Yearning for bandwidth in the Lehigh Valley
Kate and I have discovered one down-side to living in the semi-rural Lehigh Valley. Reasonably priced (true) high speed Internet access is impossible to come by. Our cable company, Service Electric Cable TV (SECTV), offers what I would term a "passable" package of 6Mbps downstream and 400kbps upstream. Bundled with their digital cable service and a one-year contract the price is a very reasonable $80 per month with taxes. The download speed is quite sufficient, but the upload speed is significantly lacking.
What about a user that needs more than 400kbps of upload speed? Forget it. It will cost at least $80 per month (plus $125 installation) to double the upload speed (but it will actually decrease the download bandwidth). To get anything above 400kbps, one needs to invest in commercial service instead of residential service. Never mind that the service is still provided by SECTV's partner, PenTeleData. According to the sales rep at PenTeleData, he has not heard of plans to upgrade the network to DOCSIS 2.0, so I doubt that the speeds will improve any time soon.
Consider, for a moment, that Comcast's lowest service broadband tier provides about the same downstream bandwidth but 1Mbps upstream. Service Electric's best offering today is what Comcast offered about 3 years ago.
What about FiOS? Nope. DSL? Nope. With the lots in our development at 1 acre apiece, the houses are spread quite far apart. To run fiber to every house would be expensive in such a low density neighborhood. And we are apparently too far from the telephone CO to have DSL.
What are our other options? A full T1 line (1.5 Mbps) would be $300 per month. That's a little too rich for our pocketbook. I've looked into a wireless provider, CAWInet, but they seem to not want our money. Filling out a contact form earlier this week on their Web site promising a response "within one business day" went unanswered. A call to their sales phone number today went to voicemail.
What about a user that needs more than 400kbps of upload speed? Forget it. It will cost at least $80 per month (plus $125 installation) to double the upload speed (but it will actually decrease the download bandwidth). To get anything above 400kbps, one needs to invest in commercial service instead of residential service. Never mind that the service is still provided by SECTV's partner, PenTeleData. According to the sales rep at PenTeleData, he has not heard of plans to upgrade the network to DOCSIS 2.0, so I doubt that the speeds will improve any time soon.
Consider, for a moment, that Comcast's lowest service broadband tier provides about the same downstream bandwidth but 1Mbps upstream. Service Electric's best offering today is what Comcast offered about 3 years ago.
What about FiOS? Nope. DSL? Nope. With the lots in our development at 1 acre apiece, the houses are spread quite far apart. To run fiber to every house would be expensive in such a low density neighborhood. And we are apparently too far from the telephone CO to have DSL.
What are our other options? A full T1 line (1.5 Mbps) would be $300 per month. That's a little too rich for our pocketbook. I've looked into a wireless provider, CAWInet, but they seem to not want our money. Filling out a contact form earlier this week on their Web site promising a response "within one business day" went unanswered. A call to their sales phone number today went to voicemail.
posted by Scott C. Savett at
10:57 AM
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