On 4/25/25 3:16 PM, William Morder via tde-users wrote:
I have a pretty fast connection (sometimes 2 mbps or more), but it comes with
Well, if you consider 2 Mbps fast then I guess I should STFU. I have a "gleeful" 11 Mbps down. ISP is fixed wireless. Birds fart or, soon in the next few weeks, leaves grow on the trees, and the speed here will get erratic.
There are spools and spools of fiber cable down at the edge of town some miles away, a project that started in this general area two years ago. Some folks have been fortunate to get connected and now have 1 Gbps symmetrical. I can only hope my literal neck of the woods is on their install list this summer or next.
Rumor control is Trump and Musk are trying to quash all rural fiber projects so Mush can coerce rural users to install the expensive Starlink, which many people seem to fail to realize is Yet Another Fixed Wireless plan. Actually somewhat worse, the satellites are moving. I don't know if the rumor is reliable but these days anything like that is almost believable.
Not to mention that the dish requires something like a 150 degree open perimeter to function correctly, which in my case means a lot of trees have to be cut. I've been cutting (mostly dead) trees as a sacrifice to the firewood burning gods for many years, but the amount of work involved to create that perimeter is not worth the cost of the expensive Starlink. Not to mention that managing the Starlink equipment requires a smart phone and -- drum roll -- an app. Seems some off-the-shelf router vendors are going down this road too -- no configuration without a data mining and tracking app. Thankfully there are router solutions like OpenWRT.
There are worse things than having a slow connection; for example, having no control over your connection.
Not that bad here, but not by much. With fixed wireless ISP, when the grid power in this area goes bye-bye -- happened only a couple of weeks ago for four hours, the tower I am connected to has a UPS that lasts exactly one hour. Then poof no internet. Being in a cell phone dead zone that means no VOIP either. I have to travel about a mile in either direction to have any reliable hope of using my little flip phone.
But I live in the woods for a reason -- much of the time I get along fine without the mad mass of humanity. And being an only child for almost five years I long ago learned to entertain myself without help.
Thing is, the ISP owner thinks a couple of megabits per second is more than enough for anybody (sound familiar 640 KB of RAM?) and does not want to invest in faster equipment. Of course, as owner he allots max speeds to his house. I know this because I once worked there.