Internet woes

Old97

Old97

Pre-takeoff checklist
Joined
Jan 6, 2014
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Bayou City
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Old97
I live near Houston. We have comcast Xfinity cable and internet. It just sucks. My wife and i both need internet service for work, and it our service is interrupted a couple times a week on average. Comcast is not able or not willing to fix this. They are apparently the only ISP in this area.

Is there any other option? Verizon wireless? Ideally id like enough gigs to be able to watch Netflix and drop cable altogether. Im not a techie so i really have no idea what is possible. Any suggestions?
 
When you say “interrupted” can you give more details?

I watch Netflix on a 10Mb/s microwave delivered pipe to my roof via a local fixed wireless provider with a 300 G/month cap. Any cable System should easily be able to beat it. And we will ever see cable out here, ever.

Are you being affected by rebuild going on due to the hurricane still? I suspect some of the outages are Comcast rebuilding but those shouldn’t be lengthy. Routing errors when turning whole neighborhoods back up, etc.

Something from the wireless cellular industry is definitely going to be more expensive, and have very low bandwidth caps. Might work better than what you’ve got, but it won’t be cheaper and will come with surprise bills when you go over your caps.

Is Comcast regulated by a utilities commission there, since they were apparently given exclusive access to the municipality if they’re the only provider in the area? That’s pretty common and was one of the stupidest mistakes of the late 80s by government, but usually they at least have a place to complain to when the “utility” can’t perform.

I’d just stay on Comcast’s butt. If they say it’s your indoor setup, plug a machine directly into their modem with Ethernet and call them whenever that is dead. They can’t argue that one is internal wiring or WiFi / wireless problems. That’s the best advice for a non-techie.
 
I live in an internet free area. I saw a satellite internet service, not Hughes, and called them. Turns out they do not serve rural areas, only areas that have a lot of people with a lot of internet options.
 
I had a similar problem with TWC at my rural NC vacation home. I found that in my area, a Verizon 4g LTE wireless modem gets about 20 megabits, which is plenty for me. Only problem was the high cost, so I ended up with a compromise - I kept my both the Verizon and TWC service, but behind a router with automatic failover (Asus makes a good one).

When the TWC connection fails, my router automatically switches to the cellular line (and back when TWC comes online again). We went from an outage per week to zero outages in two years, and the cost for the 4g LTE line has been minimal.
 
Zeldman said:
I live in an internet free area. I saw a satellite internet service, not Hughes, and called them. Turns out they do not serve rural areas, only areas that have a lot of people with a lot of internet options.
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WildBlue?
 
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