I have relatives who live in Los Angeles who don’t have any home internet at all. They watch free broadcast TV since they’re basically right next to the signal towers and get free Wi-Fi from nearby restaurants so they basically have no idea for any home communications/entertainment package. Before smart phones they just relied on local TV and basic phone service for everything.
I have DSL by an act of God
Bell South was going to upgrade the system to ADSL2, then AT&T took them over, and that ended that.
AT&T would not even upgrade the capacity, they stopped all upgrades bell south had said they were going to be doing.
So i had to literally wait years for someone to cancel and a port to be available.
Now, AT&T is no longer offering DSL here, if you are new forget it, does not matter if there are 10 ports on the VRAD free
(And i have physically seen the VRAD and spoke with the area service tech, it is currently under capacity )
If you for some reason get your service shut off, you have 0 hope of getting it back, AT&T will tell you they do not service the area.
There is no cable at all period, if you ask brighthouse they will tell you they dont show
any residences in the area.
BUT they will call you and sell you the service, which i let them do every time, because it is great fun to watch the installer arrive and not be able to find a cable loop with in 35 miles.
I had Hughes.net
YUCK!
The FAP is below average or even light use, their partnered Dish service will kill your FAP instantly, theirs is on a wierd 24 hour revolving door.
Rain? no internet, Clouds? no internet, Latency? how many ms is yesterday?
Cost just to get it in 2004? $700.00
There is a radio WISP in physical range, the problem is LOS, you need a 100 foot tower to clear the tree line, thats $$$ and their service is very high
Even TV OTA does not make it through here.
mobile BB via a cell carrier works ok kind of but the price is high and the monthly allotment of gigabytes is low and overage fees are pricey and you have to find a router that works with a cellular broadband device. Is not economically feasible
Much of non urban America is like this.
After the FCC gave AT&T the OK for the DirecTV merger, they pretty much reneged on their broadband expansion promises, what they want to sell now is TV and cell phones
Are they really calling it 5G ? I take it this is not real “5G” like WiGig/WiMAX, Advanced LTE, and similar wireless technologies that I bet you could make a fortune selling at a reasonable price to people otherwise stuck without broadband internet.
My cable company doesn’t provide internet service. A lot of small cable companies don’t.
I had dial-up until last year. Then I got a cheap smart phone and a MetroPCS “unlimited” plan. After 1 gigabyte the internet speed slows way down, but it’s better than dial-up.
Does it make anyone else feel old that someone apparently someone didn’t realize getting TV with an antenna was a thing?
My house in the mountains doesn’t have cable available and it may not get it in my lifetime. But digital TV can travel through the same old-fashioned telephone cable which brings my DSL.
That same area has internet by radio available from the same company which provides DSL but they don’t offer it: you need to know it exists and ask about it. Some of the farms use it, as they don’t have phone cables. And yes, that can also come with subscription TV services. After all, TV used to only be available through the air, it’s just a matter of how the signal is codified.
We used to have TV cable in my area until 2007 when a major storm wiped it out and the cable company withdrew from the area rather than repair it all.
The options now are Dish or DirecTV. I do have DSL through the phone lines but max speed is 10gb.
When I lived out in the sticks, I had Exede Satellite Internet. Very happy with the speed, but the bandwidth restrictions were the problem. I paid $99/mo (tax, title, and license included) for 20gb per month. That is enough to do most household browsing, but not conducive to very much Netflix at all.
I’m not sure what your plan offers, but that plan offered a 1am to 5am “free zone” where the bandwidth restrictions didn’t count. I scheduled movies and such to download during those times and watched them offline during the following evenings.
I remember using dial up and BBSes.
Partially, but I’d also put it down to them living all their lives in a place served by cable and not being aware that cable didn’t extend out into the sticks. They didn’t seem to be aware of satellite dish service either. Cable has been around for a long time - early CATV systems were created for communities in fringe areas almost as soon as broadcast TV came into being, and it was very attractive to anybody who would otherwise have to put up a 50 foot mast with an antenna and a rotor on top of it.
Possibly, they should have also noticed long-disused antennas on the top of older houses, and some houses sprouting new ones as people become “cable cutters”.
Aren’t most wireless towers line of sight? That pretty rough when your in the mountains.
Yes, it’s a factor, but can be somewhat offset when they place the towers on top of the mountains. A lot of people will have line-of-sight to the mountain top. A local WISP which provides service to the Santa Cruz Mountains has a tower on the top of Black Mountain for instance.
This article claims that line-of-sight blockage degrades WiMax range to 8 km and speed to 10 megabits/s. More recent wireless technologies may do better, but the range will still be degraded.
The solutions are to elevate the base stations and place them for optimal coverage, and if necessary to add more stations to get mesh coverage. The more towers necessary, the more it costs the operator, but if the Hughes-type service continues to cost a fortune for not much bandwidth then it would not surprise me if providing wireless Internet was still worth it in a lot of these communities.
I just upgraded to Hughes 5G myself a few days ago. First time I’ve ever been able to get video to work without a ton of buffering. I’m happy.
Super happy too, that the price was half the cost of what I was getting with Hughes 4G and it’s locked in for two years.
You’ll like it. I opted for the 20gb plan which should be adequate for my needs for some time.
yep, One reason is that in a city area, the taller buildings play havoc with the signal from wireless transmitted VHF or UHF TV ? So the apartment blocks don’t even bother with TV antenna cabling…
Even if the area doesn’t have cable internet, the apartment block or accomodation hotel/motel may have a convertor box, to put the free to air TV down onto what the TV says are “cable TV”…
Also the cost of installing cable in city areas is cheaper per subscriber, since there is less distance between them…