Country Living & Internet Connections

As professional bloggers, we are online ALL the time. We’re working on our sites, we’re researching new articles, we’re answering email. We need a connection we can depend on, especially for the Twitter parties we’ve been co-hosting lately.

Well, that reliable connection is easier said than done when you live in the country.for us, there are many, many advantages of country living…but a fast and dependable Internet connection is not one of them.

Many people have asked us what kind of Internet connections we have so we wanted to share. Of course, there are no cable services out here; we have satellite television service (after years of the jumbo dish in the yard.) It’s pretty reliable except during a rain storm which, sadly for the last year, has been all too rare due to our drought.

For many years, we’ve had satellite Internet connections; we used HughesNet so we had this small dish on roof near our offices (they were originally Direcway but now they’re HughesNet):

We had a business plan but it still had a daily cap which we exceeded on occasion. Along with a hefty price, we also had a problem with reliability, especially on cloudy days.

Satellite signals have a long distance to travel, so there is often a delay.  Plus, it’s more difficult (and therefore expensive) to install than DSL or cable options.

We’ve recently changed to a Wireless Broadband service; basically it bounces a radio signal off of a nearby radio tower and we pick it up with a receiver at the tip top of an old television antenna we have on the second floor of our home:

We’ve been really happy with the service, so far. We had one outage that lasted a few days when lightning struck the radio tower (what are the odds??) Other than that, service has been very reliable. So reliable, in fact, that we’re trying to decide if we want to continue our backup Internet service, which is a Sprint broadband modem (a tiny USB device). We’re at the very edge of the coverage area for it so it has its good days and its bad days. The primary drawback to it, however, is the fact that there’s a monthly cap on usage (plus the fact that we’re paying for TWO Internet services!)

So that’s a look at country Internet service. It’s not a very pretty picture…but we figure that’s the price we pay for getting to live in the country!