bunch of time and money into and your stuck. What is cool is it worked it is still there and it is still making you money.