debbie53

@MoreLess I can relate to the problems of rural America. It looks like my speeds are even slower than yours. Nine years ago I moved from suburbia, with decent DSL for $25.00/mo. to a rural area that only offered very expensive and unreliable satellite or dial-up. When DSL finally became available through Fairpoint a couple of years later, I signed up. I pay $41.00 a month to Fairpoint, now Consolidated Communications, and my latest test results are 2.9 Mbps down and 712 kbps up, which has been typical. ISPs want to make a profit, and it has to be more cost-effective to provide service to customers on a block in a big city, for instance, than somewhere with fewer than ten households in a mile. I don't know if it will ever get much better without some kind of government subsidy. There has been some talk here recently about upgrading the infrastructure to attract more businesses to the area, as almost all rely on fast internet now, and take it for granted that it will be available wherever they go. I will watch to see what happens.

I moved here eight years ago from CT. At the time, the only option besides dial-up was a very expensive, not so great satellite. People would often ask me if I missed CT, to which I would reply that the only thing I missed was my internet. Everything comes with a trade-off. I have read a lot of bad reviews about Comcast, so I think for now I will stick with what I have until something better comes along. Videos can be choppy, as they sometimes try to play faster than they can download, but otherwise it is mostly adequate for what I need.

From what I see, Comcast has an internet plan for "up to" 10 Mbps for $49.95 a month, after a 12 month promo, with the disclaimer "not all plans available in all areas". To find out what speed I could expect for what price, I would have to give them my exact street address, which I will not do, because I don't want to be hounded by their sales representatives. Pricing and speed seem to vary with location, with rural areas being more expensive with slower speeds, due to the cost of the infrastructure in relation to the number of customers served per square mile. I have to drive about seven miles in one direction or twenty in the other to get a cell phone signal, so I guess it isn't surprising that the internet is slow. And no, I didn't see any increase in speed after the merger, but at least it didn't go down.

Comcast speeds and pricing seem to vary widely, depending on where you are located. I just checked, and here I can only get "up to" 10 Mbps for $49.95 per month with a 1000GB data cap. $87.95 will get me "up to" 100Mbps. Of course they don't ever give you any guaranteed "down to" speeds. That price also does not include their $500.00 installation fee or unknown monthly charges for "taxes and fees". But then, until mid 2011, my only option was dial-up. I guess that's the price I pay for living away from any urban area.

I am getting 3.01 Mbps download and 727 kbps upload for $41 a month with Fairpoint. I am waiting to see if their recent merger with Consolidated Communications will make things better or worse. Some years ago, I was paying $25 a month for what seemed like faster service. That was with a small local company which I had to leave when I moved out of their area.

I feel your pain! Until a couple of months ago, expensive Wildblue and Hughes satellite were the only available options here, besides dial-up. If you are not in a hurry to change internet providers, you could check with your local phone company to find out if or when DSL will be likely available in your area, to decide if it is worth waiting for. In VT, they told me 2 or 3 years, and then surprise! a few month later it was here. I have not personally used either Wildblue or Hughes, but I have tried to find out a few things about them. From what I understand, Wildblue uses 2 satellites and Hughes uses 13. The Hughes satellite used here sits higher on the horizon, and so is less suceptible to obstruction from trees, buildings, hills, etc., so it should be a more reliable choice for me. Where you are, the situation is probably different. I found a neat little tool online at http://www.groundcon..._Calculator.htm It uses the DishPointer app and Google Maps to show you where your dish should be pointing, in case it somehow got jarred from its original position. You select the satellite from a drop-down menu and type in the address where you live to get the correct orientation. I think Wildblue uses 111.1W ANIK F2 as one of its satellites. Anyway, you should be able to get that information from your local internet providers, and then compare the line of sight from your location for both Wildblue and Hughes to see if there is a significant difference between the two, regarding possible obstructions to the signal.

It depends what you like or don't like, and what you use it for. Personally, I like a PC running Linux. I take other people's throw-aways with Windows, upgrade the hardware if needed, and install Linux, because I am cheap. I can have pretty icons when I want, a black terminal when I don't, or anything in between. I have a good, stable system, and don't have to worry about viruses. The desktop computer I am using now is seven or eight years old, but it works fine for my purposes.

The new modem/router arrived about an hour ago. Email, upload, and download all work.

Someone from FairPoint called me today, and when I told him how I had gotten it to work, he said they would send me a different modem, a newer model. I will wait to see what happens with that.

Problem solved! Before buying a new modem, I decided to try one more thing. The network cable FairPoint sent me has a Y on the end, so it can be connected either into a network card or usb port. Their instructions said to use the network card rather than the usb, if one was available, so that is what I did. I know the net cards on both the desktop and laptop computers work, because I frequently use them to transfer files back and forth. I tried connecting the modem through the usb port and then the email worked and the web pages stopped hanging. I reconnected it through the RJ45 and was back to the same problems. Although I had done it before, I tried a different network cable that I knew was good, and again had problems. Now I think there must be some incompatibility between the modem and both of my network cards. Both computers are running Linux, so I don't know if there is some issue with the drivers that they will work with my router but not the DSL modem. Anyway, everything looks good when I connect through the usb, so that is what I will do. Thanks again to everyone for helping me to troubleshoot this. I hope this discussion may be able to help someone else with similar problems.

So it would seem, from that sequence of tests. This morning I tried to run the tests closer together, starting a new test as soon as the previous one had finished, hoping to see if anything changed with the pattern. This is what I got. Tue Aug 09 2011 @ 9:49:06 am 713 Kbps Tue Aug 09 2011 @ 9:48:17 am 4 Kbps Tue Aug 09 2011 @ 9:41:41 am 716 Kbps Tue Aug 09 2011 @ 9:41:01 am 727 Kbps Tue Aug 09 2011 @ 9:40:19 am 714 Kbps Tue Aug 09 2011 @ 9:39:34 am 711 Kbps Tue Aug 09 2011 @ 9:38:53 am 4 Kbps Tue Aug 09 2011 @ 9:32:09 am 725 Kbps Tue Aug 09 2011 @ 9:31:26 am 710 Kbps Tue Aug 09 2011 @ 9:30:39 am 725 Kbps Tue Aug 09 2011 @ 9:29:46 am 712 Kbps Tue Aug 09 2011 @ 9:28:45 am 730 Kbps Tue Aug 09 2011 @ 9:27:54 am 4 Kbps I am not sure what you mean about the ISP opening a real connection through the internet. I can try clearing my browser cache before each test, to see if it makes any difference.

Besides replacing the modem, is there any way to check this? I have been poking around in the pages for the modem setup, including looking at the log files. The same few lines keep repeating, with time stamps varying between several minutes and about an hour apart. daemon.err cwmpd[156]: Diagnostics Error Handling thread is already running daemon.info cwmpd[156]: CWMP: Final Http Return Code = 200 daemon.err cwmpd[156]: cwmpDoInform: Received SOAP Fault other than 8005 daemon.err cwmpd[156]: cwmpDoInform: Received Soap Fault Server daemon.err cwmpd[156]: cwmpDoInform: Didn t receive InformResponse daemon.info cwmpd[156]: CWMP: Inform Sent Successfully I don't know if anything there is significant or not.

Okay, I'm back, but I haven't yet found out if FairPoint has checked the lines. Here is a summary of a dozen upload speed tests I did over about two and a half hours. Mon Aug 08 2011 @ 10:50:12 pm 727 Kbps Mon Aug 08 2011 @ 10:49:30 pm 4 Kbps Mon Aug 08 2011 @ 10:26:02 pm 708 Kbps Mon Aug 08 2011 @ 10:24:34 pm 31 Kbps Mon Aug 08 2011 @ 10:12:15 pm 29 Kbps Mon Aug 08 2011 @ 9:51:00 pm 709 Kbps Mon Aug 08 2011 @ 9:50:06 pm 712 Kbps Mon Aug 08 2011 @ 9:49:10 pm 29 Kbps Mon Aug 08 2011 @ 9:20:57 pm 711 Kbps Mon Aug 08 2011 @ 9:20:12 pm 4 Kbps Mon Aug 08 2011 @ 8:29:36 pm 730 Kbps Mon Aug 08 2011 @ 8:28:50 pm 4 Kbps It looks like my connection is either fast or slow, with nothing in between. I wish I could find a pattern in all of this. Web pages still hang and none of my webmail works. Could it be a problem with the modem?

I got to talk to a supervisor at FairPoint today. I told him about the speed tests I ran on your site, and he seemed interested. You might be getting some new traffic from the phone company. Anyway, when all was said and done, he said it was unusual, but sounded like the problem could be in the phone lines outside. This area is noted for noisy phone connections whenever it rains. He said someone should be able to check the lines in the next few days. Then I will be going away for a couple of days, so I think I will put this discussion on hold until I get back. I am hoping my connection will have gotten better by then. Thanks for helping me to figure this out.

Hi mudmanc4. Thanks for trying to help, but as stated in one of my earlier posts, I am on Linux, not Windows. I have not used Windows since Windows 98. I believe spybot is for Windows. My hosts files are fine, and I have tried the DSL on two different computers and with three browsers. My dial-up account, which I fortunately didn't cancel yet, still works okay, as it has for the past two years. The problems I am having are strictly with the new FairPoint DSL account that was set up last Wednesday.