FarPointe - Somewhere in the WildBlue yonder

[markn455]

Hi,
I just registered with testmy.net so I can stay informed and keep up to date on my hobby and professional interest. Over the years I have experienced numerous internet connectivity challenges. We are out in the rural area of North Georgia with no access to cable and all but one DSL provider. We are subscribing to 2x 5Mbps DSL lines in hopes of getting a little "HA". Our phone company actually provides 10 Mbps are reasonable prices. However, we are so far from the POP that the fastest connection they could get was 5 Mbps. We backed the speed down to the 5 Mbps packages on two phone lines. There is so much noise or distance that we can only get about 1.5 - 3.0 and sometimes close to ZERO.

Not too long ago some thieves from somewhere outside the country went down the road and pulled one end of the phone cable out of the ground, tied it to their truck, and pulled about 3 to 4 sections of cable out of the ground. This took the phone company close to a week to get service restored in the area. Whopee!

Recently I ran across ViaSat's announcement of the "high speed" satellite internet service providing 10.5 Mbps of download. Since I am not a gamer I didn't care much about the 600-700 ms of latency your experience with typical geostationary satellite connections. So, I sighed up and here I am trying to keep ViaSat's Excede working. While this is WAY BETTER than the DSL out here in the woods, it does not work as well as claimed. The speed is all over the board, you have to reboot the modem on a regular basis. The good folks are WildBlue are working with me in an attempt to get the service working close to advertised.

So, here we are, a new kid out in the WildBlue yonder hoping that some day, somehow, we can get blazing fast connectivity like the city boys get.


Mark
FarPointe, GA

[mudmanc4]

Hey Mark , welcome to testmy.net ,

I can say thanks for the decent attitude about the troubles, some people get wound up ( myself included ) at times, with good reason as well.

Shouldn't be terribly difficult to watch the reclamation yards for a truck full of cable coming in I have to say this is the first time Iv'e heard of someone doing that , made me chuckle, at the same time , if it were my service I might not be quite as smiley about it yes ?

There is a bit of location envy though , I might gladly trade my complaining about a 60Mb connection not working quite as well as I want, for a place out away from the madness. Not might , definitely.

At any rate , stick around and see what there is to see here , there's quite a bit , as well as quite a few people that surely can assist you in getting the most from your current connection.