4 ms·

My mother lives in rural Oklahoma, and her Internet connection (2-3Mbps/1Mbps for $60 a month) is a WiMax antenna on the roof of her house, pointed at another a

• jonah 9y ago
  My parents had dial up until about 2 years ago. On a good day, they'd get 28.8, but typically it was more like 14.4 kbps! When it rained and water got in the phone lines, they got nothing at all. And yes, they'd try to get the phone company to fix the lines often to no avail. They are only 20 minutes from town but it's too far to get DSL or cable or anything like that and the terrain is too hilly for fixed wireless which did become available in their county four or five years ago. They finally broke down and got satellite internet a couple years ago but it's slow and expensive.
  • mrbill 9y ago
    When Mom was stuck with using a modem, I bought her a (literal) stack of USR Courier v.Everything modems (cheap, since a lot of ISPs in Austin were ditching dialup service around that time). She had lightning hits and storms so often that I told her "if you try to dial up and the modem isn't working, just unplug it, toss it in the trash, and plug in the next one off the stack." Had to do this even with surge protection inline for both power and phone line. Only in the past couple of years have I been able to get an LTE phone signal at her house (only while standing on the porch, not inside the building) and that's from a tower a few miles away...