You don't have a high speed Internet connection??

[hawkeye08]

Just switched from one wireless internet provider to another. $60 for 512Kbs (up to 2Mbs burst) to $55 for 10Mbs/4Mbs (down/up). Life is so much better. I am more productive for work and I can enjoy a Netflix movie when I want. The previous provider just did not keep up with the times. We were with them for over 10 years (only other choice was satellite which did not work for me). New provider is using WIFI (Ubiquiti radio with dish) while previous provider used Motorola Canopy radios and access points. The previous provider also had severe problems with weather icing up access point on top of mountain (11.3 miles line of sight from us), meaning we had frequent outages when weather was right around 32 degrees (moisture in air would cause ice on access points which would cause loss of signal).

 

[Sysop]

Hughesnet is a joke. I ended up going with a solution that's not much better, but is less expensive. I have two antenna up on my chimneys, connected to a USB cellular modem, plugged into a Cradlepoint router. I get 30GB a month with rollover of unused data for the same price as Hughesnet.

 

[California]

I've about had it with ATT's Uverse. (basically, dual DSL over two lines).

Speed is decent when it works, 23 mbps. But it goes down several times a day. A minute ago it came back up with a message 'you need to restart your browser to resume connection', this has to mean something was down and restored in the central office.

Since my phone runs through this, (VOIP), we had two phone disconnects yesterday in the middle of calls where you call back and get a different customer rep who can't see the work of the person you were talking to earlier. Intermittent VOIP is a new source of frustration we never had before signing Uverse.

Techs have been out here several times, inside tech swears everything's perfect so it must be the cabling to downtown. Outside tech says his side is perfect, I must have a bad (ATT) modem.

Likewise out at the ranch (11 mbps Uverse). Same intermittent fails, to a degree that youtube is unwatchable. Same unsuccessful repair attempts. Same attitude from the outside techs both locations, 'I'm about to retire so there's no reason to learn anything beyond basic phone connectivity.' (The inside techs seem bright and well-trained but ineffective.) In addition the modem internal log there shows continual failure to reach ATT's DNS server while the modem doesn't allow use of anything but that remote DNS service.


ATT has declared they will be entirely out of the copper wire service business in a couple of years. The service I'm getting now seems calculated to drive away their last copper-connected customers.

 

[dickfoster]

I've about had it with ATT's Uverse. (basically, dual DSL over two lines).

Speed is decent when it works, 23 mbps. But it goes down several times a day. A minute ago it came back up with a message 'you need to restart your browser to resume connection', this has to mean something was down and restored in the central office.

Since my phone runs through this, (VOIP), we had two phone disconnects yesterday in the middle of calls where you call back and get a different customer rep who can't see the work of the person you were talking to earlier. Intermittent VOIP is a new source of frustration we never had before signing Uverse.

Techs have been out here several times, inside tech swears everything's perfect so it must be the cabling to downtown. Outside tech says his side is perfect, I must have a bad (ATT) modem.

Likewise out at the ranch (11 mbps Uverse). Same intermittent fails, to a degree that youtube is unwatchable. Same unsuccessful repair attempts. Same attitude from the outside techs both locations, 'I'm about to retire so there's no reason to learn anything beyond basic phone connectivity.' (The inside techs seem bright and well-trained but ineffective.) In addition the modem internal log there shows continual failure to reach ATT's DNS server while the modem doesn't allow use of anything but that remote DNS service.


ATT has declared they will be entirely out of the copper wire service business in a couple of years. The service I'm getting now seems calculated to drive away their last copper-connected customers.

I've never been suckered into VOIP. If they can't do the Internet then why should I trust them with the phone when you could be trying to call an ambulance. Nope, not for me. You get what you pay for and only then if you're lucky.

 

[ultrarunner]

I have DSL for the Hospital Admin Department... believe it or not it was only a $15 add on back in 2000

Today it is $90 a month and in over 15 years it has been flawless... the Central office is on the corner.

So a couple of weeks ago the DSL goes out... call AT&T and they say a tech has to come out... and within 2 hours he was here... he runs a series of tests and determines the problem in in the Central Office...

AT&T terminated our Legacy service... spent the better part of the day to get something going... we had Static IP and now are Dynamic... say we can't go back... we have to go forward with Fiber...

It was not broken until they broke it.

So the few that need remote access no longer have it...

Not a week goes be without a call from AT&T promising the sun and the moon if I switch... my reply is how much will I save... of course I won't save anything and at their best price it is still over $200.

Remember when things were simple???

 

[teejk]

Upgraded to Hughes Gen4 a year or more ago. In the meantime my MIL bought a house 400' east of us that had something the telephone company called "extended DSL" service. My wife swears it as fast if not faster than Hughes...and no data caps...I know the neighbors used to steal bandwidth from us and I employed stronger security on the router. They now have service from the telco...the connection is only a few 100' feet away

 

[PILOON]

Bell around here only offers Modem service but a private contractor came in and gives us unlimited for $49/m.
Generally excellent other than some folks watch only HD TV that eats up a lot of space. Sat and Sun being the worst.
For the first time in 4 years we were down for 4 days as his site was hacked and he needed to re boot some 300 clients.

The maddening thing is that Bell is fiber optic up to about 1/2 mile from us (75 residents) but they seem to want a gov't subsidy to provide us with Hi Speed.

 

[dmccarty]

In our never ending struggle for sorta fast Internet service, we just had a second DSL line installed. We are keeping the land line phone but we can only call out to 911. Other people can call be we cannot call out which is just fine by us. Supposedly this will save us money and the second DSL line will only add $10-15 a month to the bill. I will believe it when I see the bill.

Right now the kids use one 1.5 mbps DSL line and we use the other. This is working out pretty well. We can bind the two lines into one router but we will just use what we have for now.

Reliability is a joke. Constant outages and we have to reset modems and routers on a frequent basis.

A phone Coop from another county is somehow able to bring in fiber. Century Link cannot/will not improve our lines at all much less bring in fiber. If the phone Coop ever makes it to us we will drop Century Link so fast their heads will spin. I don't fault the Century Link employees, they really do try their best but the company just will not improve the network for us or many others in the county. We have dealt with dozens of Century Link employees over the years and with one exception, they have been really nice and helpful. But the company just will not update the network....

During a recent outage that lasted a few days including the weekend, :confused3::shocked: I had to use my cell phone for Internet access. Man is 4G fast compared to our land line. :shocked: Just wish I can afford to run 4G 24x7.

Later,
Dan

 

[kcflhrc]

The infrastructure can and will get better with CAF 2, Connect America Fund phase 2. CenturyLink and AT&T accepted the money for rural areas. I work for one of those and I'm already seeing the build out happening. Just be patient and don't blame the companies for where you live. I'm rural too and I pay almost $90 a month for 3mb. My son lives in town and pays less than that for Google Fiber Gigabit Service. We all can surely move back to the city if it's that important. For me, I get enough technology being a tech at work. I don't need the internet when I get home for the most part. And what I do I can look up on the data plan on my phone that runs speeds in excess of 50mbs. And one other tid bit, just because it's fiber doesn't mean you can get faster speeds. I put in fiber to homes all day long and we only offer 10mb because of the backbone not being upgraded.
We actually can offer higher speeds over copper right now.

 

[MossRoad]

FINALLY, got our fiber connection. 15 minutes later I was on the phone with HughesNet to discontinue their service. Night/day difference:

View attachment 469689

Satellite is a good option if there are no other choices...

Nice! :laughing:

 

[orezok]

ATT has declared they will be entirely out of the copper wire service business in a couple of years. The service I'm getting now seems calculated to drive away their last copper-connected customers.

They may want to rethink that with the new g.fast system that delivers 750 mB/sec over standard copper phone lines.

Huge breakthrough in blazing fast internet speeds - May. 16, 216

 

[k0ua]

They may want to rethink that with the new g.fast system that delivers 750 mB/sec over standard copper phone lines.

Huge breakthrough in blazing fast internet speeds - May. 16, 216

I would not hold my breath on that one.. "the boxes on the street cost about $70,000".. Um hum... what are they? Fiber fed? A box for each house?

Point is no actual information was given in this article.. I smell smoke and mirrors. Or a VERY short 750meg over copper system.. In other words "from the $70,000 box on the street" What ever the heck that is to get to your house over an existing drop. All well and fine, how does the backbone work? I smell Bovine Excrement..

 

[k0ua]

Here you go.. speed vs. distance for Gfast. Looks like that 750 or 1 gig speed is about 100 meters and 150Meg could go about 250 meters.
This is a copper to the curb distribution system not Central office to your home.. You will still need fiber to feed the box out at the curb or subdivision common point. This is where the big money will come in.

100 m, FTTB 500-1000 Mbit/s
100 m 500 Mbit/s
200 m 200 Mbit/s
250 m 150 Mbit/s

 

[orezok]

Remember when you got your first internet connection. It was probably 1200 baud. Things change over time and now we are in the gigabyte world. This is the first iteration of this technology and it is not likely to stay where it is today.

The first IBM personal computers cost $5 to $10,000 in todays dollars, had a whopping 48 mb of memory and a floppy disc.

G.fast will most likely improve and drop substantially in cost.

 

[RobS]

Here you go.. speed vs. distance for Gfast. Looks like that 750 or 1 gig speed is about 100 meters and 150Meg could go about 250 meters.
This is a copper to the curb distribution system not Central office to your home.. You will still need fiber to feed the box out at the curb or subdivision common point. This is where the big money will come in.

100 m, FTTB 500-1000 Mbit/s
100 m 500 Mbit/s
200 m 200 Mbit/s
250 m 150 Mbit/s

Our new system is fiber all the way to each house. There is a small box on the outside of the house that converts to cat5 copper.

 

[kcflhrc]

Our new system is fiber all the way to each house. There is a small box on the outside of the house that converts to cat5 copper.

This is the technology I install. Fiber to the outside of the house and then a Calix unit to convert from fiber to copper. It works great.

 

[dickfoster]

Remember when you got your first internet connection. It was probably 1200 baud. Things change over time and now we are in the gigabyte world. This is the first iteration of this technology and it is not likely to stay where it is today.

The first IBM personal computers cost $5 to $10,000 in todays dollars, had a whopping 48 mb of memory and a floppy disc.

G.fast will most likely improve and drop substantially in cost.

Heck, I remember using 300 baud acoustic modems, 1200 baud was uber fast by comparison then they doubled it to a whopping 2400, wow. I don't remember the first PCs having anywhere near 48 Mbytes of memory, it was more like 1 Meg tops and you needed a memory manager to handle that. Most PCs had 256KB of RAM. The DOS upper limit to addressing hard drive space topped out at somewhere around 20 MB. My first personal PC had a 30MB hard drive that needed to be partitioned into a 20 and a 10 so DOS could deal with it. I remember wondering what we could ever do to fill up the first 1 Gig hard drives, now I can just barely scrape by with 10Gig a month. LOL

 

[orezok]

Heck, I remember using 300 baud acoustic modems, 1200 baud was uber fast by comparison then they doubled it to a whopping 2400, wow. I don't remember the first PCs having anywhere near 48 Mbytes of memory, it was more like 1 Meg tops and you needed a memory manager to handle that. Most PCs had 256KB of RAM. The DOS upper limit to addressing hard drive space topped out at somewhere around 20 MB. My first personal PC had a 30MB hard drive that needed to be partitioned into a 20 and a 10 so DOS could deal with it. I remember wondering what we could ever do to fill up the first 1 Gig hard drives, now I can just barely scrape by with 10Gig a month. LOL

Yeah, you're right. I confused it with my first Apple II which only has 48kB of memory and a single 143k floppy.

 

[rekees4300]

Remember when you got your first internet connection. It was probably 1200 baud. Things change over time and now we are in the gigabyte world. This is the first iteration of this technology and it is not likely to stay where it is today.

The next big thing in a few years will be 5G ... currently in the test phase ... rumored as being 100X the speed of 4G !

 

[buickanddeere]

2-1/4 miles from the central office. Have medium speed high speed at that distance. Pings at 5meg but sustained download runs 700K to a Meg depending.