Any suggestions for rural Internet?

[ncted]

Do they really think they're going to hold more sway with Comcast or Cox?

The gubmints still haven't figured out that if they don't enforce the agreements that they struck with companies as part of their support of assembling megacorporations, the desired results will never come. What you permit, you promote and you can't roll it back.

Well, technically, NY could try to force the dissolution of the merged company, as they agreed to the terms of the merger, and those terms have not been met. AFAIK, this may never have been tried in court, and I doubt NY wants to pay for a lengthy legal fight over telecommunications. They can instead revoke their license and force Spectrum to either spin off or sell the business in NY, or, more likely, threaten to do so to get Spectrum to do what they promised to do in the first place.

 

[Bruce]

I finally found the company who serves his area: Clarity Connect.

Yech-Our progressive technology gives you a reliable, secure, high speed connection of up to 6 mbps download and 1.5 mbps upload at an affordable cost. -$55 a month

 

[ncted]

Yech-Our progressive technology gives you a reliable, secure, high speed connection of up to 6 mbps download and 1.5 mbps upload at an affordable cost. -$55 a month

Yep, but no contract, and no caps...and the only people who are willing to even try to hook something up for him.

 

[harshness]

Well, technically, NY could try to force the dissolution of the merged company, as they agreed to the terms of the merger, and those terms have not been met.

The problem is that if they wait too long, the courts tend to find in favor of the company as nobody spoke up about it being a problem. This is why most pay TV providers still don't carry Comcast Sports Net Philly even though Comcast agreed to make it available at a reasonable price but have completely ignored that aspect of the merger agreement.

 

[harshness]

Yep, but no contract, and no caps...and the only people who are willing to even try to hook something up for him.

Given that steady HD streaming requires a sustained 5MBps connection, an "up to 6Mbps" connection may not suffice no matter how high the cap is.

 

[ncted]

Given that steady HD streaming requires a sustained 5MBps connection, an "up to 6Mbps" connection may not suffice no matter how high the cap is.

Yeah, he may be unenthusiastic about the quality at the end of the day. Only time will tell. At least he hasn't had to sign any contracts yet.

 

[Radioguy41]

Yech-Our progressive technology gives you a reliable, secure, high speed connection of up to 6 mbps download and 1.5 mbps upload at an affordable cost. -$55 a month

Essentially DSL speeds, just a wee bit better (up to). I have streamed HD (720) on DSL and it can work. 4K is out of the question. Occassionally there is buffering but my experience indicates buffering issues are more related to the source than the line speed. Certain sources will buffer regularly while other sources almost never do. The only way to know is to try it out.

 

[ncted]

I used to have ADSL2 7Mb/768k from Verizon, and I streamed HD Netflix just fine, but I couldn't do much else of significance, or it would step down in quality. I'll be curious to see exactly what kind of speeds he ends up with. If this is just wholesale, throttled LTE from AT&T or Verizon's network, they'll probably be fine. If not, who knows?

edit: looks to be non-LTE. They mention mesh networking, but no idea what actual tech they are using.
edit2: Appears to be WiMax802.16e.

 

[harshness]

While probably fine for browsing, I'd bet that he'd be sharing a band with an arbitrary number of other users making the performance unpredictable (other than probably being worst in the evenings).

 

[ncted]

While probably fine for browsing, I'd bet that he'd be sharing a band with an arbitrary number of other users making the performance unpredictable (other than probably being worst in the evenings).

Yeah, I'll be curious to see. WiMax is capable of 100+ Mbps across multiple devices in the real world. I bet they throttle them to 6Mbps. When you throw in mesh, which apparently this company does according to FCC filings, that should improve throughput, but not sure by how much. Should be interesting.

 

[harshness]

I bet they throttle them to 6Mbps.

That's the magic of "up to" figures. It may be more (don't count on it) and it may be a lot less at times.

Live performance has little to do with theoretical possibility other than being capped by it.

 

[david_jr]

We are going through a similar situation here in rural Western Massachusetts as Rural NYS only our state is not kicking in as much dough, but we are much smaller than NY. It is called the MBI project here. The idea was for the State to build a middle mile fiber network from civilization through western Massachusetts and back to civilization again. They hooked up all the fire stations, police stations, libraries, schools and town halls and wait for a “last mile” company to come in and build out the last mile and be the ISP. Problem was after all that no last mile companies were interested. State kicked in a lot more money dividing it up by Towns and most towns got a suitor. We ended up with Spectrum and after almost 2 years we don’t even have an agreement in place. We’ll see how it goes. Currently I have Consolidated Communications copper DSL at 15 MB which comes to me from NYS. Right across the border from me Consolidated is running miles of fiber paid for by the taxpayers. I talked to one of the techs about whether the fiber would be run over here too as we are the end of their network orphans. He said it would end at the state line. One of the realities of living in a rural area is limited broadband and even with extravagant government spending on it improvements and choices are limited.

 

[ncted]

Talked to my brother last night. Apparently, the techs won't install unless they can get excellent signal. They have been burned by complaints to the NY PSC, and they have lost a lot of customers to wired broadband competition in the past couple of years, so they have plenty of backhaul capacity at the moment. His location should have direct LOS to their tower which is about 2 miles away, so they are optimistic. They can't guarantee anything because it is wireless, but they claim to routinely exceed the 6Mb advertised speed. I hope it works out for him as the other options are expensive, slower, legal grey areas, or all of the above.

 

[navychop]

Keep us posted.


Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys

 

[ncted]

Well, yesterday was install day, and it apparently went well. Unfortunately, his Vizio TV has some odd thing where he has to use an app on his phone to configure it, and the app and his TV aren't talking, so he can't get the TV on the new WiFi network. The TV needs to be on the network to use the built-in Chromecast or something similar. This seems like a monumentally stupid design to me (not too dissimilar to how I feel about Chromecast itself). I've sent him some guides to reset his TV to factory defaults. If he can't figure it out, I may send him a spare Roku I have.

He is able to watch video on his phone and laptop just fine so far.

 

[mdram]

is that one of the vizios that has to use the phone/tablet?
its basically a monitor that you can cast to iirc

 

[Jagosaurus]

For what it's worth, I set my parents up with a company that does WISP (wireless internet service provider). Essentially, they have a small dish on their house pointed at a local cell tower. This goes inside their home and connects to the carrier gateway router, we then have a WAP hooked up for wireless/wifi. Think of it as 4G hotspot on steroids.

I have their Roku hardwired into the carrier gateway and they run Sling TV fine. There are a few resolution drops at times, but it is fairly solid. I'd give it a 95% rating. Rain can impact it.

Obviously this can vary based on WISP service and mbps. My parents get 40 mbps down or so. They have no bandwidth cap.

 

[comfortably_numb]

For what it's worth, I set my parents up with a company that does WISP (wireless internet service provider). Essentially, they have a small dish on their house pointed at a local cell tower. This goes inside their home and connects to the carrier gateway router, we then have a WAP hooked up for wireless/wifi. Think of it as 4G hotspot on steroids.

I have their Roku hardwired into the carrier gateway and they run Sling TV fine. There are a few resolution drops at times, but it is fairly solid. I'd give it a 95% rating. Rain can impact it.

Obviously this can vary based on WISP service and mbps. My parents get 40 mbps down or so. They have no bandwidth cap.

Mind if I ask what they pay per month for that?

 

[Jagosaurus]

Mind if I ask what they pay per month for that?

Their bill runs around $60 to $65 with taxes. I thought it was a very solid price.

It is central Texas and there aren't a lot of trees between them and tower. I do see some houses in the area with 30 foot tall towers for that tiny satellite to get over treetops. That WISP company (2 to 3 guys) is making a killing signing up whole rural neighborhoods, even at that rate.

@OP, sooo.... they're just calling WISP fixed wireless, correct? Same technology?

Following thread as my in-laws also have a rural lake house with no WISP around. They're looking into options with Hughes & Dish. They have Direct satellite for TV.

I also have 2 of those Vizio smart TVs... um, monitors (no TV tuner). They were a pain to set up, but have worked fine since. They have a proximity feature. I had to use this. I assume it was using my phone bluetooth or DLNA to communicate between devices versus through the LAN. I did not like their ecosystem or casting at all. I hooked up a 4K Roku and never looked back.

 

[ncted]

is that one of the vizios that has to use the phone/tablet?
its basically a monitor that you can cast to iirc

That sounds like what he has.