The primary inspection Purgatory had to undergo while in escrow was verifying that we could get decent network connectivity living halfway up a mountain. The previous owners relied on HughesNet 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 sight 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 dropouts and lag. A few calls to their support desk didn’t resolve the issues completely, but we did find out we might be upgradeable. In the last three years they had built 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 sent 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 the current antenna. I’m happy to report not only was said tech super happy about our very pretty yet functional ladders, he verified that we had great LoS to a tower just a few miles away (we were 19 miles from the old tower). So he set about upgrading and in about an hour we were back up and running.
Our speeds were originally about 28Mbps/12Mbps when we moved in, but degraded over time and last week were just 10/4.
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 supercool bonus, the tech removed the manky old DirectTV dish we’d hadn’t yet taken down, and did a sweep to remove all the coax 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.