First I’d like to give a history lesson.  For the past 7 years of my life (the computer oriented part of it anyways), I’ve known about high speed internet options, but I’ve never been able to bring them to my home. Keep in mind that I live in the middle of nowhere where the neighbors are a ways away from me (think thousands of feet).   My town is not that populated, in the last census, I think it was just over 700 people in the town.  With that said, this is why no one would think about bringing high speed into our town.

I can remember my first day on the internet here at home.  It was the Christmas of 2000 and my father got me a free internet hookup through Kmart’s bluelight dial up service.  Ad supported, I was easily able to get on the internet at a whopping 24Kbps (I had no clue what anything meant, I just knew that I could now get on the internet from home).   I now know that modems can connect at a max of 48Kbps when the phone line has no noise in it.  Not knowing much about the internet then, I went to Yahoo.com from home and said, woah   Obviously, only knowing about Yahoo and how to get info for research projects at school, I was quite happy with this hookup.  I didn’t realize that anything else existed, and for that matter, there was such a connection that was faster for home users anywhere.

As time progressed, I discovered a lot about the internet and what limitations bluelight internet had (how much time I could be on).  I also discovered that it tied up our phone line all the time (which was not fun).  In time, I also learned that there were options out there for paid internet that didn’t have ads.  I can’t tell you how many times I begged my father to get one of these services that don’t have ads or custom dialers.  Unfortunately, it took a few years before he finally gave in, I think it was around 2003 because I remember going to France that year (thats another story I should tell sometime in the future).  I’m still not sure if bluelight offers internet, but Copper does provide dialup.

Somewhere around the time when we got paid dialup, our already ancient phone lines started getting *really* bad.  I remember many nights around 2004-2006 when I couldn’t connect and stay connected for more than 5 minutes.  I also remember that my fastest connection rate would be 16Kbps.  By this time though, I realized that our phone lines are over 60 years old and our phone lines ran through a swamp (and were likely drenched with water).  Verizon claimed that DSL was coming, but I didn’t know how since the phone lines would have to be re-ran to provide dsl.  I would think something like fiber would actually be cheaper to run than new phone lines.

Wanting something faster, I convinced my father to get satellite internet through cband (our old 10′ satellite dish in the yard) for 30 bucks a month.  The idea of it was to use the existing signal to get a fast download speed and use the phone line to upload to the internet.  This is called a hybrid connection.  When the phone was useable, this was an excellent connection and solved many of my problems of frustration (that is provided the phone worked, which wasn’t that often).

At this point, you probably asked, why not bug the phone company to fix the issue?  Well, we had the phone company out here numerous times in those years and every time they said they can’t support modems on the phone line.  They only will support when the phone doesn’t work for voice.  Modems are far more sensative to noise in a phone line than voice, so obviously, Verizon was no help here.   To this day, the phone still has bad noise in it and Verizon has not done anything to fix it.

Regardless, in late 2006, we ordered Wildblue Satellite internet (2 way system that doesn’t require the phone line).  When I first got this, I was very impressed with the speed and very happy with it.  This is the start of decent internet where I live.  Unfortunately, as time has progressed, I’ve found many faults with this sytem.

Satellite internet systems such as Wildblue suffer from latency and usage spikes.

Firstly, satellite signals travel about 26,000 miles at the speed of light.  This kind of distance coupled with routing latency at the network center for the satellite company causes about a 1.5 second lag on Wildblue.  This means that while Wildblue may be decent for surfing (if you don’t mind lookup delays and block ads which cause massive amounts of lookups and tons of delays in loading pages), wildblue will suck for any kind of remote control applications or time critical applications.  Examples of this are in gaming on xbox live, wii over the internet, etc.  Satellite will also make voice calls (computer to telephone calls) more like a walkie talkie if it works at all.  It also causes a lot of time outs for normal surfing if your site has tons of requests.

Usage spikes on satellite are considered peak usage hours.  During the evenings and weekends, I’ve noticed that Wildblue often slows down to 56Kbps to 100Kbps for download speeds when it advertises 512Kbps for our package.  I’ve also noticed that the lag increases to about 3.5 to 4 seconds.  To normal surfing, pages load ultra slow, and dialup would actually be faster (even on my crappy phone line).

Sadly, I’ve waited on the phone company for long enough for decent internet and got nowhere.  Recently, I discovered that I can use EVDO to get high speed internet that is comparable to DSL.  All I needed to do is get a good cell phone signal.  My next blog will detail a lot about my EVDO experience and why it is the only option for me that works well and will likely be the only option for a long time to come (I doubt DSL or cable will be here anytime soon). Look forward to pictures too

I did send our local senator (Senator Catharine M. Young) a letter a few weeks ago highlighting many of the problems with internet connectivity where I live.  Unfortunately, the day I finished writing this letter to Senator Young, Verizon changed many of their policies therefore making the evdo part of this letter inaccurate and I did not catch these until after the letter was sent a few days after.  I will be covering the new information in my blog post tomorrow .  You may read a copy of this letter here:  Letter to Senator Young