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Can anyone recommend a good and reliable rural internet service provider? I currently have Mercury Wireless, but it is pretty slow and unreliable. Also, they are starting to administrative fees to their bills to cover their costs of processing payments. The download speed is often only about about 1 Mbps, but can be as high as 2.5.
There must be a Midwest rural internet provider that gets 10-15 Mbps. I am willing to pay more if faster and more reliable. Thanks for any suggestions.
It's all 100% dependent on your location. My folks, 15 miles from the closest town (pop.900) in the middle of Montana have fiber to their home. My in-laws, an hour south of Atlanta in Georgia, have some of the slowest DSL I've seen in the past 20 years (seriously, I had faster DSL when I first bought it in the late 1990's), when it works. Their only other options are Hughes/Satellite (massive latency, tiny data caps) and LTE (low reliability in their area, tiny data caps).
I live 1/2 mile up from my in-laws on the same driveway and have cable with 200/20 for $50/month.
For your local options, check to see if there are any WISP's (line of sight wireless ISP), or look into going full-on LTE if you have access. Might need to curb some use, but if you use T-mobile you get a whole lot of video streaming that's zero-rated (free).
Generally speaking, it's one of the prices you pay for living rural. If good connectivity is important enough to you, you'll move where the service is available. If quality of life is more important, you'll learn to make do with the service that's available.
Location is everything on this.... as said above :-) ... it depends what’s locally available.
When we first moved to our current place the only Internet we could get was satellite Internet, and we chose Hughes net. My biggest complaint with the service is their billing structure with the usage caps, or “Fair access policy“. I would have been OK with the speed if not for the usage limitations, which as far as I know are still plaguing all satellite Internet services. I don’t understand why Internet is this way we have satellite television that is unlimited and works like a dream.
If you have decent cellular service there are some wireless cellular Internet plans that might be worth looking into. I honestly think that might be the wave of the future…. It has the potential to be a lot faster and better than wires to everybody’s house. But at this point it’s location dependent.
I use a service that resells AT&T 4g. No data cap and when the tower isn't screwed up it's pretty fast. I use it for my business so I ALSO have a 10gb plan with Verizon. Between the two it is pretty reliable.
I can't wait until the low earth orbit sat system is up and running; I don't care what it costs I'm in. I would like to live in an even more rural location than I am now and the only thing holding me back is reliable internet.
My Mercury Wireless download speed tonight is .54 Mbps and the upload speed is .01 Mbps. The latency starts out at 463. I am purchasing the speed package of 5 Mbps. In the morning, early, it may be as high as 2.5. The weather is perfect out. If I use my phone as a hot spot, it is quite a bit faster. I often do this when Mercury Wireless is down.
I will look for other local options. I just saw a sign advertising fast rural internet and will call search for local options.
We had nothing available to us until Hughesnet... which we had when it started out as Primestar. But we weren't happy with the speed or down time. We had it for 18 yrs and then finally a Verizon tower upgraded and we were able to get a decent signal so we got the verizon hotspot whatever it is package. Ended up a little cheaper than the satellite since we had our cell phones with them (they were the ONLY service that came in where we lived). It was faster and didn't go out when it rained or the trees blew around. No cable or DSL was available to us.
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I would like to live in an even more rural location than I am now and the only thing holding me back is reliable internet.
