Not Bad Speed for the Boondocks

[RJM62]

My little village of < 600 residents has its own local phone company, which also provides cable TV and Internet (and I believe fiber soon).

My little phone company provides very dependable service. Outages are few and very quickly repaired. They also have real "tech guys" who are honest-to-goodness Americans who hang out at an office within walking distance, and real people who answer the phone when you call. And if you want to make a payment in person or by phone, they ask for your name, not your account number. It's kind of surreal for someone like me who was raised in The City.

Anyway, I've had an old D-Link wireless router (old as in draft N -- so it owes me nothing) uttering gasps of impending death lately, so I replaced it today. After I was done configuring the new router, I did an Internet speed test.

My tested speed was 23.71 Mb/s down and 1.61 Mb/s up -- and that was on a Windows machine (Linux usually tests a bit faster), with some other machines (including the TurtleCam video server) on the LAN using up some bandwidth.

My connection is a "business-class" cable connection that costs me, I believe, $75.00/month. It has a 750 G/month cap, but I've never come close to hitting it; and all they do if you hit it for a few consecutive months is call you up and let you know you need to buy more bandwidth. They don't throttle you or even charge for the overage unless you're consistently over your limit and refuse to upgrade.

The good customer service I've come to expect from rural businesses. But it's amusing to me that the fastest copper Internet service I've ever had is in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere.

-Rich

 

[EppyGA]

Gotta love cable modems. Maybe someday they'll move up in the world and do more channel bonding.

 

[denverpilot]

That's what DOCSIS 3 and the back end upgrades were all about at the Cable companies.

Comcast offers 100Mb Down/10 Mb up here if'n ya have the cash.

 

[Marauder]

I've got to suffer too

 

[mbundy]

My brother-in-law in Sweden has 100 up/down, 2 fixed IP addresses. He pays the equivalent of $24/month.

 

[RJM62]

My brother-in-law in Sweden has 100 up/down, 2 fixed IP addresses. He pays the equivalent of $24/month.

Please ask him if he gets telephone tech support from a guy in Bangalore named Sven.

-Rich

 

[rpadula]

That's what DOCSIS 3 and the back end upgrades were all about at the Cable companies.

Comcast offers 100Mb Down/10 Mb up here if'n ya have the cash.

16 and 24 bonded down streams coming soon to a cable modem near you.

You may, however, faint at the price the evil cable company wants to charge for that!

 

[EppyGA]

16 and 24 bonded down streams coming soon to a cable modem near you.

You may, however, faint at the price the evil cable company wants to charge for that!

Gotta pay for all of those CMTS cards somehow!

 

[RJM62]

Stationary 4G is starting to make inroads into rural communities. This could add a bit of competition and lower prices in places like here, where it's pretty rare for there to be more than one wired broadband provider in town. In areas with Sprint 4G coverage, it's becoming a fairly popular choice both through Sprint and through Clearwire and other MVNOs using Sprint's service.

I've been kind of expecting this to happen, actually. I used to do stationary EVDO installations back in the day, but because of the high data cost and relatively low throughput back then, they were mainly used for remote commercial / industrial facilities that needed data links for whatever reason, but had relatively low bandwidth requirements.

Nonetheless, with amplifiers and yagi antennas, we could sometimes snag towers as far as 15 or 20 miles away, and provide at least DSL-quality connections. The up-front costs for the equipment (other than the tower or mast, if one was needed) were in the $200.00 to $800.00 range -- which even made it salable to wealthy folks on Long Island's North Shore, as well as to commercial users.

But again, the data costs and caps made it unattractive except when no other connectivity was available. 4G removes a lot of those limitations.

Cell providers are now starting to realize that there's enough of a market for stationary wireless internet and phone services in rural areas that it makes planting new 4G-equipped towers and upgrading existing ones worthwhile. I know of three new antenna projects and two upgrades within a 20-mile radius of me. VZW is planting two new towers and upgrading one, T-Mo is upgrading an existing tower, and AT&T is planting a new tower and upgrading an existing one.

I suspect that Wal-Mart may have something to do with VZW's sudden interest in 4G out here in the boondocks. Through Straight Talk, Wal-Mart is selling residential, stationary wireless phone service, over VZW's towers, at $15.00/month for unlimited nationwide voice service, with optional international service for slightly more. Apparently it's selling like hotcakes because the equipment is a sweet seller at all the local Wal-Mart stores.

But I don't think there's a huge profit potential in selling unlimited voice service at that price, especially considering that three companies are involved. So I suspect that they've got their eyes on providing stationary 4G internet at some not-so-distant future point.

Also, VZW has always been Wal-Mart / Straight Talk's least-favorite provider because they're least-friendly to MVNOs. So Wal-Mart / Straight Talk pushes new customers to phones on Sprint or AT&T, in that order of preference, unless VZW is the only game in the customer's town. If you want to buy a Straight Talk phone online, when you enter your ZIP code, they won't even show you VZW phones if there's a decent Sprint or ATT signal in that ZIP code.

But the stationary home phone service uses VZW exclusively. That makes me wonder why. Presumably it's the extensiveness of Verizon's network, but again, at $15.00/month, how much upside potential can there be in voice-only service? That's exactly one-third of what they charge for their unlimited mobile service, so in a way they're cannibalizing their own market.

I personally use Straight Talk's mobile service (over VZW towers) because I get unlimited everything for about one-third of what Verizon would charge me for postpaid, and about one-half of what they would change me for prepaid (and not unlimited, at that). There's absolutely no difference in the service quality as far as I can tell. My email-to-text address is even a VZW one. So VZW is cutting their own throat, it would seem, by undercutting their own service.

But it makes perfect sense if Wal-Mart / Straight Talk / Verizon have plans to break into the stationary 4G market to compete with Sprint / Clear / Other Sprint MVNOs, with Straight Talk building the user equipment and that end of things, Wal-Mart doing the marketing and distribution, and VZW providing the towers and bandwidth -- especially because VZW also expands their own network capacity in the process.

This is just speculation, of course. But it does make sense in view of the sudden enthusiasm for building and upgrading towers in the boonies. There wouldn't be enough upside potential if the only thing they had in mind were mobile phone service, or even stationary wireless phone service. But if they add on stationary 4G Internet a'la Clear's model, then there's the possibility of making some real money.

-Rich

 

[BillTIZ]

Through my cable access to my wrt54g wifi to the iPad, 20Mbps each way, ping was 95