I first met my wife in 2003. I grew up in the sub burbs. While she grew up in the country. I got DSL in 2000 while I lived in Peach Tree city. She never got anything besides dial up, and she did not get that until college. It wasn’t until late 2010’s that things like cellphone hot spots started to become available in the country. And that was if you were lucky. Those who had the ability to get a hotspot would be limited to low data caps. sub 100gigs and high prices. Don’t get me started about traditional satellite internet. Your were paying almost $200 for ~100gigs of data..
So fast forward to we got a chance to build a house on family land. However, I work from home 100% so there is a problem. In research I found that I could get an ATT wireless hotspot for $100 per 100gigs. This seemed the best option to be able to work.
So, while planning to build our house I started walking around 7 acres of land with a Verizon phone and att phone doing speed tests to find the best place to build the house. So plan was to use att and spend 200$ a month for 200 gigs of data.. It was kind of funny looking back but was a real worry. What if I build my house and could not work.
I found a third party LTE service who used phone sim cards on a third party modem. Kind of sketch looking back at it but it was the only option. They indicated it was unlimited but the owner said would be around 300-400 gigs.
So I paid the $300 for modem, then $100 install and $100 a month for a small amount of data.
So now you are getting where the real problem is with Rural internet. The issue is unreasonable data caps and high costs. This is what people don’t understand. It is not reasonable to have 100 or 200 gig data caps for 5+ times the cost of normal much better internet in.
My Stop Gap solution:
What was my solution to be able to keep data usage down? I found the answer was traffic shape or QOS..
I bought a ubiquity edge router x and throttled streaming bandwidth.. This allowed me to pick specific devices and services to limit..
What this would do is now the apps on apple tv and so on would down scale resolution and lower bandwidth used causing less data usage on the network.
Great problem solved. Well not really even though this works. The experience is lacking. Some apps are not optimized for this option and don’t want to downscale an example would be direct tv app, and starz. They want to use everything they can get.. I was able to get our usage down to if just normally internet and streaming could stay around 200 gigs a month. However this is not counting any sort of downloading.
At work to keep the usage down for logs we were able to have servers at work to do all log reviews.. Thats great.. Still was not as easy as it was to just download things to my system and review..
Then there came the next challenge. My children now are on the age they are wanting to play games. Games are huge 1 game would take 1/5 of my data for a month. So while their friends were playing games they could not. I would have to wait until the end of the month and check my data usage then IF I had enough left I would download the game.
If you notice a trend here. I am more worried about data caps than speed. While there are internet options that may be usable speed wise or even decent. At the time there was absolutely no internet with reasonable data caps.
The temporary saving grace that I came across was a promotional deal of 500gigs of data a month with att fixed wireless internet. The default max cap was 350gigs of data..
That is not a lot.. With normal unrestricted usage of a user like any normal populated area usage. They would burn though that amount of data in about a week or less.
The stress was over the constant worry about running out of data for work , for my livelihood. I needed to be able to have internet that would not be throttled when I hit data cap, or would give fees when I went over.
Note: At the time of all of this star link was not available in my area so I did not have that option.. That option is now $599 for unit and $110 for service.
So what is the solution. The solution is two fold.
- Standard Satellite, LTE, 5G ISP’s scale to more reasonable data caps or no data caps in rural areas.. These areas initial areas that have no proper broadband service. I think there needs to be a program or exception that those who do not have access to broadband with data caps equivalate to populated areas. They need to allow for higher data caps in those rural areas. Starlink has broken out from the pack in this area. However, they were not available in my area during my experience.
- The second solution. This is what is happening in my area.. More partnerships between local EMC and Power Companies to carry fiber channel internet over power poles. This will hopefully include more subsidies to make it cost effective to build out theses net ISP across America.
The final solution for me:
So in my area I was blessed with solution #2.
Over the past 2 years I have been watching crossbeam ISP forming and building out their network.. I have been driving my kids crazy pointing out new runs of fiber channel internet being run on power polls.
Come End of January 2023 and I got an email!! The new ISP crossbeam would be able to be installed shortly.. I was so excited the install was easy they worked with me well about where to run the underground line as I had underground power and where to hook it up..
If you look at the speed comparison it is drastic however the unlimited data cap is what sold me.
Now I no longer need to worry about running out of data for work. We can watch as many movies as we want in HD.. I can download games for kids to play and not have to worry about the games data usage.
The fact we no longer have to think will I have enough data for the month. Or fussing at kids for leaving the tv on streaming…
The freedom is the overall fresh breath of air.
I hope new rural ISP’s are formed across america with reasonable terms that line up with data usage and functionality of the normal world of populated areas continues.
This will allow for children and adults to have the same opportunities others do in cities that are reliant on internet.