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[HavingPhun]

   Alright, so this probably amazes some people, but I still have dial-up. Yes, it does make the buzzing sounds. I just wanted to make this thread to see what my other options are, and to see what people think about this ridiculous situation.

   I have had dial-up my whole life, though I will obviously move out once I am 18, that is a year from now, so it is still torturous to have to use it for so long. I have wait a minute or ten for some websites to load, except for the forums, they load fairly quickly. I get downloads at anywhere from 2-3kbps... really.

   I have tried every single company in my area to see if I can get some sort of better deal. There are an assortment of wireless cards that I can get from Verizon or AT&T, and there is also the satelite internet from hughesnet, but none of these are very great deals. I had a wireless hotspot card from Verizon for a time, I was limited at 5gb a month, which was ridiculously easy to go through. Even if I just browsed the web, and didn't watch videos, stream music, or do anything particularly internet heavy. Overall using internet with a cap that low is unreasonable, and for the people who don't have caps, you can probably understand why.

   As I had said earlier, I have called many of the local companies to see what they have to offer. If you go one mile down my road one direction, there is an entire town with time warner cable. If you go 200 feet the other direction down the road, there is an entire strip of road with time warner cable. But, in between the two in the roughly mile of road, where I have nothing. Time warner cable gave the "very generous" offer of ~$800 per house on the road to lay the cable, when one of my neigbors called to see. Which comes out to be more than $5,000. Verizon owns the phones lines on the road, and I have them as cell phone, and home phone carrier. They claimed that I was too far away from their office or station, to give us even dsl. Which I find ridiculous.

   Frontier says that they cannot give us their service, because Verizon owns the phone lines, which is understandable. I have checked a plethora of other companies, and they either don't offer service in my area, or have monthly usage and speed caps. This should be completely unacceptable in this day and age. High speed fiber lines are being set up in cities, some with up to 500mbps downloads, and even in some of the more common and modest connections, maybe anywhere from 1-20mpbs, depending on the quality of service in the area. Meanwhile, I am stuck with 2-3kbps downloads. I have heard claims of dial-up having download speeds of 54kbps. That would be lovely compared to what I have.

   Also, I know I am not alone on this, I am sure that there are many who also are stuck in similar situations. But, I have also heard of people who have connections that their provider claims are "high-speed", yet they are unbelievably unreliable, or much slower than they should be. That they have had to wait long periods of time to get things fixed, and sometimes having it break soon after it being fixed. Why is this allowed to happen?

   Also, forgive me for not having a link or name for this, but I can't seem to find the page anymore. I had read at one point on the FCC website, that there is some sort of fund that has been around for years. It is supposed to expand internet connections around the country, and in general end ridulous situations like this. Still, it has been decades and many people in the US don't even have high speed internet. I know that this is also a problem in many countries in the world that do not have the infrastructure, or wealth that the US has, but I don't even live in the middle of no where. I live in New York state, and in a place where almost all of the people I know have high speed connections, that are mostly reliable.

   So, I suppose that this is some sort of a rant, yet I am not really venting anger, at this point I have had dial-up for so long that I just learn to deal with it. I just wanted to post this, to possibly make people aware of this, and see if anyone else has similar issues. Also, to possible get people talking about it. I know that bringing internet to many remote places, or less developed places in the world is a huge hurdle, that will take large sums of money and intelligent people to solve. But, we are talking about the US, where all the companies would have to do to bring me internet is to run a damn line to my house and connect it to their network.

   As a final word, I am just speaking from my experience, and some small amounts of research online, I am by no means an expert, and if I am getting something wrong then let me know. But, I know one thing, it is completely ridiculous that in this day and age, that many people in a supposed 1st world country don't have access to reliable, high-speed internet. It's what I see as the internet companies purposely avoiding many side roads, and immediately going for high population areas to maximize profit. Which, yes, is a good business strategy that anyone could see, plain as day, but it leaves many people high and dry. I mean really, dial-up was made more than two decades ago, if I am correct.

   So, there it is. I know it is a lot to read, but please do, and post what you think about this and similar matters. Also, I am sorry if my ideas are rather spread out, and un-organized. I just sat down and typed this, and did not bother to edit it and pre-plan it. I also may have one paragraph out of order, as I shifted a few on accident while typing, by hitting a keyboard shortcut accidently. Thank you for reading this all if you did.

[Antioch]

I get 1Gbit for 15eu a month.

*hides behind desk*

[Orange Wizard]

If you can't get DSL or specific cables laid, your only other option is satellite internet, AFAIK.

[mainiac]

My girlfriend's mother was in the same boat.  The result of my research was that her best bet was a hotspot 4G arrangement like you have considered and rejected.  Rural internet in the US is just balls.

[Reelya]

I am stuck with 2-3kbps downloads. I have heard claims of dial-up having download speeds of 54kbps. That would be lovely compared to what I have.

Do you mean you get 2-3 kilobytes per second? Small-b is bits, big-B is bytes. A 56kbps (kilobits per second) modem can get a maximum theoretical rate of 7 kilobytes per second. If you really only got 2-3kbps it would take you 1 minute to get 20K of data.

If there's decent service 200 feet away, that's close enough to get a wifi network going with a neighbor. Are you friends with anyone there who gets decent connection? You could pitch half their bill and share the connection.

[alexandertnt]

Be careful with the WI-FI sharing thing. Some companies may have a clause in their agreements that state you can't provide internet access to other establishments.

[i2amroy]

Yeah, in rural areas for cable you generally need someone to either pony up the money or for everyone in the neighborhood to chip in to get the initial cables laid down. Once they are down it works just fine (and will continue to do so for the rest of eternity) but until that point your options are kinda limited.

[mainiac]

Be careful with the WI-FI sharing thing. Some companies may have a clause in their agreements that state you can't provide internet access to other establishments.

They're intended to be used that way.  It's a wireless ethernet router that connects directly to the local 3G or 4G network to get internet.  Which is exactly as low performance and bandwidth as it sounds.

[Reelya]

Here though, we were talking about someone running a wifi router from the Time Warner cable service that the OP says they get 200 feet away.

[wierd]

Is this one of those "Personal hotspot" things you are talking about mainiac?  Those are usually limited to 4 connecting devices, and are intended to allow things like tablets and laptops to grab the service.

A better option, IMO, is to get the 4G USB2 dongle version, which is able to pull data rates of up to theoretical 400mbit that USB2 can deliver. (Really, limited by what Verizon or whoever is provisioning the dongle, and the tower connected to, is able to service). OpenWRT has driver packages to enable these devices, meaning you can get one, attach it to the USB port on the back of more modern USB routers (running openwrt), and then use it as the WAN port in the routing/bridging configuration. You often get extra perks this way, such as configurable TCP methods, configurable frame sizes, custom firewall options, enhanced wifi channel modes (such as enhanced N modes) and all that kettle of fish. You can even do encrypted VPN tunneling if that's something you want.

The personal hotspot option is probably cheaper and easier to set up, but has far less "oomph".

[alexandertnt]

The OP has already tried mobile wireless, and ran into problems with the their limited download quotas.

You can usually pay for more quota, but at least here in Australia mobile internet becomes exorbitantly expensive.

[wierd]

That problem also exists for satellite internet as well.

You only find ["capless" AND "inexpensive"] with wired service options.

You can't just leave cookies out for the magic internet fairy. She does not exist.
You have to account for the limitations of the various technologies available in the area.

DSL has a loop length restriction, meaning that after X Km from the distribution hub, you simply cant get service.
Cable internet has a branch size restriction, which gets in the way of rural deployments. (beyond a set number of users per node branch, it becomes too noisy. Impedance problems for end-to-end sides of the branch also come into play, as do signal timing issues that can cause datagram collisions at the branch's node.)
Satellite internet has extreme latency problems, and the restrictions of a fixed pipe width coming away from the satellite, and into the provider's network.
Cellular (and WISP) providers have tower saturation problems, costs of laying cable infrastructure between towers and node centers, AND the problems with fixed width pipes being shared by X number of connected users, with collision control overhead.

Wired solutions imply:
Efficient physical distances between peers in local branches
Efficient layout of branches for the service area
Efficient allocation of bandwidth out of the branches into the ISP network
Efficient allocation of bandwidth from the ISP to peer networks.

That's why they can offer "unlimited" caps, with a fixed max transmission speed.

You dont get those with other internet service types. That's why you dont get that option with them.

[alexandertnt]

The OP's neighbour also got an offer for cable to be placed, so it doesn't sound like there is any restriction beyond the non-existence of the physical cable.

It might also be worth calling up about DSL. When they installed DSL around here, we were a couple of hundred meters too far away from the exchange to get it. We just called Telstra over and over (and over) until they got sick of us calling and extended the limit.

[wierd]

He's probably victim to an artificial reason then.

"Oh, on the west side of that street? That's zoned under a different right of way parcel, and we dont have zoning rights to extend service there, so no high speed internet for you! What? you dont like that answer? Well sorry-- talk to the city/territorial government about that. They leased that parcel out under contract to [That Other ISP], and they dont offer that kind of service, and thus dont have any deployments that can reach there. Sorry."

[HavingPhun]

Sorry, I had forgotten about this, was busy.

I am stuck with 2-3kbps downloads. I have heard claims of dial-up having download speeds of 54kbps. That would be lovely compared to what I have.

Do you mean you get 2-3 kilobytes per second? Small-b is bits, big-B is bytes. A 56kbps (kilobits per second) modem can get a maximum theoretical rate of 7 kilobytes per second. If you really only got 2-3kbps it would take you 1 minute to get 20K of data.

If there's decent service 200 feet away, that's close enough to get a wifi network going with a neighbor. Are you friends with anyone there who gets decent connection? You could pitch half their bill and share the connection.

I meant 4-5 kilobytes per second, I wasn't completely sure which variation meant bytes. Only problem is that in addition to the road, my driveway is about 200 feet long, and from driving down the road, and checking with my phone, everyone has those pesky (wpa2 psk?) passwords.

   I have a 2gb data plan on my phone monthly, which is at least nice when I need to download some larger things in a reasonable time, but still not enough. Also, I just think that any of the options with monthly caps, are not even worth getting. Barring the phone, which I just like to have, hehe. I believe that the people ~100 down the road from me had it paid to be put in. The main reason I would say that I haven't had a line put in is just because I am on one of the side roads, that is easier to just ignore, than run a line through.

Though I probably won't have to worry much about this when I go to college next year, someone at a verizon retailer did suggest something to me. He said that he had bought a mobile hotspot off of someone on ebay, that had no data cap, but had to pay upwards of $800 to get it. Perhaps I don't know what I am talking about. But, I find it ridiculous that in a apparent first world country, that internet is something that some people still have trouble getting access to.