How would you get reliable reasonably-fast internet if:
- 1. There is no DSL line to our house - it stops about a mile away, and we are on a 'dead-end' phone line and the only land-line customer past that point, so it won't come here any time soon.
2. There is no Cable service to our house - for the same reasons.
3. We tried Satellite, and after a year of only getting good signals when the sky was clear, we started getting disconnected mid-web-page even in good weather. They came out and told us we needed to move our dish, and marked the spot; so I trenched, laid conduit, put in a concrete pad, bought their $75 special pole, and they came out and relocated the dish and re-aimed it. We couldn't get on-line so they said it was our WiFi, even though we ALSO couldn't get on-line connecting directly to the modem with a cable. So $350 later we had a completely re-done WiFi - the best one the store had. Still couldn't stay on-line reliably even in perfect weather. They said it was the WiFi again, but we went back to Ethernet cables and still couldn't stay on-line. So they replaced the modem, and they replaced the transceiver on the dish, and we stay on-line for maybe five minutes before disconnecting, and speeds vary from 3Mbps half the time to 0.3 Mbps download the other half. They say they can get us an upgraded style transceiver that "should help" but we have to sign a one year contract - they refuse to do any sort of 'test-run' to see if it would work - and of course they say it will still fail whenever there is rain or snow or lots of clouds. Since their other service has sucked, I am not eager to sign up for a year, which means probably over a thousand dollars, just to find out that this one does too. If they really felt their product was good, they should be able to guarantee it by letting us out of the contract if the service is unreliable.
4. We found out that there is Ground-to-Ground service (wireless via towers) available in our county, with "up to 25 Mbps download speeds", but............no towers on our side of the hills, or whatever, so they told us they can't provide service to our house.
5. Our Cellphones get 3G always and 4G usually "at the road" but our house is 300 yards from the road, and at the house, they don't get 3G or 4G, and only get "one bar" signal most of the time. We can text at home, but can't use voice, for example. If we want to use voice on our cellphones, or text a photo, we have to walk down to the road. We are putting on a metal roof, and it hasn't seemed to worsen things (how can you get too much worse than one bar signal strength...?), but I thought perhaps that would actually help things if we had a rooftop antenna due to the ground-plane effect. However, standing on the metal roof I still only get one bar signal and sometimes none.
6. Due to no voice ability on cellphones, we keep our land-line, and used to haveDial-Up service, but the past few years, the land-line got so lousy whenever it rained (goes through a mile of 'swamp' to get to our house) it was unusable. (So much hum that when you pick up the phone you can't hear the dial-tone stop when you start pushing numbers to dial, and conversations are barely possible.) We are on a dead-end phone line stub, so each time it floods we have to turn in a service request, and in a few days they come out to 'fix' it, but by then it is dry again, so it works anyway - until the next flood. I don't think they're going to re-do a mile of land-line for one customer.
I thought about putting a cellular antenna down by the road (we have a building there it could go in), but two problems I can see:
- a) we would need a way for the signal to make it the 300 yards to our house reliably, and I'm not aware of any WiFi that strong, and
b) everyone seems to want a 2-year contract to set anything up, and we learned the hard way that even if you realize the service sucks after a few weeks, you're stuck.
- c) I know lots of things can be done 'theoretically' (a guy I used to know built his own pair of microwave transceivers with directional antennas, and put one on a neighbor's house three miles away who had DSL, so he could get high-speed internet at a location that didn't even have a land-line), but I don't know enough to do that sort of stuff myself, or even know who would know enough to do it and get it right (the cellphone places I talk to pretty much just know how to do the 'normal' stuff). I don't mind paying for whatever works, but don't know even what I should be asking for other than "Get Me Some Reliable Internet....!", so would be vulnerable to being ripped off, as well.
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