Hi all!
I live in a decently rural area. Up until last year, we had a 1.5mbps connection through the phone company. With me and two kids in school, and home because of COVID, 1.5mbps wasn’t cutting it. Satellite service (prior to Starlink) sucked, and that was about the only other option besides what I am using now, a cellular wifi hotspot.
Luckily, I have a ham radio tower, and could put an external antenna up, so we can get 2-3 bars on the little box, which nets us ~ 25mbps-30mbps download speeds. Coming from 1.5mbps, it is heaven! Expensive, though: we pay $179/month for unlimited data.
We had a representative of a local telco stop in and ask if we were interested in fiber, as they are gauging interest in pushing it out this far. They must have some kind of subsidy to do the work, as there aren’t many other homes around here, and all we’d pay was a one-time $40 connection fee. The price sheet looks amazing, too. We’d pay $75/month for 100mbps speeds, and the speeds go way up from there.
So, anyway, “the price of living in the country” that I tell my city friends might be a thing of the past. Now the price is just slow law enforcement , fire and EMS response, UPS throwing packages in the ditch because they don’t like our driveway, and deer/livestock in the road!
Wouldn’t trade it for anything.
I live in a decently rural area. Up until last year, we had a 1.5mbps connection through the phone company. With me and two kids in school, and home because of COVID, 1.5mbps wasn’t cutting it. Satellite service (prior to Starlink) sucked, and that was about the only other option besides what I am using now, a cellular wifi hotspot.
Luckily, I have a ham radio tower, and could put an external antenna up, so we can get 2-3 bars on the little box, which nets us ~ 25mbps-30mbps download speeds. Coming from 1.5mbps, it is heaven! Expensive, though: we pay $179/month for unlimited data.
We had a representative of a local telco stop in and ask if we were interested in fiber, as they are gauging interest in pushing it out this far. They must have some kind of subsidy to do the work, as there aren’t many other homes around here, and all we’d pay was a one-time $40 connection fee. The price sheet looks amazing, too. We’d pay $75/month for 100mbps speeds, and the speeds go way up from there.
So, anyway, “the price of living in the country” that I tell my city friends might be a thing of the past. Now the price is just slow law enforcement , fire and EMS response, UPS throwing packages in the ditch because they don’t like our driveway, and deer/livestock in the road!
Wouldn’t trade it for anything.
