anyone else losing their internet service?

[Burbert]

We have MCS Net, (Albertie) service is
good, BUTT their billing department sucks.
They seem intent on ripping off anyone
possible. Name change on account, cost
$168.oo, what a fu*kin scam.

[oneoff]

Check out what St Therese Institute, Bruno Sask has accomplished. Very nice people to talk to.

Search the agriville forums for past posts on this very topic. Its been there for several years. Apparently too deep or too futuristic for most, but it works and has been proven scalable.

There is a difference between a density of a dozen users per square mile and a million users per square mile. Are we not talking about the former situation? And that is why a solution may have failed in Puerto Rico or Philadelphia for instance; but that same equipment might just work fine in rural Sask. I hesitate to publish all the details because of obvious personal harm that could befall a person; and next to no support one could expect when it does happen to someone who wished that it was a simple matter to help others out.

There are several manufacturing vendors and prices on second hand equipment has tumbled. As you know, consumer electronics is one commodity that has come down in price to sometimes ridiculously low levels. There are good reports on new low cost, state of art equipment too.

Most solutions involve extending ISP providers service (eg. SaskTel) through your own wireless LAN network using relatively higher powered , licence free equipment using a network of access points and subcriber modules These can reach distances (line of sight) of easily two plus miles and more with directional antennas or simple "satellite" type microwave reflectors. And these distances can be incresed by connecting more radios and "hopping" to the next location. This does decrease speeds somewhat (depending on the equipment.

This works fine for your business or family use; but would currently bring the wrath of the service providers down upon yourself; especially if there was any money to be made.

However, as I have said dozens of times before; if there was any 1900's type spirit and ingenuity left, rural people would band together to solve problems and get the ear of local and provincial governments. In cases where those governments can not or will not on their own come to the rescue; there are examples of services that were provided in the past, such as the old Rural Telephone Cooperatives, snow plow clubs, even involvement in rural electrification, community recreation facilities, daycares, fire protection and on and on. The least elected officials and their departments can do is not prevent others from attempting to improve services.

There is no difference between why governments and people created those listed examples, and the current need for ubiquitous rural broadband coverage that meets our needs and desires.
Affordable, extensive rural broadband, in Sask at least, has lagging and was completely underserved from the very beginning, and we will always be seen as scarce high cost customers.

What chance is there of keeping up with what others take for granted?

If anyone is truly sincere and capapable of doing things for themselves I would later be willing to provide a telephone number at which I can be reached. And yes it is not a landline, and two or three US Netflix, Hulu, Crackle and Amazon feeds may be running concurrently, and along with all the smaller bandwidth uses.....and all several miles out in the country.

[oneoff]

And would you believe with WiFi 802.11g "full" current coverage of a township or so?
Just need more nodes, "towers" and a 90V to 480V power supply to extend futher.

[cottonpicken]

Whats driving me crazy is five people using the
internet in our house,even the three year old streams
netflix cartoons leaving my computer under
performing.

Is there any solution to this problem?

[fjlip]

oneoff, you are really up on this. Agree crap is happening to rural Sk.
Smells just like the socialists that wrote us off.
They are all the same, everyone should be herded into cities.

[oneoff]

Anyone can spend a lot of hours searching various knowledge bases. Eventually some things seem to fall into place and make a little more sense. Thanks

[oneoff]

As you know cotton; its a basic lack of adequate bandwidth that causes such problems. Someone would suggest rotating the unplugging of certain electronic devices for selected users, or denying simultaneous use to some etc. etc. But those are simplistic solutions as we all know. And it will not be a fully acceptable set of restrictions.

I have noticed that streaming video does not happen at a continuous constant speed. In fact with reasonably fast high speed connection speeds; video is downloaded is done in bursts. This works extremely well because services such as Netflix buffer continue to play several seconds even after the connection is lost. No doubt that is how good viewing experiences can be had on multiple streams at the same time.

One thing that does work is to decrease the picture quality for those cartoons. Your kids just don't need Blu-Ray quality for cartons and such; and for Hulu Plus for example; movies still look darn good when displayed in standard resolution. I've never had to change the Netflix resolution; but have done so for Hulu Plus which is capable of giving a very "high definition" resolution picture.

It took me years to take advice regarding dependable D Link routers that cost only a few dollars. Set them aside, after commenting on their years of dependable service. Invest less than $50 in a Cisco/Linksys router with 16 Megs of memory. Get one loaded with "dd-wrt" open source software. Then you have the equivalent of a router worth literally hundreds of dollars; and the features are mind boggling.

Your can monitor your bandwidth, set Quality of service (Qos which can partition out your scarce bandwidth on a selective basis to your users) and on and on.
And the LAN bandwidth usage is plotted in real time for uploads and downloads; and will show how short you are.

Run www.speakeasy.net/speedtest (using the same city destination each time you use it) to get a rough idea of how your internet service provider slows data transfer during times when other customers are using the system to get a rough idea of what limits are outside your control.

And a major, major commonly overlooked item is connecting to your wireless router through the computer/laptop wireless card instead of using a direct ethernet cord to the computer LAN port. That can more than double the speed. Maybe attenuate the router by a liitle discretionary shielding for less "sensitive" users by relocating behind a wall or moving further away from the kids; and hook yours up by ethernet wire though a wired direct connection.
In fact if you figure some interesting and useful features out; report back to the rest of us. I haven't had the ability/time to figure out but a fraction of the features.

[oneoff]

Twenty years ago; there was a information session presented to local farmers on looming herbicide resistance to commonly used chemicals. The speaker emphasized that the problem of not rotating chemical groups was analogous to having a gun with 7 or 8 bullets. You have only a limited number of shots. Fire them off in short order; or spread them out and use them for maximum effect, because there are always a few that are resistant; and sprying is effectively selecting for the survival of the resistant minority....which with continued use become the majority.

On the way out after the session one farmer quipped that when he went spraying ; he did it with the intent of killing every last weed. The farmer next to me said quietly "Talk about missing the point".

The point is that rural internet users are underserved; and are not considered by any provider (maybe Explorenet excepted) to be a viable business opportunity.

At times such options may satisfactorily meet some limited need of relatively small numbers of people. Please broaden your horizons and look at the identified problem which is

Underserving of rural areas with inadequate internet bandwidth......and then start doing and keep doing what you can to address the actual basic problem that we in rural areas face.

And that goes well beyond seeking your own personal short term solution, from amongst non-sustainable inadequate long term choices.

[sumdumguy]

Cotton, that must be murder. I could not live
without high speed entirely in my control. Might
turn me into a drunk or gambler. LOL, but no
internet poker tsk- tsk.