High-Speed Internet Headaches in Rural Clayton

The ubiquitous high-speed Internet connection, or broadband, is something most of us give little thought to anymore. It has been reduced to the banal ads I hear on television and radio from service providers all claiming to being the fastest.

Digital subscriber lines (DSL) and cable providers offer service to most homes for reasonable prices. It’s hard to imagine what the content rich Internet would be like without it. Can you say dial-up?

However, for people who live in rural areas beyond the physical limits of DSL and cable, there are few choices. What’s more, the few choices available just don’t measure up.

My family moved to Morgan Territory Road in Clayton in 1999. We were using a dial-up connection in our home in Pittsburg. Broadband was just becoming more available to the masses. After moving, I figured this was the logical time to ramp up to light speed.

I dreamed of being able to jump from one page to the next without having to go outside and wash my car while waiting for a page to load.

I called the local phone provider and cable service just before our move, checkbook at the ready. But my dreams came crashing to Earth when I learned that neither DSL or cable would be available where I was moving for six months.

The reason was that for either service to work properly, a home must be within about 18,000 feet of the office from which the signal originates. This covers more than 80 percent of the homes in the country. But not us.

Funny thing was we live only seven minutes from downtown Clayton.

Nevertheless, both service providers assured me that the equipment to boost signal strength to my area was in place. They just needed to finish the final wiring. 

I thought to myself, it's just six months. Dial-up worked pretty well for sending and receiving e-mails. However adding an attachment required some planning and viewing web pages sometimes took an entire evening.

So six months later, I called again, only to be told it would be another six months. The six-month story continued for three years.

By early 2003, I began to wonder if something was going on that I should know about. I decided to stop calling the sales office and drove to the local phone company’s service yard. I spoke with a very knowledgeable supervisor who listened to my story. He sadly told me the phone company had no plans to bring DSL to our area. We were beyond the physical limitations of the service.

Using my investigative skills, I later confirmed this information with the cable service provider.

I had been duped by salespeople. What else is new?

In my search for an alternative, I came across a satellite-based broadband service run by the same company that provided my family with television, DirecTV, a service that has functioned flawlessly for more than 12 years.

The Internet service was called DirecWay.

The speed was only about 50-60 percent of DSL but that was light years faster than dial-up. Within one week, the installer was at our home putting up the dish and pulling cable to our den.

The service worked well and we were jetting across cyberspace immediately. We could even have more than one computer on the web at the same time, thanks to a wireless router.

The only problem with the service would occur during a heavy rain. Unlike its television sibling, which seemed immune to this meteorological phenomenon, DirecWay suffered badly during rain storms. All things being equal, however, it was tolerable given our location.

The decent Internet speed lasted until the summer of 2006. Suddenly, we started experiencing a loss of service for weeks. By this time, DirecWay had morphed into HughesNet. With the marginal help of its technical support, it was determined that the problem was with our outdated modem. This meant the dish had to be replaced.

Several hundred dollars and a new modem and dish installation later, we were up and running. This lasted only about a year; then, the real fun began.

Off and on for the next three and a half years, we experienced service ranging from nonexistent to a level more like dial-up. Conversations with HughesNet technical support was like talking to the HAL 9000. I kept thinking I was about to be dumped into the vacuum of cyberspace without an Internet connection.

It became a ritual to travel to the to acquire an Internet connection for checking e-mails and downloading bank statements.  

I searched for other alternatives (Wild Blue, AirCloud), but nothing worked.

I called independent installers and the consensus was my dish was out of alignment, something that had been addressed multiple times by contractors working for HughesNet.

After revealing my findings to HughesNet, a technician was sent to our home. He realigned the dish (for the third time) and determined that the modem was defective. He replaced the modem and we were back in the air again.

This was just last fall and so far the service has been excellent.

Last year, while attending the Corn Fest in Brentwood, I was lured into a Comcast broadband booth. A representative asked me to sign up for the company's broadband service, which he claimed was available anywhere. When I told him my story, he said there was service in my neighborhood.

Laughing to myself, I signed up for service. The rep told me a service representative would contact me in three days to set up the installation.

I never received a call.

In the meantime, I bask in the comfort of full Internet service. I know living rural has some benefits but a reliable broadband connection is not one of them.

It’s all right though. I just got an e-mail from AT&T DSL offering me three months of free service if I signed up with them today. Yeah, right.