Who do you use for internet?

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John6185

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Direct TV for TV and Cox for internet and home phone. I need to combine them with Cox for a discount and eliminate the home phone.
 

Fredkrueger100

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I have verizon hotspot. I can't get anything else but satellite where I live. Speed is great until I go over my data limit. Which my son uses in about 3 days. I don't mind though. I don't use it that much. And just some info for people who might not know, you can still play online multiplayer games on Xbox and PS4 while your speed is being throttled. My son lives on destiny and other fps and it runs great.
 

dennishoddy

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I have verizon hotspot. I can't get anything else but satellite where I live. Speed is great until I go over my data limit. Which my son uses in about 3 days. I don't mind though. I don't use it that much. And just some info for people who might not know, you can still play online multiplayer games on Xbox and PS4 while your speed is being throttled. My son lives on destiny and other fps and it runs great.
Once we go over our data limit with the Exeed sat system, we go into slow down mode, not cut off completely.
Takes a minute or so for a pic to load off of this forum when it is in that mode. Really slow.
 

Shadowrider

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Once we go over our data limit with the Exeed sat system, we go into slow down mode, not cut off completely.
Takes a minute or so for a pic to load off of this forum when it is in that mode. Really slow.

That's because it's satellite and it'll never change. They only have so much capacity and it's not like they can just throw up another tower. Keep your eyes peeled for new towers around you, cell service is vastly better than a satellite service.

O/P I use Cox for internet. It's pretty smoking fast and pretty reliable too with one caveat. Get your own modem and router. I did and then I let them talk me into their super duper latest dual band kickass gateway. It's blown chunks from day one. Sometimes I have to reboot it 4 or 5 times a day and other times it'll go a week with no issues. Sometimes its streaming a HD stream on a Firestick just fine and my computer is dropped off it's channel, then I change to the other and it'll drop in a few minutes. Or not.

Get your own Motorola cable modem and the biggest, baddest, multi-band router you can find. Hook all your heavy data streaming stuff up to the 5.0g side and phones, tablets, etc. to the 2.4g side.
 

dennishoddy

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That's because it's satellite and it'll never change. They only have so much capacity and it's not like they can just throw up another tower. Keep your eyes peeled for new towers around you, cell service is vastly better than a satellite service.
The bad part of satellite is that your audio and video seems to come from two different sources. It's like a bad chinese movie with the lips moving when nobody is talking. Plus video eats up too much data, so when a thread has a video, It gets bypassed unless it looks interesting, then I have to pull it up on my phone and watch the tiny version.
 

promiseofwar

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The bad part of satellite is that your audio and video seems to come from two different sources. It's like a bad chinese movie with the lips moving when nobody is talking. Plus video eats up too much data, so when a thread has a video, It gets bypassed unless it looks interesting, then I have to pull it up on my phone and watch the tiny version.
LOL Bad chinese movie! That is what I want to avoid.
 

NightShade

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Have to agree that renting their gateway's is bad juju. You end up having it for three or four years and pay twice what it is worth in rental fees.

I have a docsis 3.0 8X4 arris cm800 along with a SuperMicro board with 8GB of ram and a couple L5630's and OpnSense as a router and a Nighthawk X6 R8000 put into AP mode for WiFi. In about 8 to 12 months I will be swapping the modem out to something like a sb8200 docsis 3.1 and with my router I can actually bond the two ethernet ports together. If I do that and toss a 10G ethernet card into my Router, FreeNAS and Desktop I will get to have some other stuff to go along with it. Intel x520's or some chelsio s310's or 320's but when I start looking at parts all I see is hundred dollar bills floating away.

Another reason why I do not like the combined router/modem's especially the rentals is it's nearly impossible to change over to another firmware of your choice. Need an extra feature on a standalone router and you can probably grab dd-wrt, opn-wrt, or tomato, with a combo you just plain get what you have. To add to that the cable company probably has a backdoor into your home side of the network and I also have a feeling that they have their own hidden AP available to their techs. Some companies have been pushing them out with a feature that allows them to use your home as a free wifi ap for customers who have signed in, I know Comcast is doing this and I believe Cox has started the same practice since I have began seeing their ap's pop up around Guthrie and OKC in the last couple months. They generally give extra speed to your home but they never really elaborate if the person connected has your external IP or if they route the traffic to another IP, which can mean the person downloading child porn could be pointing the feds directly to your home.

@dennishoddy Even with trees you may be able to get internet access if the hill they are on is in line of sight with their tower and your place is close enough to the hill to run power and ethernet over and I did one install where I bounced from a barn that had power at the top of the hill over to a couple houses about 200 yards away. And if you can set up a tower on the hill and neighbours are interested you may even be able to get free or discounted service if they use it as a distribution point, shoot they may even pay you for it on top of free service.
 

dennishoddy

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About 5 years ago a wireless company came out and attempted to set up service. Their repeater was on top of a COOP elevator about 12 miles away. They couldn't get enough signal to meet their guarentee.
Came back a week later with a big parabolic antenna, tried it again and still couldn't get enough signal. I trimmed tree limbs to open a hole, but the distance was just too far.
 

TerryMiller

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Back when we had to rely on a source other than WiFi at RV parks and such, we used a MiFi from Verizon. Like many other things, it depends on how much data one uses as to whether it is viable, but when we weren't over our data limit, the MiFi worked good for us.
 

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