Hello again! I posted an entry back in September 2010 about cutting the cables at home in regards to phones and Internet. This post is a follow-up to that, just to let you know how it's going.

We have changed some things around, but we are still cable-free in terms of both services! We dropped the satellite Internet, since it proved to be unreliable when I needed it most -- during a rainstorm of course -- to remote into the library and see what was going on with one of the servers. Plus, we were consuming enough data that we were starting to bump into our 17 GB cap that Wildblue imposes on its customers. Don't think we weren't happy to have the 1.5 Mbs download speeds when the weather was clear, but that data cap is a deal-breaker for an online family! Additionally, the modem seemed to behave a lot better after we signed up for the Pro package, which I think just paid them to ramp up the transmission power from the satellite to the ground station. And please don't think this isn't a great service; it is well worth a look if you live in an area like several residents here, where there is a state line involved (Tennessee) and the carriers don't want to infringe on territory by placing cell towers too close to their competitors or internal territorial divisions! This creates a fringe area where no one gets good cellular reception, and the cable companies don't want to run miles of line for a few subscribers, and where the only phone company in town doesn't want to invest in equipment for the same reasons.

Anyway, my brother-in-law is the owner of the Radio Shack & Scottsville Cellular store in Scottsville, KY, and he is a dealer for our regional cellular company, Bluegrass Cellular. Bluegrass has a nifty device that allows you to surf the Internet at speeds that rivals basic DSL service. For the purposes of this discussion, basic DSL service offerings are those that advertise speeds of "up to" 3Mbps. Most basic DSL packages are in the neighborhood of 512Kbps - 1.5Mbps, so it is a fair comparison in my eyes.

The Axess MV400 is a wireless broadband router that uses the cellular phone network to provide high-speed wireless Internet access. Bluegrass Cellular is the ONLY cellular provider in our area that has 3G or better speeds, and they have partnered with Verizon to bring 4G to town later on. Once that happens, I may jump ship with my cell phone, since AT&T have no interest in a small rural community -- they've said as much -- which tells me that they are no longer concerned with growing the cellular business. If AT&T were concerned, they would be pursuing every line of revenue.

So to keep this from becoming another AT&T-bashing session, let me point out that we are extremely happy with our new service. We get download speeds in the neighborhood of 3.5Mbs, which rivals mid-range DSL service, and uploads as high as 1.8Mbps, which beats most basic DSL offerings. On a consistency note, our average download speed is around 900Kbps, with our uploads in the neighborhood of 512Kbps.

Since we ditched our satellite TV service, we have watched all our shows over the Internet. This service is hands-down better than satellite Internet could ever offer, in large part to the higher bandwidth and low latency in the connection! Whether it's Netflix on the Wii, HD video from YouTube, Hulu or a network's offerings, the videos load relatively well and have few pauses or buffering issues unless someone else in the house is online watching videos also. Since I don't watch NASCAR or much baseball, I guess I'll have to wait & see what football season brings as far as sports goes.

This service is also very beneficial to me professionally. I have used the Linux operating system (OS) & open source software almost exclusively for the last five years, and I really like to experiment with the new & updated OSes that come out from time to time. As you can imagine, these files are not small! I have downloaded and used one that is over 8GB in size, and that much data takes hours to download on all but the fastest connections.

The ability to download any Linux distribution, burn it to USB/CD/DVD, and try it without installing it are the biggest reasons I switched from Windows. I can do this all for the cost of a CD, DVD or USB flash drive, and a little of my time. I can try any piece of open source software I want, at any time, without installing it on my hard drive. When I'm done, I simply restart the computer, remove the live media, and boot up normally. You can't do that with Windows or Mac OSX at all, unless you have a lot of patience, don't mind backing up all your data, installing the OS, restoring your data, and then rinse, lather, repeat for each version you want to try. And then there's the money and time to shop for the software to make Windows & OSX productive! For that price, I will continue to experiment, I will continue to be vendor-free, and use my computer the way I want.

Thanks, Bluegrass, for the ability to have high speed Internet in an otherwise under-served area!

Until next time...