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Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | I have been less than impressed with my local ISP. The price keeps going up but the service hasn't followed. Since I'm out in the land of "Cows and Rocks" as our Governor Walz puts it, I don't have many choices.
Anyway ,I got my monthly bill for my Internet service. It suggested I click on a link to pay for my monthly bill via the Internet. The site was down, so I called a listed telephone number. The lady suggested I pay my bill by mailing a check through the U.S. Mail. I thought it rather ironic that I needed to pay my Internet bill through the U.S. mail because the service is unreliable.
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Southeast South Dakota | pretty ironic I agree
I use my cellular phone internet from Cricket as my home internet - not super duper fast - but we can stream a show - and its cheap and reliable.
If my internet was gone - I would be lost.
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Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | I get Ads from Verizon for home internet. I looked into it but it is not offered in my area. |
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Southeast South Dakota | very happy with cricket
could also see if T mobile is in your area
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southern MN | Aren’t there data limits on the cell internet that makes it difficult or expensive to stream tv and the like?
Maybe things have changed in the past decade and I need to get out more, but was a real stumbling block in the past.
Paul |
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Fairfield County, Ohio, USA | Paul, depending where you are, things might have changed significantly in the last 5+ years.
For many years, I was stuck with a 1.5 Mbps DSL line from my local phone company (Frontier) that only ever did about half that speed. It was in no way usable for streaming video, other than sometimes YouTube on the lowest setting. But then AT&T released a "Wireless Home Phone & Internet" plan (that they have since discontinued) which got pretty popular in some areas, and it improved things quite a bit. It used 3G, and later 4G, to provide wifi internet to a home (or barn, or whatever). They had data caps that were, if I recall correctly, 250GB and 500GB. That's large enough that in my opinion most farm families wouldn't need to worry about them. My parents are still on that 250GB plan; they watch AgDay and US Farm Report via streaming every day, the grandkids like to watch YouTube when they're there, and they never come close to the limit.
T-Mobile released a 5G home internet solution in my area a few years ago, and technically it works the same as AT&T's did -- they send you a cell modem that converts 4G and 5G signals to wifi -- but they have a plan that is "unlimited", and it's less expensive than AT&T or Frontier ever were, in my area. I signed up for the T-Mobile 5G home internet right after it became available in my area, and after a couple of months of using it to make sure it worked well, I canceled my AT&T wireless home internet service. Now the T-Mobile service is not perfect -- it can get pretty slow particularly on Friday and Saturday night, I assume because a bunch of people in the area with the same service are streaming video or some such. And their solution has made it much more difficult to host servers at your home, but that won't apply to nearly all farm families, I suspect. But aside from that, I don't have any complaints. Funny thing is, I get a decent 5G T-Mobile signal using that home internet device, but I have tried T-Mobile cellular service for my cell phone, and it is downright awful in my area.
Verizon also has a cellular home internet solution, but it isn't available in my area, so I have no experience with it. They are my cell provider for my cell phone and tablet, though, as their service is *maybe* the best in my area -- they and AT&T seem to keep going back and forth on which works the best around here. |
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Southeast South Dakota | I have another cell phone - stays tethered to my desktop - no datd limits because I use a little program call PDAnet which came with my android phones.
If I want wifi to other devices in my house I use connectify and share my PC 's connection
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Southeast South Dakota | I have another cell phone - stays tethered to my desktop - no datd limits because I use a little program call PDAnet which came with my android phones.
If I want wifi to other devices in my house I use connectify and share my PC 's connection
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southern MN | I am less than a mile from a small village that is just big enough the phone co put in some high speed copper wire equipment years ago. I was able to get 1m service on the copper wire when that was a big deal. They upgraded it to 3m and dropped the price by 1/3 a couple years later, and now I’m at 12m service for about the same price through that copper wire. It has been pretty dependable and works well for streaming we can have a tv show streaming and do a FaceTime and use another iPad all at the same time and no issues. It’s not screaming fast as newer connections these days, but it’s pretty darn good and rarely had buffer, lag, slow down, or what ever one wants to call it, issues.
So….. telephone copper wire service has always seemed pretty good for me. A my back yard perspective.
As I travel with my Verizon iPad, there seem a lot of slow data areas, or dark areas in my greater neighborhood. Along with the old plans of fairly limited data caps this always seems like a very limiting way to access internet, again in my back yard.
Thanks for the explanation.
Paul |
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Pasco WA. | I am very happy with Starlink |
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Ironic?
