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I live 20 minutes outside of a major US city. The fastest I can get for home service is 20/1. It's terrible. I use my cell phone half the time. I hate what we'

I live 20 minutes outside of a major US city. The fastest I can get for home service is 20/1. It's terrible. I use my cell phone half the time. I hate what we've become. Maybe we were always this way.

inversetelecine 3y ago
Starlink available? It's not cheap, but should offer at least faster download speeds most of the time and better than 1Mbps upload from what I've read.
- gruez 3y ago
  "20 minutes outside of a major US city" is probably dense enough that starlink realistically won't work.
- madaxe_again 3y ago
  Starlink is cheap - where I am at least - and it just got cheaper. I get 300/40 with it for €40/mo., which they just reduced from €65. I mean, dog slow fixed line fibre in the nearby village is €50 a month. If ISPs aren’t careful starlink is going to eat their breakfast. It’s also faster and cheaper than LTE.
fragmede 3y ago
Have you looked into T-Mobile Home Internet?
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  Cell-based internet in the US often doesn't work well in practice -- cell coverage tends to be incredibly spotty away from major roads. In populated areas, enough people are irrationally frightened of cell radiation to NIMBY additional cell towers required for coverage.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    why on earth would this comment be downvoted? This is absolutely true in some places, particularly in smaller states. To the downvoters, please go try using cell-based internet in nearly any big city in Wyoming and let us know how that goes. Idaho has a much higher population and even much of that is way too unreliable for home internet.
    - 1123581321 3y ago
      It’s irrelevant, and wrong. 20 minutes outside a major US city wouldn’t be in Wyoming or Idaho; it would be in an area serviced by one of the newer 5G Internet offerings that gets 100-300 down. Or at least about to be. Complaining about rain and cloudy days doesn’t matter when leaving a connection capped at 20/1. In practice it does work well from the perspective of someone leaving a bad wired service.
      - Spivak 3y ago
        I don't know why you're being downvoted. Cellular home internet isn't the same thing as your cell phone; you can be 20 miles from the nearest tower without it being an issue. Def not 300 down at that distance but when all you need to beat is 20 it's no issue.
    - quickthrowman 3y ago
      For starters, there aren’t any big cities in Wyoming.
      - COGlory 3y ago
        Yeah, as a Montanan, I did a double-take at that comment.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      I didn't downvote the comment. Just wanting to address this idea: > in nearly any big city in Wyoming Every "big city" in Wyoming is smaller and way more remote than most "small cities" in the rest of the country. It is not really a good representation of the rest of the country. There are only four cities which break 30,000 people. There's 40 in Texas with over 100,000. Being 20 minutes out from a city of < 30,000 people is pretty radically different from being 20 minutes out from a city of > 1M people. There's also a question of geography when it comes to places like Montana and Idaho compared to the rest of the country. I don't know if you looked out a window but the geography of Idaho and Montana looks pretty different than the geography of Kansas, Michigan, Florida, N+S Carolina, Illinois, Ohio, etc. Its way more difficult to operate cell infrastructure in such a place, and then on top of that each valley only has a few customers to try and cover the cost. All in all, the experience of cellular infrastructure in Montana and Idaho are massively different from the majority of the rest of US consumers. I've got family in the suburbs 20 minutes out from the deep urban areas of a large city. Their main home internet is T-Mobile 5G. It has stable and low enough latency for them to work remote a remote job with videocalling, they play regular online games and they even do Playstation cloud gaming on it without issue. I've seen it being demoed at county fairgrounds far outside the big cities where they offered free wifi, I was able to get pretty stable low latencies (~25ms) at several hundred megabits of throughput with a dozen+ people using it at the same time. It might not work in every market. There's a lot of variables in place, even within a specific geographic area. But it is something viable for a large chunk of US households.
overstay8930 3y ago
If you don't even have 5G FWA as an option then you are on copium if you think you live near a major US city
cooper_ganglia 3y ago
Wow, I live more than 2 hours from a major city and even my internet is 500/50.

inversetelecine 3y ago

Starlink available? It's not cheap, but should offer at least faster download speeds most of the time and better than 1Mbps upload from what I've read.

gruez 3y ago
"20 minutes outside of a major US city" is probably dense enough that starlink realistically won't work.
madaxe_again 3y ago
Starlink is cheap - where I am at least - and it just got cheaper. I get 300/40 with it for €40/mo., which they just reduced from €65. I mean, dog slow fixed line fibre in the nearby village is €50 a month. If ISPs aren’t careful starlink is going to eat their breakfast. It’s also faster and cheaper than LTE.

fragmede 3y ago

Have you looked into T-Mobile Home Internet?

KerrAvon 3y ago
Cell-based internet in the US often doesn't work well in practice -- cell coverage tends to be incredibly spotty away from major roads. In populated areas, enough people are irrationally frightened of cell radiation to NIMBY additional cell towers required for coverage.
- freedomben 3y ago
  why on earth would this comment be downvoted? This is absolutely true in some places, particularly in smaller states. To the downvoters, please go try using cell-based internet in nearly any big city in Wyoming and let us know how that goes. Idaho has a much higher population and even much of that is way too unreliable for home internet.
  - 1123581321 3y ago
    It’s irrelevant, and wrong. 20 minutes outside a major US city wouldn’t be in Wyoming or Idaho; it would be in an area serviced by one of the newer 5G Internet offerings that gets 100-300 down. Or at least about to be. Complaining about rain and cloudy days doesn’t matter when leaving a connection capped at 20/1. In practice it does work well from the perspective of someone leaving a bad wired service.
    - Spivak 3y ago
      I don't know why you're being downvoted. Cellular home internet isn't the same thing as your cell phone; you can be 20 miles from the nearest tower without it being an issue. Def not 300 down at that distance but when all you need to beat is 20 it's no issue.
  - quickthrowman 3y ago
    For starters, there aren’t any big cities in Wyoming.
    - COGlory 3y ago
      Yeah, as a Montanan, I did a double-take at that comment.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    I didn't downvote the comment. Just wanting to address this idea: > in nearly any big city in Wyoming Every "big city" in Wyoming is smaller and way more remote than most "small cities" in the rest of the country. It is not really a good representation of the rest of the country. There are only four cities which break 30,000 people. There's 40 in Texas with over 100,000. Being 20 minutes out from a city of < 30,000 people is pretty radically different from being 20 minutes out from a city of > 1M people. There's also a question of geography when it comes to places like Montana and Idaho compared to the rest of the country. I don't know if you looked out a window but the geography of Idaho and Montana looks pretty different than the geography of Kansas, Michigan, Florida, N+S Carolina, Illinois, Ohio, etc. Its way more difficult to operate cell infrastructure in such a place, and then on top of that each valley only has a few customers to try and cover the cost. All in all, the experience of cellular infrastructure in Montana and Idaho are massively different from the majority of the rest of US consumers. I've got family in the suburbs 20 minutes out from the deep urban areas of a large city. Their main home internet is T-Mobile 5G. It has stable and low enough latency for them to work remote a remote job with videocalling, they play regular online games and they even do Playstation cloud gaming on it without issue. I've seen it being demoed at county fairgrounds far outside the big cities where they offered free wifi, I was able to get pretty stable low latencies (~25ms) at several hundred megabits of throughput with a dozen+ people using it at the same time. It might not work in every market. There's a lot of variables in place, even within a specific geographic area. But it is something viable for a large chunk of US households.

overstay8930 3y ago

If you don't even have 5G FWA as an option then you are on copium if you think you live near a major US city

cooper_ganglia 3y ago

Wow, I live more than 2 hours from a major city and even my internet is 500/50.