The primary inspection Purgatory had to undergo when we were in escrow was verifying that we could get decent network connectivity while living halfway up a mountain. The previous owners had relied on Hugesnet (satellite service) which is so laggy we would never consider it. Enter Etheric. A wireless PTP provider who happily sent a tech out who confirmed we had line of site to a couple of their towers.
So immediately after taking possession we scheduled Etheric to install service, and for the last three years we were happy enough with our connectivity. In the last two months though we started experiencing drop outs and lag. A few calls to their support desk and a chat with them didn’t resolve the issues completely but we did find out we might be upgradeable. In the last three years they had built out more towers and we might be able to point to a closer one and take advantage of their new and faster service plans.
This past Monday when their tech support was trying to trace the cause of our woes they ended up sending out a tech who had finished another job early. He was to check if we had LoS to one of the closer towers and if not check current antenna. I’m happy to report not only was said tech super happy about our very pretty yet functional ladders, he also verified that we had great LoS to a tower just a few miles away — we were 19miles from the old tower. So he set about with the upgrade and in about an hour we were back up and running.
Our speeds were originally about 28Mbps/12Mbps when we first moved in but had degraded and as of last week were just 10/4. Well now….now we have a network of a completely different sort….
That’s right: 85Mbps/43Mbps. This might rekindle my interest in PVP gaming.
As a super cool added bonus, the tech removed the manky old DirectTV dish we’d hadn’t taken down from up there when we first moved in and did a sweep to remove all the co-ax runs to the 9 separate TVs in the main house, 2 in the studio building and 2 in the garage (although only one of those worked.) I tossed him up a length of rope so he could lower it down more easily and it’s now sitting in the latest pile awaiting dumpster number 18’s arrival.