Tony
Staff member
As some of the original members here know, back in the day I, as well as thousands of others (if not millions) started out on a dial up connection. The bad thing was, out here in the country, the old copper phone lines are complete trash. If it rains, you lose your phone (or internet if anyone actually still uses dial up). It is so bad, that even my grandmother got rid of her home phone that she has had for over 25 years. Same number too lol.
When I moved into my old house back in 2004 I think, dialup was all there was that I knew of. It was horrible! Thankfully by that time we had the PCI modem cards. And yea, 56k was the biggest card at the time I think. However, with the lines around my area, the main lines, being in such bad shape, I was lucky to pull down 20k. HORRIBLE!!!
That is when I found HughesNet. At the time, it was about the only "high speed" internet that you could get where I was. The big package back then was the good ole 1.5mbps down, 256k up. It was still very slow compared to todays standards, but man was it better than dialup!!! I had to sign a 2 year contract on this puppy and man was it expensive!!! And the latency was absolutely horrible at over 1000ms, or over 1 second!
Thankfully after my 2 year stint in that crap, something new had come along...
AtLink or @Link depending on how you want to type it out, they have both on their page, was a new service in the area that worked off of towers and antennas. This is why they are called @Link WiFi, because there is NO COPPER anywhere on your property running to your house, it is just a wireless signal. And with a 3mbps/1.5mbps connection, it was much better than HughesNet. And the latency was as low as 50ms with this connection. Granted, that is still horrible, but it was way better than I was used to.
This system was running on a 900Mhz wavelength and thankfully could pass through trees and such. You FPV guys know all about this. If you have seen my old videos, you will know my house was surrounded by trees! But about 1/2 mile away was a house that had a base on it, and that house could see the tower directly. It worked for the time.
Sadly though, that was the fastest speed we could get on that system. Better than before, but quickly out growing it. This is when I purchased my current house and moved here next to my grandmother to help take care of her place and so on. Here, in a very specific part of her hard, we had a direct LOS, or Line Of Sight to one of the towers. Not the same tower from my old house, but a tower none the less.
With this, we could ditch the 900Mhz antenna and we upgraded to a 5.8GHz antenna! Full bandwidth was now at our reach! But, as with HughesNet, this internet was not cheap. But I needed it! I had to have it! And I got it!
The Base package was still there, the 3/1.5 package, then there were a few others. I think that 3/1.5 was called the "Gamers Package" or something. But with most modern games, 1.5 up is just not enough. That is why I went with the 6/6 package. 6mbps up, 6mbps down. And let me tell you what, it felt like a rocketship when I was downloading.... at that time...
I also received a static IP with this connection, of course at an additional cost, because of some servers that I was playing with back then. This was fantastic! But the connection was just not that reliable since it was wireless. If it would rain, the 5.8GHz signal would die and we would lose internet. If it was foggy, same thing. It just bounced the signal way too much to keep a solid connection. And the fact that above I stated there was one place on my GRANDMAS PROPERTY was still a factor!!!
She knows nothing about internet or how to set all of this up and I damn sure was not going to pay for this stuff twice, so I have her house setup on a node on my network so she can get online. With constant drops in the early years she would always be calling me telling me the internet was out. So I was constantly having to mess with the network.
It was then that I decided to just dig a trench and lay some conduit from her place to mine and run the antenna for the internet directly into my house and then put a bridge in her house. This is about a 150' run of cat5e which is fine, but it's buried and I never though about that, until the next spring....
Because the pipe fit very snugly, and I may have to pull it up some day, I did not glue the pieces together. I also did not cap off the end over at her house, so water could get into the conduit. That's fine, the cable I ran is a direct bury cable, or so I thought.
The first spring time thunderstorm came and man was it great. Very loud lightning, heavy rain, everything you could think of from an Oklahoma spring time storm! Of course our internet went out because of the rain, but when it passed and cleared, my internet did not come on again. So I call up the company and ask then and they say the tower is up and running and that they can see my antenna just fine. I connect my laptop directly to the antenna and there it is, internet! But I was not getting anything out of the router.
Ah well, I had that router for a while, time for a new, better one. So off to bestbuy and I get the Asus AC3100, Oh yea, at that time it was the shiznit!!! They have better now, but yea, it was nice! The connection to my grandmas house was never better! The next storm hit and once again, the router died.
Okay, so my house is brand new, the electrical in the house is brand new. Even the lines coming from the street to my house is brand new, I watched them bury it and make the connections! But maybe, just maybe I was getting a power surge. So I purchased an UPS (Uninterupted Power Supply) and hung it on the wall next to my router. Not only will it provide hours of power to the router if the power goes out, but it will also protect it from surges since it is 100% active all the time.... on 4 of the 8 ports that is lol. The other 4 ports are just surge protectors, which is fine.
This went on for about a year and thankfully I purchased the replacement plan for the AC3100 because I think I'm on my 9th one now... This is when it dawned on me. Every time I have a storm, I lose internet from my router. So I start testing ports on the one I had that just lost internet, and I found only the WAN port was affected. The LAN ports were working just fine. Weird. Then it hit me, the cable is burried shallow in the ground and likely has water in the conduit and we have been having some pretty good lightning storms...
It doesn't take much to kill a port on a router. Hell there are low amperage USB sticks out there that can completely trash a computer through a USB port! So I found a known good, in line, ethernet surge protector and put it in my little network room. The next storm rolled in and it didn't kill my router. then the next, and the next, and a year and a half later we still had the same router. I do think this took its toll on the surge protector though because after that time I lost the router. So I got another one, again... lol
It was at this time I figured out that on this router, you could assign a WAN port to one of the LAN ports. And with my current router (about a year after the one I just talked about) I had to do just that. I have my WAN port on LAN1 now because WAN is dead! Again...
I have had thoughts about redoing my entire network to try and keep this from happening. I was going to run brand new lines in brand new, glued and sealed conduit with proper junction boxes as I should have done in the beginning. I had that thought almost a year ago... Wow, has it been that long.... But the thought of digging all of that up and running new lines (yes, multiple lines because I'm tired of messing with ddwrt wireless bridges so I was just going to run a line directly next door for a better connection that I would not have to deal with). I was going to do it, but kept putting it off because I have no time to do anything right now.
Then I received THE EMAIL!!!
There is a brand new service coming to my town out here in the middle of nowhere. I had been waiting for them to at least get DSL out here, but the phone lines are such crap that there is no point for AT&T to invest that kind of money way out here. But, OEC will!!!
OEC is the Oklahoma Electric Coop, the company that keeps my lights on and I have to say they have done a fantastic job over the years IMO. Well I received an email from a subsidiary, OEC Fiber. You read that correctly, FIBER!!! As in Fiber Optics! The email read that they would be starting construction in my area very soon to lay new fiber parallel to the electrical lines and this is also how it would come into the house. At this time, they are still building out the "rings" or the base for the infrastructure. But once they are done with that, they will be sending out techs to run a line directly into the house. Fiber directly into the house! Dude, this is awesome!!!
So I started doing a little reading on it and at this time there is no set deadline for when they will have this completed. And thanks to the holy hell metric crap ton of rain we have been getting lately, I'm sure the crews are not working in this. But it's fiber, I can wait lol.
Their base plan is 100mbps. No need to say up/down because ALL of their plans offer the same up as they do down. So 100mbps up and down is their BASE product! They also have the 1000mbps, or 1gbps setup. Again, same up and down!!! Dude!!!!!! They as well have dedicated IP addresses and if you need something faster than that, they can run a DEDICATED FIBER LINE into my house for even faster speeds!!!!
So after years of putting up with dial up, satellite and wifi internet, we are about to finally join the rest of the world with a direct fiber connection straight into our house. this means no more buried copper that is going to kill my router every time it storms pretty good! Glass is not conductive, it's an insulator! I love it! And I can assure you the prices are going to be about half what we are paying now for 6/6 (even though @Link has upgraded their towers and I have seen as high as 30mbps up and 30mbps down with my current connection).
I'm friggin excited!!! Matt (@callsign4223) was rubbing it in my face that he finally got gigabit internet and I will admit, I was a little jealous of that one, but now it's my turn
Now, I get to live out in the country and have the same connection or faster if I want 
Guess I need to get started on running the conduit for the fiber line that they want... Oh goodie, more work while I'm off work...
When I moved into my old house back in 2004 I think, dialup was all there was that I knew of. It was horrible! Thankfully by that time we had the PCI modem cards. And yea, 56k was the biggest card at the time I think. However, with the lines around my area, the main lines, being in such bad shape, I was lucky to pull down 20k. HORRIBLE!!!
That is when I found HughesNet. At the time, it was about the only "high speed" internet that you could get where I was. The big package back then was the good ole 1.5mbps down, 256k up. It was still very slow compared to todays standards, but man was it better than dialup!!! I had to sign a 2 year contract on this puppy and man was it expensive!!! And the latency was absolutely horrible at over 1000ms, or over 1 second!
Thankfully after my 2 year stint in that crap, something new had come along...
AtLink or @Link depending on how you want to type it out, they have both on their page, was a new service in the area that worked off of towers and antennas. This is why they are called @Link WiFi, because there is NO COPPER anywhere on your property running to your house, it is just a wireless signal. And with a 3mbps/1.5mbps connection, it was much better than HughesNet. And the latency was as low as 50ms with this connection. Granted, that is still horrible, but it was way better than I was used to.
This system was running on a 900Mhz wavelength and thankfully could pass through trees and such. You FPV guys know all about this. If you have seen my old videos, you will know my house was surrounded by trees! But about 1/2 mile away was a house that had a base on it, and that house could see the tower directly. It worked for the time.
Sadly though, that was the fastest speed we could get on that system. Better than before, but quickly out growing it. This is when I purchased my current house and moved here next to my grandmother to help take care of her place and so on. Here, in a very specific part of her hard, we had a direct LOS, or Line Of Sight to one of the towers. Not the same tower from my old house, but a tower none the less.
With this, we could ditch the 900Mhz antenna and we upgraded to a 5.8GHz antenna! Full bandwidth was now at our reach! But, as with HughesNet, this internet was not cheap. But I needed it! I had to have it! And I got it!
The Base package was still there, the 3/1.5 package, then there were a few others. I think that 3/1.5 was called the "Gamers Package" or something. But with most modern games, 1.5 up is just not enough. That is why I went with the 6/6 package. 6mbps up, 6mbps down. And let me tell you what, it felt like a rocketship when I was downloading.... at that time...
I also received a static IP with this connection, of course at an additional cost, because of some servers that I was playing with back then. This was fantastic! But the connection was just not that reliable since it was wireless. If it would rain, the 5.8GHz signal would die and we would lose internet. If it was foggy, same thing. It just bounced the signal way too much to keep a solid connection. And the fact that above I stated there was one place on my GRANDMAS PROPERTY was still a factor!!!
She knows nothing about internet or how to set all of this up and I damn sure was not going to pay for this stuff twice, so I have her house setup on a node on my network so she can get online. With constant drops in the early years she would always be calling me telling me the internet was out. So I was constantly having to mess with the network.
It was then that I decided to just dig a trench and lay some conduit from her place to mine and run the antenna for the internet directly into my house and then put a bridge in her house. This is about a 150' run of cat5e which is fine, but it's buried and I never though about that, until the next spring....
Because the pipe fit very snugly, and I may have to pull it up some day, I did not glue the pieces together. I also did not cap off the end over at her house, so water could get into the conduit. That's fine, the cable I ran is a direct bury cable, or so I thought.
The first spring time thunderstorm came and man was it great. Very loud lightning, heavy rain, everything you could think of from an Oklahoma spring time storm! Of course our internet went out because of the rain, but when it passed and cleared, my internet did not come on again. So I call up the company and ask then and they say the tower is up and running and that they can see my antenna just fine. I connect my laptop directly to the antenna and there it is, internet! But I was not getting anything out of the router.
Ah well, I had that router for a while, time for a new, better one. So off to bestbuy and I get the Asus AC3100, Oh yea, at that time it was the shiznit!!! They have better now, but yea, it was nice! The connection to my grandmas house was never better! The next storm hit and once again, the router died.
Okay, so my house is brand new, the electrical in the house is brand new. Even the lines coming from the street to my house is brand new, I watched them bury it and make the connections! But maybe, just maybe I was getting a power surge. So I purchased an UPS (Uninterupted Power Supply) and hung it on the wall next to my router. Not only will it provide hours of power to the router if the power goes out, but it will also protect it from surges since it is 100% active all the time.... on 4 of the 8 ports that is lol. The other 4 ports are just surge protectors, which is fine.
This went on for about a year and thankfully I purchased the replacement plan for the AC3100 because I think I'm on my 9th one now... This is when it dawned on me. Every time I have a storm, I lose internet from my router. So I start testing ports on the one I had that just lost internet, and I found only the WAN port was affected. The LAN ports were working just fine. Weird. Then it hit me, the cable is burried shallow in the ground and likely has water in the conduit and we have been having some pretty good lightning storms...
It doesn't take much to kill a port on a router. Hell there are low amperage USB sticks out there that can completely trash a computer through a USB port! So I found a known good, in line, ethernet surge protector and put it in my little network room. The next storm rolled in and it didn't kill my router. then the next, and the next, and a year and a half later we still had the same router. I do think this took its toll on the surge protector though because after that time I lost the router. So I got another one, again... lol
It was at this time I figured out that on this router, you could assign a WAN port to one of the LAN ports. And with my current router (about a year after the one I just talked about) I had to do just that. I have my WAN port on LAN1 now because WAN is dead! Again...
I have had thoughts about redoing my entire network to try and keep this from happening. I was going to run brand new lines in brand new, glued and sealed conduit with proper junction boxes as I should have done in the beginning. I had that thought almost a year ago... Wow, has it been that long.... But the thought of digging all of that up and running new lines (yes, multiple lines because I'm tired of messing with ddwrt wireless bridges so I was just going to run a line directly next door for a better connection that I would not have to deal with). I was going to do it, but kept putting it off because I have no time to do anything right now.
Then I received THE EMAIL!!!
There is a brand new service coming to my town out here in the middle of nowhere. I had been waiting for them to at least get DSL out here, but the phone lines are such crap that there is no point for AT&T to invest that kind of money way out here. But, OEC will!!!
OEC is the Oklahoma Electric Coop, the company that keeps my lights on and I have to say they have done a fantastic job over the years IMO. Well I received an email from a subsidiary, OEC Fiber. You read that correctly, FIBER!!! As in Fiber Optics! The email read that they would be starting construction in my area very soon to lay new fiber parallel to the electrical lines and this is also how it would come into the house. At this time, they are still building out the "rings" or the base for the infrastructure. But once they are done with that, they will be sending out techs to run a line directly into the house. Fiber directly into the house! Dude, this is awesome!!!
So I started doing a little reading on it and at this time there is no set deadline for when they will have this completed. And thanks to the holy hell metric crap ton of rain we have been getting lately, I'm sure the crews are not working in this. But it's fiber, I can wait lol.
Their base plan is 100mbps. No need to say up/down because ALL of their plans offer the same up as they do down. So 100mbps up and down is their BASE product! They also have the 1000mbps, or 1gbps setup. Again, same up and down!!! Dude!!!!!! They as well have dedicated IP addresses and if you need something faster than that, they can run a DEDICATED FIBER LINE into my house for even faster speeds!!!!
So after years of putting up with dial up, satellite and wifi internet, we are about to finally join the rest of the world with a direct fiber connection straight into our house. this means no more buried copper that is going to kill my router every time it storms pretty good! Glass is not conductive, it's an insulator! I love it! And I can assure you the prices are going to be about half what we are paying now for 6/6 (even though @Link has upgraded their towers and I have seen as high as 30mbps up and 30mbps down with my current connection).
I'm friggin excited!!! Matt (@callsign4223) was rubbing it in my face that he finally got gigabit internet and I will admit, I was a little jealous of that one, but now it's my turn
Now, I get to live out in the country and have the same connection or faster if I want Guess I need to get started on running the conduit for the fiber line that they want... Oh goodie, more work while I'm off work...
