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For you guys that live in the sticks. Fast computer service for you.
Ricci.Wright
Member Posts: 5,127 ✭✭✭✭
I know next to nothing about this. I do know the service sucks at my house. The folks next door bought a satellite service from someone but they said it sucked too. According to this guy this one really works. He lives in Ruel Oregon I think.
Comments
Yeah, mine is awful.
Been with Hughes Net for the last 5 years from a satellite dish. Web surfing has been fine but I do not do any streaming. I have had to knock snow off the dish several times during our winter months and found a new use for my extended snow rake as the thing is mounted on top of my garage.
Brookwood, We use a supersoaker with warm water to wash off the snow.
We have Hughes.net also. It's better than Centurylink, but not by much. I think I'll do some more investigation into this.
Thanks for the info Ricci.
Joe
VERIZON 'JETPACK', WORKS OK
Mine is pretty fast when it is working.
Ive signed up to be a beta tester for Starlink multiple times at my farm. There is no other option except cellular or Hughsnet which is horrible. I will do cell hot spot before any current satellite offering.
I just looked at the website and found this out. Unfortunately, I'm too far south.
The public Starlink beta began on October 26, 2020, in select areas of the United States and Canada. Service is available north of the 45 degree parallel, which is where the Montana and Wyoming border lies. Starlink coverage areas include parts of Washington, Montana, North Dakota, Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia, Alberta, South Dakota, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Minnesota, Ontario, Quebec, Vermont, and New Hampshire.
I am too far south also.
Darn..........
The Federal agency I work for has been collecting information on rural access to high speed (or ANY speed in some locations) for other agencies like RDA and such. The results of that info have been trickling down and as a result local telephone/internet providers are getting grants and other funding to improve rural service.
My local phone cooperative has received enough funding to provide high speed internet to it's entire customer area if/when the final hookups can be made. We now have fiber optic lines suitable to carry whatever amount of data a customer is willing to pay for.
I used to work for a major phone company up until last year back in Iowa. We had money from the Connect America Fund that you pay a tax for on your bill. The company wasted the money in a terrible way. They had plant engineers who never set a foot in the field designing the "CAF" remotes. It was fiber to these remote DSLAM's then copper to the end user. Problem was we were working with cable out in the rural areas that was 50 to 70 years old, much of it bad and more or less abandoned as people gave up their land lines over the years. Also the cable maps were innacurate and I saw instances of the $60,000 CAF remotes being put in the wrong places and at times only being able to serve one customer. Of course we subcontracted all this out and so the subs couldnt care less as they were getting paid.
Sales people were selling customers 100meg+ service, and us techs would be the ones to have to tell the customers that due to errors we could only provide them 3meg. Those were fun discussions. And Sales would tell customers they were getting Fiber internet, and of course we had to explain the truth. The last mile of copper was typically run through mouse infested old rural cable through old pedestals that had been mowed over by farmers over the years, and finally to an old single pair drop from the 1950s going into a farmhouse on old quad phone wire that was so rotten the insulation turns to dust when you touch it.
But the company got their gov't funds and a warm fuzzy for providing service to rural customers.....
Starlink's beta test program is limited in area, but as they launch more satellites that will improve until they have total global coverage. They plan to launch 120 more satellites by the end of this month, with about the same number every month thereafter. It would not hurt to sign up now.
BTW, their antennas are self-aligning and heated to remove snow automatically.
Our local Co-op electric company said several years ago that they were going to send internet down the electric lines for us rural folks. I haven't heard anymore about that in a couple of years though. I just hope they get it done before we kick off.
Joe
Most the co-op phone companies in IA were actually running FTTH (Fiber To The Home), and giving their rural customers 1gig speeds. Funny how a small co-op could efficiently deploy a large fiber network with excellent service, while an entrenched old behemoth of a corporation spent millions for a poorly thought out network utilizing old worn out infrastructure.
Having said that, the incumbent local exchange carriers do have much more regulation and are burdened with their legacy network. But I surmise more had to do with corporate red tape and decisions being made in a board room a thousand miles away.
Any relation to the parade of satellites we saw this past summer? Up to 25 - 30 visible at any time tracking from wsw to
ene.
Those were likely Starlink birds soon after launch. After that, each satellite maneuvers to a higher altitude and they spread out until they are hundreds of miles apart. They're invisible at that point except under certain circumstances.
Thank you, Our son was visiting us and in our dark sky, they were quite a sight. He would have missed it altogether if
he had been home in Meridian.
Stay tuned, the next batch of 60 is now set to go up Monday. (From the Cape, 8:45 am EST) I can't predict when, where, or if they'll be visible at dawn or dusk for wherever you live. But if you're interested, check here after launch: https://www.n2yo.com/?s=20638
We saw a line of what looked like about 8 stars in a row this summer at the farm, Im sure it was their satellites.
Thank you for the heads up and link!
I live in the sticks and darn proud of it. Nothing like the "vast wasteland" of the out west.
Since schools are doing the "at home schooling" those that be are making good efforts at getting high speed internet to all the areas they can, and they should.
You require your folks to do something the least you can do is provide them with the tools.
By the way I have fiber optic to my door and the net is quicker than an electric cat.