Ok, so last year I bought a new house. Thought it would be great as there is plenty of room for the family and I have a second garage all to myself for my projects.

I've been working on a few problems with the house and getting it to where we are comfortable living here. The one remaining problem I have is lack of decent Internet.

DSL - The first guy on the street has Frontier and I thought I would be able to get it as well. He has about 500Kbit for speeds and gets buy. They came out to install my service and refused to because the tech said the speeds were ~300Kbit at the box that feeds my house. I'm only 2 houses down from the other guy so this really frustrated me.

Cable - There is no cable service on my street. Talking to one of the neighbors who was the second to build on the street it has something to do with the fact that the contractor that developed the land didn't want to pay for the expense of cable. I find that very strange since they put in buried electric, telephone and gas. This is the only neighborhood that has buried electric and supposedly the contractor was not expecting to have to do that and cheeped out and didn't do cable because of the extra expense of the buried electric. Maybe with the buried electric he would have had to use a better shielded cable or something and decided not to. All the streets that lead up to mine all have cable so this really frustrates me as well.

Line of Site - I have not found any kind of service like this in my area. Maybe I should start one and sell it to my neighbors!

4G - This is what I have now but I am finding it to be very restrictive. The speeds are decent but I have Verizon home fusion system and 20 GB of data. That's not enough data for what we are used to and it is already too expensive.

Satellite - This is what most people have. It's just as expensive and restricted as my 4G service

I'm just kind of ranting because I am extremely frustrated. I've been trying to contact the cable company to see what it would take to get cable service installed on my street but I can't get anyone to call me back. I'm wondering if I'd have to take the issue up with my city instead. There are 14 houses on my street and everyone I have talked to says that they don't like their options for internet and would switch if they could find something better.

Anyone have any ideas for me?

quote Originally posted by Jefrysuko: DSL - The first guy on the street has Frontier and I thought I would be able to get it as well. He has about 500Kbit for speeds and gets buy. They came out to install my service and refused to because the tech said the speeds were ~300Kbit at the box that feeds my house. I'm only 2 houses down from the other guy so this really frustrated me.

check other dsl providers, thats VERY slow.

I had a house on a river on the other side of town a long time ago. Since houses there were all on acreages there was no cable. I asked how much would it cost to run a cable from a neighborhood maybe a half mile away. They quoted me something like $12,000. Having bought plenty of cable myself for projects, I figured maybe $1500 tops. I watched broadcast tv instead.

quote Originally posted by hookdonspeed: check other dsl providers, thats VERY slow.

I think Frontier is the only DSL provider in my area. Anyone know how to look up all the providers in my area?

Get an old DirecTV dish and a USB antenna and see what you can pull in for free.

It's possible to pull in Wifi from miles away with the right equipment.

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quote Originally posted by rogergarrison: I had a house on a river on the other side of town a long time ago. Since houses there were all on acreages there was no cable. I asked how much would it cost to run a cable from a neighborhood maybe a half mile away. They quoted me something like $12,000. Having bought plenty of cable myself for projects, I figured maybe $1500 tops. I watched broadcast tv instead.

That was the cable company who quoted you? They haven't given me the time of day in response to my request for them to run a line down the street. I am starting to think they have no interest in taking my money or they just don't get into these kind of jobs.

When I moved in I had a hard time even figuring out who was the cable provider in my area. It was Suddenlink shortly before I moved here and NewWave Communications took over. I had heard bad things about both companies so I initially stayed away. Over the past 6 months I have seen plenty of NewWave trucks in the neighborhood and some of the neighbors started telling me good things. One day I stopped and talked to one of the NewWave guys and he told me that they were upgrading all the equipment in the area. Right after the new year I decided to try my luck and called asking to sign up for their internet service. They took my order and a couple days later they send out a service tech to install my service. When he got here he told me that he hadn't ever been on my street before. He called the former tech from Suddenlink who informed him that there was no service on my street. I asked him what it would take to run service down my street and his response was "a lot" and he didn't want to entertain any more questions about it. I have called their new customer hotline a couple times asking to talk to someone who could tell me how much it would cost in order to run a line but the managers are always "busy".

quote Originally posted by rogergarrison: I had a house on a river on the other side of town a long time ago. Since houses there were all on acreages there was no cable. I asked how much would it cost to run a cable from a neighborhood maybe a half mile away. They quoted me something like $12,000. Having bought plenty of cable myself for projects, I figured maybe $1500 tops. I watched broadcast tv instead.

Ayup what Roger said, forget it unless at least a few more of your neighbors are willing to get cable as well. it will cost you a small fortune. Go with the dish if you absolutely have to have that much speed. we have Verizon here and it goes threw the phone line, not really that fast as most of you net freaks like it but for me it works and sooooo much faster than dial up.

Steve

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Technology is great when it works,
and one big pain in the ass when it doesn't



Detroit iron rules all the rest are just toys.

I had just switched to cable internet about 7 months ago. Before that I had been using DSL since it was Bell Atlantic. That was back when you could get a self install kit from CompUSA. Yes well over a decade ago, closer to 2. Many would remember how long ago that FIOS came out. Being a loyal AT&T, then Bell Atlantic, then Verizon customer I patiently waited for it to be offered here. Verizon has updated around 95% of the old POTTS lines in Baltimore. Except for the region from just above downtown directly north. This area is still using the AT&T relay system centered at the original building downtown due to the heavy use of the commercial multi line businesses in the area. Because of that and being that the residencial area is small, Verizon finally fessed up in saying that it would not be be in their interest to update to fiber in this area unless some of the commercial projects that were suppose to happen come to be(25th St. Station project was supposed to be 2 blocks from my house). Where I work they were also a Verizon customer. Because they had to start offering WIFI, they had to go to another subscriber also.
The part that really sucks is Johns Hopkins University is 6 blocks northeast, the cultural center of town is 10 blocks south and several state buildings are 8 blocks south west. There is a major cell tower 4 blocks to the west with fiber base. You can bet it is available there.

check these people out.
http://www.wildblue.com/

wont be good for gaming (latency would kill you) but the speeds look good

Had a similar response from Frontier here when we recently moved. I had bundled service with Frontier and Direct TV because cable service was lousy at our old address. Anyhow, Frontier said they could only provide low speed digital service at the new address, 1.5 Mbps. I thought the previous 6 Mbps down was slow (upload was capped at 700 kbps).

This is a new area with hundreds of homes planned and maybe half of those already constructed. Frontier doesn't seem to be interested in adding other than mandated services to new areas.Now we have Commcast digital service and a year to go on Direct TV contract, still billed by Frontier but with none of their services.

Anyhow, cable TV providers usually are granted a franchise to operate in an area and they have a responsibility to provide service within the franchise area. There should be a public utilities commission or a municipal office that handles the franchise details. Might be worth finding out who the administrator is and giving that office a call. Maybe you are not in the franchise area and so may be SOL.

[This message has been edited by spark1 (edited 01-23-2014).]

quote Originally posted by hookdonspeed: check these people out. http://www.wildblue.com/ wont be good for gaming (latency would kill you) but the speeds look good

Yeah, I have looked at that before. Satellite internet is billed by how much you use just like my current setup through Verizon. I am really looking for something without a cap and I'd really like to be able to stream movies and such.

No fiber here and was told in no uncertain terms, that there never will be.
Didn't even have phone lines till 2007.
We do have Verizon wireless off a cell tower, but spotty at best unless I'm inside where the antenna and amplifier is.
Forget about streaming anything.

I used to get my internet anywhere I wanted with a flashdrive from Verizon. It was just a little bit slower than my Roadrunner, and it did slow down near the end of the month if I downloaded lots of movies. It did however have unlimited gb. I regret giving it up now because they no longer offer it unlimited, and Id have been grandfathered into it if Id kept it active. It worked my laptop anywhere I had cellphone service for just a monthly fee of $50. I could have used it to watch HULU 20 hours a day. The only limit it had was it could not be on 24 continuous hours at a time. Might see if they offer unlimited service like that where you are.

how close is the nearest neighbor behind you?

Do they have cable internet?

There are line of sight ethernet repeaters or you could bury a fiber optic cable to them and split thier bill. would save them some money and you would have internet.

[This message has been edited by mike-ohio (edited 01-24-2014).]

quote Originally posted by rogergarrison: I used to get my internet anywhere I wanted with a flashdrive from Verizon. It was just a little bit slower than my Roadrunner, and it did slow down near the end of the month if I downloaded lots of movies. It did however have unlimited gb. I regret giving it up now because they no longer offer it unlimited, and Id have been grandfathered into it if Id kept it active. It worked my laptop anywhere I had cellphone service for just a monthly fee of $50. I could have used it to watch HULU 20 hours a day. The only limit it had was it could not be on 24 continuous hours at a time. Might see if they offer unlimited service like that where you are.

The only place I found with truly unlimited service is Sprint, and since most people that have no options can't pick up their towers.....

I'm using a Verizon Mifi unit that is limited to 20Gigs a month for work. It's awesome...Until you run out.

I was using the Sprint one, which barely worked, which is surprising since we worked on Sprint towers....

I use Millenicom, http://5z8.info/start-troja...u5uv_horse-slaughter which is a no contract service. Great customer service as well. I highly recommend them, but I don't think it'll work for this situation.

Brad