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I've been looking into buying a house and moving to Vermont. The topic of fuller, better internet coverage seems to come up every few years. So I'm a little ske

I've been looking into buying a house and moving to Vermont. The topic of fuller, better internet coverage seems to come up every few years. So I'm a little skeptical to see it now. I'm not sure I'd consider it a blocker to moving there, even if I'm dependent on the internet for work. I'm assuming I'll always be able to lease an office within an hour drive of the house. I wonder how practical satellite options like Viasat are says it gets 12-100Mbps download across Vermont. That's as good as Comcast's consumer broadband gets you in Philly. If there are any folks here who own and live on land in Vermont I'd love to ask you more about how/where you're living and working, if you wouldn't mind.

mauvehaus 6y ago
Moved to VT in early January from the Boston area, in what was by sheer chance, a very timely move. We rent. We live in a bit of an odd development/area. Think of it as a golf course community minus the golf course: under a dozen homes, low density, and private roads. We quite like it, but it's an unusual arrangement from a utilities standpoint. We have Comcast. The other options were VTEL via satellite and cellular wireless. We struck cellular wireless from the list for reasons we're all well familiar with ("unlimited", caps, speed restrictions, cost). VTEL was going to be complicated because we have a metal roof, among other things. We're told that unofficially we can get line of sight to nearby VTEL infra, but convincing VTEL of this seemed like a lot of work while we were moving. We got ridiculously lucky on begin able to get Comcast. The pole our cable comes off of is literally the last pole with coax on it. In this regard, I suppose I'm replying to you from the actual end of the internet. There is possibly one other house within the radius of the pole that Comcast is wiling to pull a line. That's 300' for a temp line, which they did for us because the ground was frozen and the couldn't bury a line when they did the original install. I don't know if it's longer if they can do a direct bury. The latency and throughput aren't as good as they were in the Boston area, but it's good enough. Zoom calls tend towards blurry, but Netflix and Youtube are certainly serviceable. Instagram videos tend to pause a lot for buffering. Bad websites are apocalyptically bad. Joann.com, for example, is horrendously slow. I'm guessing they never worried too much about e-commerce until quite recently. I'm told that the cable company put coax up to the development way back in the day, but that nobody actually subscribed, and so the line was never brought any farther in.
- csharptwdec19 6y ago
  > I'm told that the cable company put coax up to the development way back in the day, but that nobody actually subscribed, and so the line was never brought any farther in. That happens, especially if it's a lower density area. Usually the way it goes is if the region is close to the minimum 'homes passed/mile' metric they'll do a minimum build-out, that way if there's enough interest and/or HPM goes above threshold it's not absurdly expensive to finish the buildout (and/or buildout as people actually request service.)
sokoloff 6y ago
When comparing satellite to terrestrial broadband, you can't just look at bandwidth. Latency (ping time) is possibly even more important, both absolute latency and variability of latency. You can have plenty of bandwidth to host an audio or video call and have an utterly terrible experience from latency/jitter/packet loss.
- matt_the_bass 6y ago
  I frequently have phone calls with customers via sat phones. The latency is pretty tough. With experience one learns to leave lots of pauses to allow for the other person to interject if needed. But it’s still frustrating. Then I think about the latency that would be there with ANY communications 30 years ago and think “wow! This is amazing!”
trazmcnaz 6y ago
I am in Chittenden County just outside of Burlington and even areas here may have spotty broadband connection at best once you get outside of the bigger areas and in-between Chittenden and Addison or Franklin counties. I would suggest checking with Comcast if you want the best internet around (Unless you can get into Burlington, or some areas that have their own Fiber lines like Hinesburg in some areas) I have coworkers that have DSL and can't do video meetings currently if anyone else at the house is using the internet also, but if its just one person than most the internet options are ok. They did just launch an initiative with Comcast (We will see how well that actually goes) to get broadband to a number of smaller towns in Vermont, mostly around the Addison area. As for Satellite options here, I will caution you against them unless you want a frustrating experience because depending on where you live, you may live in a valley covered by trees, and with our cloud coverage and rain patterns, it could be a bit of a bummer but again, if it's just a single person, I've known a few that have been able to make it work for the most part. Again, depending on where you live here it may be better but I know people getting less than 10Mbps down on their satellite connection. Leasing office space may be a challenge if you are not near a bigger area. We don't have co-working spaces and rent is notoriously high here for both residential and commercial.
driverdan 6y ago
VT has a surprising amount of Gb coverage considering its low population density. There are quite a few small ISPs providing fiber. That said, there are areas with very poor connectivity too. You have to be careful.
vtthrowaway2519 6y ago
>If there are any folks here who own and live on land in Vermont I'd love to ask you more about how/where you're living and working, if you wouldn't mind. I was born in Burlington and after leaving for a decade-ish moved back a good 11 years ago now. I've got a house maybe 20-30 min from Burlington, family has a farm up towards the Northeast Kingdom and I've got friends scattered around the state as well as projects I've done in various places. As I said in another comment on this topic, there is 1G symmetric fiber at my house now with a pretty great local company. There are other fiber efforts scattered around the state as well, like ECFiber who are based in South Royalton. Vermont broadband can definitely be very feast or famine in some cases, with fiber options in surprising areas but the instant you get a bit farther away you're down to rapidly degrading DSL and/or maybe cable. Verizon/ATT/Tmobile cellular coverage maps in Vermont are also a flagrant lie, don't count on anything in many places let alone LTE. Lots of shadows from mountains. Basically, if you just pick a property at random based on other factors it'll be hit or miss. You can't -count- on broadband anywhere you want, though presumably Starlink will change that at some point since Vermont is fairly far north and low density. But if you do some research first you should definitely be able to find property with good options, tons of beautiful places including fairly rural ones where you've got good choice. You just have to take that into account in your research. And of course right now a lot of installations are on hold/backed up, you'll want to check on timelines there (it'll help if no in-home access is needed).
evandev 6y ago
I'm moving to Southwest Vermont on the 29th of May. So far the best internet provider we can get is consolidated communications at 25Mbps with a two year contract. I think we will be going with AT&T enterprise unlimited cellular internet, which the sim card can be had on ebay.
- nkurz 6y ago
  > AT&T enterprise unlimited cellular internet, which the sim card can be had on ebay Depending on your exact location relative to network towers that might work fine. I'm in Southern Vermont (Readboro) and had success buying $50 SIM cards from here: https://www.ebay.com/itm/4G-LTE-ATT-Unlimited-HOTSPOT-Data-50-UNTHROTTLED-NO-CAPS-TRUTLY-UNLIMITED/223079075380 https://www.ebay.com/itm/4G-LTE-ATT-Unlimited-HOTSPOT-Data-5.... I eventually ended up going with VTel Wireless instead: https://www.vtelwireless.com https://www.vtelwireless.com. Speeds were about the same, it was a bit cheaper, and felt better to use a local company. I needed a good MIMO antenna to get good speeds with either. Good luck!
  - evandev 6y ago
    When I went to look at houses, I ended buying a netgear nighthawk and got a sim card from that same ebay seller to test signal at potential homes. I'll be in the North Bennington/Shaftsbury area. I ended up getting a high gain mimo antenna to increase speeds based on experience with the same setup on an island on the St. Lawrence river. Looks like from my house I should have a line of site 3.5 miles to one of VTel's points. I might have to go local once I finish the move.
nekbroadband 6y ago
I live one mile from town center in Danville and my only option is 7/1 DSL from Consolidated. I run a technology company out of the house and if I have to push up a build, it can take 8 hours or more. There is a coax line not 400 feet from my property and my 4 neighbors and I offered Charter $6000 toward their build costs as well as long term contracts and they told us to get lost. They simply do not care about rural America.
- eatonphil 6y ago
  Why don't you have servers in a colo or the cloud to manage builds?
kyralis 6y ago
I'm in the Woodstock area with access to EC Fiber, which is wonderful (another comment noted that they're looking at using EC Fiber as a model for this program.) 750 symmetric fiber. We had a couple days of outages last year, and the customer service response from EC Fiber is just a completely different thing than Comcast. We got a full post-mortem on what went wrong, why it happened, and what they were doing to fix it moving forward, as well as a bill credit. Other than that period, which was related to an aging line needing replacement, service has been rock solid. I'm generally downloading and uploading gigabytes per day with no issues, and I regularly see real-life 45MB/sec real-life download speeds. Access to a high-speed internet connection was definitely a priority when we were looking for property, and it took some effort to get realtors to understand that we really did mean it when it came to access.
DFHippie 6y ago
Things are fine in Brattleboro provided you aren't too far out of town. I understand things are a bit spottier if you live too far out.

mauvehaus 6y ago

Moved to VT in early January from the Boston area, in what was by sheer chance, a very timely move. We rent. We live in a bit of an odd development/area. Think of it as a golf course community minus the golf course: under a dozen homes, low density, and private roads. We quite like it, but it's an unusual arrangement from a utilities standpoint. We have Comcast. The other options were VTEL via satellite and cellular wireless. We struck cellular wireless from the list for reasons we're all well familiar with ("unlimited", caps, speed restrictions, cost). VTEL was going to be complicated because we have a metal roof, among other things. We're told that unofficially we can get line of sight to nearby VTEL infra, but convincing VTEL of this seemed like a lot of work while we were moving. We got ridiculously lucky on begin able to get Comcast. The pole our cable comes off of is literally the last pole with coax on it. In this regard, I suppose I'm replying to you from the actual end of the internet. There is possibly one other house within the radius of the pole that Comcast is wiling to pull a line. That's 300' for a temp line, which they did for us because the ground was frozen and the couldn't bury a line when they did the original install. I don't know if it's longer if they can do a direct bury. The latency and throughput aren't as good as they were in the Boston area, but it's good enough. Zoom calls tend towards blurry, but Netflix and Youtube are certainly serviceable. Instagram videos tend to pause a lot for buffering. Bad websites are apocalyptically bad. Joann.com, for example, is horrendously slow. I'm guessing they never worried too much about e-commerce until quite recently. I'm told that the cable company put coax up to the development way back in the day, but that nobody actually subscribed, and so the line was never brought any farther in.

csharptwdec19 6y ago
> I'm told that the cable company put coax up to the development way back in the day, but that nobody actually subscribed, and so the line was never brought any farther in. That happens, especially if it's a lower density area. Usually the way it goes is if the region is close to the minimum 'homes passed/mile' metric they'll do a minimum build-out, that way if there's enough interest and/or HPM goes above threshold it's not absurdly expensive to finish the buildout (and/or buildout as people actually request service.)

sokoloff 6y ago

When comparing satellite to terrestrial broadband, you can't just look at bandwidth. Latency (ping time) is possibly even more important, both absolute latency and variability of latency. You can have plenty of bandwidth to host an audio or video call and have an utterly terrible experience from latency/jitter/packet loss.

matt_the_bass 6y ago
I frequently have phone calls with customers via sat phones. The latency is pretty tough. With experience one learns to leave lots of pauses to allow for the other person to interject if needed. But it’s still frustrating. Then I think about the latency that would be there with ANY communications 30 years ago and think “wow! This is amazing!”

trazmcnaz 6y ago

I am in Chittenden County just outside of Burlington and even areas here may have spotty broadband connection at best once you get outside of the bigger areas and in-between Chittenden and Addison or Franklin counties. I would suggest checking with Comcast if you want the best internet around (Unless you can get into Burlington, or some areas that have their own Fiber lines like Hinesburg in some areas) I have coworkers that have DSL and can't do video meetings currently if anyone else at the house is using the internet also, but if its just one person than most the internet options are ok. They did just launch an initiative with Comcast (We will see how well that actually goes) to get broadband to a number of smaller towns in Vermont, mostly around the Addison area. As for Satellite options here, I will caution you against them unless you want a frustrating experience because depending on where you live, you may live in a valley covered by trees, and with our cloud coverage and rain patterns, it could be a bit of a bummer but again, if it's just a single person, I've known a few that have been able to make it work for the most part. Again, depending on where you live here it may be better but I know people getting less than 10Mbps down on their satellite connection. Leasing office space may be a challenge if you are not near a bigger area. We don't have co-working spaces and rent is notoriously high here for both residential and commercial.

driverdan 6y ago

VT has a surprising amount of Gb coverage considering its low population density. There are quite a few small ISPs providing fiber. That said, there are areas with very poor connectivity too. You have to be careful.

vtthrowaway2519 6y ago

>If there are any folks here who own and live on land in Vermont I'd love to ask you more about how/where you're living and working, if you wouldn't mind. I was born in Burlington and after leaving for a decade-ish moved back a good 11 years ago now. I've got a house maybe 20-30 min from Burlington, family has a farm up towards the Northeast Kingdom and I've got friends scattered around the state as well as projects I've done in various places. As I said in another comment on this topic, there is 1G symmetric fiber at my house now with a pretty great local company. There are other fiber efforts scattered around the state as well, like ECFiber who are based in South Royalton. Vermont broadband can definitely be very feast or famine in some cases, with fiber options in surprising areas but the instant you get a bit farther away you're down to rapidly degrading DSL and/or maybe cable. Verizon/ATT/Tmobile cellular coverage maps in Vermont are also a flagrant lie, don't count on anything in many places let alone LTE. Lots of shadows from mountains. Basically, if you just pick a property at random based on other factors it'll be hit or miss. You can't -count- on broadband anywhere you want, though presumably Starlink will change that at some point since Vermont is fairly far north and low density. But if you do some research first you should definitely be able to find property with good options, tons of beautiful places including fairly rural ones where you've got good choice. You just have to take that into account in your research. And of course right now a lot of installations are on hold/backed up, you'll want to check on timelines there (it'll help if no in-home access is needed).

evandev 6y ago

I'm moving to Southwest Vermont on the 29th of May. So far the best internet provider we can get is consolidated communications at 25Mbps with a two year contract. I think we will be going with AT&T enterprise unlimited cellular internet, which the sim card can be had on ebay.

nkurz 6y ago
> AT&T enterprise unlimited cellular internet, which the sim card can be had on ebay Depending on your exact location relative to network towers that might work fine. I'm in Southern Vermont (Readboro) and had success buying $50 SIM cards from here: https://www.ebay.com/itm/4G-LTE-ATT-Unlimited-HOTSPOT-Data-50-UNTHROTTLED-NO-CAPS-TRUTLY-UNLIMITED/223079075380 https://www.ebay.com/itm/4G-LTE-ATT-Unlimited-HOTSPOT-Data-5.... I eventually ended up going with VTel Wireless instead: https://www.vtelwireless.com https://www.vtelwireless.com. Speeds were about the same, it was a bit cheaper, and felt better to use a local company. I needed a good MIMO antenna to get good speeds with either. Good luck!
- evandev 6y ago
  When I went to look at houses, I ended buying a netgear nighthawk and got a sim card from that same ebay seller to test signal at potential homes. I'll be in the North Bennington/Shaftsbury area. I ended up getting a high gain mimo antenna to increase speeds based on experience with the same setup on an island on the St. Lawrence river. Looks like from my house I should have a line of site 3.5 miles to one of VTel's points. I might have to go local once I finish the move.

nekbroadband 6y ago

I live one mile from town center in Danville and my only option is 7/1 DSL from Consolidated. I run a technology company out of the house and if I have to push up a build, it can take 8 hours or more. There is a coax line not 400 feet from my property and my 4 neighbors and I offered Charter $6000 toward their build costs as well as long term contracts and they told us to get lost. They simply do not care about rural America.

eatonphil 6y ago
Why don't you have servers in a colo or the cloud to manage builds?

kyralis 6y ago

I'm in the Woodstock area with access to EC Fiber, which is wonderful (another comment noted that they're looking at using EC Fiber as a model for this program.) 750 symmetric fiber. We had a couple days of outages last year, and the customer service response from EC Fiber is just a completely different thing than Comcast. We got a full post-mortem on what went wrong, why it happened, and what they were doing to fix it moving forward, as well as a bill credit. Other than that period, which was related to an aging line needing replacement, service has been rock solid. I'm generally downloading and uploading gigabytes per day with no issues, and I regularly see real-life 45MB/sec real-life download speeds. Access to a high-speed internet connection was definitely a priority when we were looking for property, and it took some effort to get realtors to understand that we really did mean it when it came to access.

DFHippie 6y ago

Things are fine in Brattleboro provided you aren't too far out of town. I understand things are a bit spottier if you live too far out.