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how do you get internet and phone

  • Total voters
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buildit

buildit

Hay Seed Scientist
Neighbor
Joined
Nov 25, 2017
Messages
1,595
Location
Ohio
So recently I was confronted by my Public utility phone company who has provided my home phone and internet (DSL) for the last six years with two increases in price in three months. I called twice trying to get my pricing reduced all to basically be told, we just want the money. So I have canceled them and they end March 9th.
In the mean time I've been trying to find a better option. I tried getting a cellular wifi hotspot but unlike my cell phone it can't get a signal, so I'm wondering what everyone else does for home phone and internet?
 
You have two options if you go cell based, a Jet Pack for data or using a cell phone as a hotspot. I can tell you Iphones don't like being used as a hotspot full time. It also uses up the battery on the phone since it needs to be recharged often.

I've used a jet pack for about six years now since I kicked sat internet to the curb when they ticked me off one time too many.
 
I have no cell service here so have a land line. My internet is with Hughes, my TV with Dish Network. Dish network offers a tv/internet package, they may have a phone package as well. Dish leases satellite time from hughes...

I’m happy with Dish, their customer service is great and it’s an american company. I’m happy with Hughes also. They have excellent engineers on their customer service team. The is a slight problem though. Their customer service is in the Philippines. Their English language skills are sometimes lacking.

I had to call Hughes customer service this past week. The English comprehension of young lady I spoke with was lacking. Once I realized this I switched from a southern accent to a tv accent and I was careful with enunciation and syntax. Once the young lady understood the reasons for my call she was on them like white on rice! Great service!

Someone posted recently that Hughes was a horrible internet service. I think that person had a dish alignment problem. About six years ago hughes sent someone out to upgrade the antenna assembly on my dish. The person messed up my alignment. I experienced difficulties similar to the person who posted. They had to come back out the next day and re-align it. I’ve had no problems since.

One thing to be aware of if you go the satellite route… if there is a thunder storm I lose my tv and internet. Usually if it’s raining I have to stay inside and the first thing I do is turn on my computer or tv… bummer.
 
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At our vacation home (aka "the Farm") we purchase a bundle package through what could be best described as the cable/phone public utility company. I voted cable company as that is how they started and still describe themselves. The only provider available unless you want to use something satellite based. We get a basic TV package, telephone and DSL for one price. It's not expensive compared to what I pay at home, but it's also not near as fast or reliable. Cellular service out there is not good enough to use a cellular internet provider and since the place is only occupied 25-30% of the year we don't want to get locked into expensive satellite contracts.
 
I just reread what you said about the wifi hotspot not getting a signal. If we are not talking apples and oranges, if your cell gets a signal and the hotspot is the same cell provider, it should work. I have one bar on my cell phone, yet my jetpack functions just fine for internet access.
 
I have fiber optic service through Spectrum. I don't have TV, I don't even own one, but my phone service is VOIP which is great because it is a flat fee (less than $20 / month) and I can call to just about anywhere in the world without additional cost. My internet is a fast connection at 65 to 75 Mb/second down load and 6 to 10 Mb/second upload. I rarely have problems of any kind. I pay less than $60/month for the internet which is less than I paid for DSL, cable or Satellite in the past. The best that the phone company could offer at my remote location was not only more expensive but offered less than 7Mb/ per second. I'm sold on fiber optic and I will continue to use it.
 
SheepDog said:
I have fiber optic service through Spectrum. I don't have TV, I don't even own one, but my phone service is VOIP which is great because it is a flat fee (less than $20 / month) and I can call to just about anywhere in the world without additional cost. My internet is a fast connection at 65 to 75 Mb/second down load and 6 to 10 Mb/second upload. I rarely have problems of any kind. I pay less than $60/month for the internet which is less than I paid for DSL, cable or Satellite in the past. The best that the phone company could offer at my remote location was not only more expensive but offered less than 7Mb/ per second. I'm sold on fiber optic and I will continue to use it.
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I can only dream of fiber optic.
Fiber optic lines are only 1/2 mile away and I will never get connected to it.
Not enough houses for the company to make enough money. No TV cable providers for the same reason.
My only option is DSL running at a blazing 3Meg down and .5 meg up.
It is fast enough to stream Netflix but just barely.
I pay around $125 a month for Dish and $75 a month for internet.
My wife uses her iPad tethered to her iPhone in the motor home.
 
I don't think I could function with 5 computers running on 3Mb. I do a lot of research on the net. I also compose a lot of my own work and save it to a "folder" outside of my operating system. I just backed that folder up a couple of days ago and it has 9 to 10 thousand files in it that I have created. That is 6 meg of irreplaceable files! I have them backed up on DVD, a portable drive and another two computers one of which is kept protected from HEMP except when I run updates. The information I download is kept in a separate file area and when digested it is either rewritten or deleted depending on the information it contains. (there is a lot of junk on the net) :(
 
So the cellular hot spot arrived and didn't work. Apparently they put an ATT sim card in it and my cell phone that works fine has Sprint. So I'm shipping it back and will reorder once my credit card gets cleared for the bill. Sort of surprised that as good as Consumer cellular has been they were actually rude about this with me and when I complained just said "yeah, sorry about that".
***Side Note*** Incompetence and poor customer service seems to be rampant in all the utilities and service industries. I will remember this when they start complaining about being unable to remain "competitive" with start ups and foreign companies who replace them. :angie:
 
When I purchased this house, I hooked up a Verizon land line, and it cost me $69 plus taxes of about $16 a month. My new neighbor told me about "Straight Talk", where you purchase the box for $50 at WalMart, and it connects your land line phone via a cellular tower, which for me is about 1/4 mile away. Straight Talk customer service walked us through the entire change over, and also allowed us to keep our same land line number. We now pay $15 per month, with no other service charges, which is less than the Verizon land line taxes I paid every month. I also verified that if I ever have to dial "911", it will report my phone number and address for quick emergency response here if needed.

I know this is not a fix all for everyone, but if you have a cell tower in your general proximity, it is worth checking out.
 
Peanut said:
I have no cell service here so have a land line. My internet is with Hughes, my TV with Dish Network. Dish network offers a tv/internet package, they may have a phone package as well. Dish leases satellite time from hughes...

I’m happy with Dish, their customer service is great and it’s an american company. I’m happy with Hughes also. They have excellent engineers on their customer service team. The is a slight problem though. Their customer service is in the Philippines. Their English language skills are sometimes lacking.

I had to call Hughes customer service this past week. The English comprehension of young lady I spoke with was lacking. Once I realized this I switched from a southern accent to a tv accent and I was careful with enunciation and syntax. Once the young lady understood the reasons for my call she was on them like white on rice! Great service!

Someone posted recently that Hughes was a horrible internet service. I think that person had a dish alignment problem. About six years ago hughes sent someone out to upgrade the antenna assembly on my dish. The person messed up my alignment. I experienced difficulties similar to the person who posted. They had to come back out the next day and re-align it. I’ve had no problems since.

One thing to be aware of if you go the satellite route… if there is a thunder storm I lose my tv and internet. Usually if it’s raining I have to stay inside and the first thing I do is turn on my computer or tv… bummer.
Click to expand...
Like Peanut, we have no cell service here so we have a land line. We have HughesNet Gen 5 for internet and are very happy with it, especially since we exceed the download allowance every month (thank you Microsoft!) and Hughes removed the slow-you-down-until-you-die penalty with this new upgrade. We have DirecTV.

The thunderstorms are problems for internet and TV; however, the outages are sporadic depending on the location and density of the storm.
 
havasu said:
My old house was similar, with horrible cell phone reception. I did call Verizon and they provided me this booster, that was plugged into a wall and I immediately got better reception.
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I have 4G at my place on the mtn but my neighbors who are a bit down hill barely have 1 bar without the booster.
 
We have land line and Wifi. I will check on Straight Talk for sure! I am not happy with the cost. Land line and DSL is $106 mon. Plus $10.99 for Netflix.

We have ATT cell phone which is $25 every 3 months. But our minutes always roll over since we never use them much at all.
 
Our internet out here EATS! So slow! We have DSL (centuryLink). They recently buried some fiber optic cable down along our county road, and I thought we'd get to tap in. I called them, and they said it couldn't be done (which is a bunch of manure!) anyways...... What a let down. Our neighbor gets MICROWAVE internet because he's in line with the water tower across the river that has a microwave dish on it. However, he pays an ungodly amount of money each month for this service. I know what you're thinking......"My tech-life sounds like a script from HEE-HAW"...... in black-n-white! the point is...... "Microwave" is an option, but expensive.
 
We pay $63/month for the HughesNet Gen5 internet. We purchased the equipment instead of leasing it (We did the numbers and purchasing the equipment for the two year contract was cheaper than leasing it). We're pretty happy with HughesNet now that they've stopped punishing those us on Gen5 from exceeding the monthly download allowance. We've noticed very little difference on speed after we exceed the download allowance for the month. However, we don't to Netflex or a lot of TV/Video on the computer.
 
captain belly said:
...DSL (centuryLink). They recently buried some fiber optic cable down along our county road, and I thought we'd get to tap in. I called them, and they said it couldn't be done (which is a bunch of manure!) anyways...... ...
Click to expand...

Maybe yes, maybe no. It all depends on what the fiber optic cable is used for, what electronics are on the ends and where access manholes are located.
 
We use Viasat. Unlimited internet.
We have a very spotty cell signal with verizon.
We use googlevoice for our phone service. Free calling anywhere in the US.
I also have internet calling set up on my cellphone, so that if I can't get out on verizon, the call will go through my wifi.

It's rather expensive, but living in the boonies does come with a price sometimes.
 
Country Living said:
We pay $63/month for the HughesNet Gen5 internet. We purchased the equipment instead of leasing it (We did the numbers and purchasing the equipment for the two year contract was cheaper than leasing it). We're pretty happy with HughesNet now that they've stopped punishing those us on Gen5 from exceeding the monthly download allowance. We've noticed very little difference on speed after we exceed the download allowance for the month. However, we don't to Netflex or a lot of TV/Video on the computer.
Click to expand...


We don't do a lot of NetFlix either. But is is worth the $11 a mon. for some shows and series we like Blue Bloods, Person of Interest, Royal Pains and some of the old ones lik Highway To Heaven ,Mayberry, etc. Plus now and then a classic movie.
And first 3 episodes of " Schitts Creek " was so funny we had to pause it a couple times.
 
Most rural areas have at least one terrestrial microwave internet provider. Look around your area for small dishes (18-24") on antenna towers at residential locations. If you are in a hilly area the coverage could be spotty as it is a line of sight service. Most of these companies have very limited advertising. If you can get the service expect 10-20 M down and 5 M up depending on the provider.

ViaSat is also a better choice then Hughes/Net and they offer phone services along with satellite internet, but the phone service and internet have a 1 second built in lag since the signal has to make a round trip to a geo-sync satellite. We currently use ViaSat for our internet, however I will be switching to a terrestrial microwave provider at some point, but I have to get a 50 foot tower installed to get line of sight to the providers antennas.
 
*Andi said:
I heard you need to have no less than 1 bar for this to work, do you know if this is true?
Click to expand...

I don't know. We have 4G at our place most of the time, my friend down the hill has almost nothing and is the one who did this. Ill try to remember to ask her next week.
 
Okay, it seems I've solved my issue and again saved money. No hot spot needed since I can use my cell phone as a hot spot which saved me spending $80 and adding another line. My internet is working really well too so I'm happy. :)
 
captain belly said:
Our internet out here EATS! So slow! We have DSL (centuryLink). They recently buried some fiber optic cable down along our county road, and I thought we'd get to tap in. I called them, and they said it couldn't be done (which is a bunch of manure!)...
Click to expand...

Technically, you are correct. They COULD tap you in, but to do so, they would have to dig up the line, cut it, put networking gear in the middle, set up an above-ground service box, etc.

What you want them to do is equivalent to asking your state DOT to connect your driveway directly to the nearby 70mph interstate. They, quite appropriately, declined your request. Most times, it's less stress for everyone involved for the ISPs to say "it can't be done" rather than "we can but we won't".
 
*Andi said:
I heard you need to have no less than 1 bar for this to work, do you know if this is true?
Click to expand...
Generally speaking, yes. Boosters don't make signal out of nothing..they "boost" existing signals.

If you put a booster at the spotty edge of reception, then the boosted signal will have minimal additional range. This may not be a problem if you plan to talk on your cell phone right next to the booster.

If you can put the booster where it has 2-3 bars, the range increase is significant. However, we're still only talking maybe a 50' radius circle for consumer-grade boosters.
 
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