house hunting in the country - internet problems

[vi edit]

And from somebody who "lived in the country" there are other things to consider to. Is the next place on well water and septic? With three kids that's a lot of showers and laundry. If you have a shallow well with a low flow rate you'll be hauling water every week during the summer. Plus you have septic tank issues with the lady folks flushing lady folk things down the toilet.

What's the busing schedule look like there? Or will you guys be taking them in to school and picking up each day?

 

[vi edit]

Personally I think you're going to have way better memories in a house on some acreage than remembering your kid locked in their room on their tablet. But you'll still have internet for facebook and such. Just have to have some restraint.

Meh. I used to live in a rural subdivsion. Each place was 1-2 acres in size. Huge back yards with many of us backing to the woods. My kids were one of two other houses out of about 5 that regularly had kids playing outside when weather permitted. A lot of them just stayed inside and vegged out.

We got tired of the drive where we last lived (20 miles each way to town) each day and moved to a place where we lived in town. Our subdivision has it's own pool and from May-September each year we head down there almost every day after school and on weekends and swim and socialize. It's a great place to make acquaintances with neighbors and for your kids to hang out with other kids from their schools.

I grew up on a farm. My wife grew up on 10 acres in the country. You didn't meet *anyone*. No friends were close. Your parents moved there/stayed there because they were psuedo recluses. And you just didn't have chances to socialize well. Independence is nice and all...but I think my kids will be better in the long run being more social and while doing it still "outside".

 

[RaistlinZ]

OP has to make a tradeoff decision. Deal with slow internet or find someplace closer to town. He's trying to have it both ways, which isn't going to work.

 

[boomerang]

sometimes even if you offer to pay they will say no.

I have 1 friend who lives maybe 1/2 a mile from where the cable line runs (he is on the wrong side or a Y in the road) he offered to pay for the run and poles to get it to his house, they still said no


Another guy I work with did the "get all your neighbors to want it thing" and failed because not enough of them wanted it

Yeah, and this is what bothers me about this. We have a sole provider in our area and that is Comcast. They have a contract (might not be the correct term) with the township. I have friends that would like their internet service that live way off the road (they have ten acres) and Comcast wants $1500 to run a line to their home. The problem I have is that if you have contracted to be the sole provider in the township, you should make it available to all the homes. Not just the ones that suit your business purposes. You lock up the area, you provide service to everyone. Ain't right.

 

[Anubis]

1500 isn't bad
I know people who were looking at like 50k to get lines run to their house

 

[mnewsham]

Yeah, and this is what bothers me about this. We have a sole provider in our area and that is Comcast. They have a contract (might not be the correct term) with the township. I have friends that would like their internet service that live way off the road (they have ten acres) and Comcast wants $1500 to run a line to their home. The problem I have is that if you have contracted to be the sole provider in the township, you should make it available to all the homes. Not just the ones that suit your business purposes. You lock up the area, you provide service to everyone. Ain't right.

seriously? At least they are getting the option, and $1.5k is a great price. I've seen estimates hit $8-10k+

it would be 100x worse if comcast told them to pound sand and not offer it at all. Which they could just as easily have done.

 

[brianmanahan]

I grew up on a farm. My wife grew up on 10 acres in the country. You didn't meet *anyone*. No friends were close. Your parents moved there/stayed there because they were psuedo recluses. And you just didn't have chances to socialize well. Independence is nice and all...but I think my kids will be better in the long run being more social and while doing it still "outside".

i grew up on a farm and i loved it. had siblings, cousins, and friends a mile or two away to play with.

i keep looking for a good deal on small farm with 20-30 acres and woods

 

[FelixDeCat]

They dont need the internet anway. Its a bad influence.

 

[boomerang]

1500 isn't bad
I know people who were looking at like 50k to get lines run to their house

I guess it's all relative then. The fiber runs across their property out by the road. All Comcast needs to do is run it up to their home on utility poles already in place. My contention is never going to change. You contract to be the sole provider, you provide. I'm very certain that should another provider be allowed to come into the area that Comcast would find a way to do it at no charge. Last I heard they had a few extra bucks lying around.

 

[mnewsham]

I guess it's all relative then. The fiber runs across their property out by the road. All Comcast needs to do is run it up to their home on utility poles already in place. My contention is never going to change. You contract to be the sole provider, you provide. I'm very certain that should another provider be allowed to come into the area that Comcast would find a way to do it at no charge. Last I heard they had a few extra bucks lying around.

Then the town should have made an agreement with comcast to hook up every residence of the town. If they didn't put something like that in the exclusivity contract, sucks for the town.

 

[vi edit]

They dont need the internet anway. Its a bad influence.

They don't need youtube, facebook, ect. Sure.

But my 1st grader has iPad apps that are web based. They track reading and math productivity and her classroom gets credit for completed "levels" in them. We also have her use some other online learning sites since activity problem books get expensive if your kid is cranking through them.

As a first grader she's chewing through 4th grade level chapter books so I'm not concerned about a little TV or ipad time. Stuff like cartoons on Netflix are nice rewards or downtime for 20 minutes if I need to cook dinner or get some downtime to do something around the house.

We aren't in the 1950's any more. The cat's out of the bag as far as how ingrained the internet is on our lives. Shield them from it entirely and they are going to binge and choke on it at the first taste when they are older.

 

[slag]

They dont need the internet anway. Its a bad influence.

Unfortunately, I do for work and so does my wife (she has a home office).

I think this just is a little too far out for what we want, I was just hoping there was some technology I was not aware of that people used that made the access to high speed internet in the boonies not as bad as it used to be. I'm online often working on server problems remotely and we watch netflix a lot in the evenings as well when we are doing laundry, relaxing, etc. We just got the xbox for Christmas and have downloaded many games/patches/etc that is just not possible without high speed internet.

 

[SearchMaster]

I don't exactly live "in the country" but it's a fairly rural neighborhood and my Internet options suck.

Until ~2000, we used satellite Internet with dial-up upload. Speed at that time was tolerable (probably 600Kb/s) and lag wasn't a big problem as nobody in the house gamed. Of course at that time, bandwidth was a scarcer resource so we weren't THAT far behind the norm.

Then AT&T made DSL available, so we went that route. 6Mb/512Kb...and that's what we still have. And it's not that cheap. We're on a dead end street but the street adjoining and most of the neighborhood has cable. But Comcast won't run it up our street unless we pay $2000 up front and my neighbors aren't interested (and it's not worth that sort of cost to me). I play games occasionally but frankly I can't do it when the kids are around, because Netflix/Facetime/Skype/etc. suck up so much of the pitiful bandwidth that gaming is just an exercise in frustration.

Upload speed is so poor that my wife sending pictures to FB or whatever can take a looooong time. I showed her Speedtest the other day....first on our Internet (which usually shows 5Mb/300Kb), then on LTE (which shows 20Mb/5Mb). Her WTF? reaction was priceless but when I explained that getting LTE-only service would cost an arm and a leg it pissed her off.

 

[olds]

In about 2000, we had 5 acres in the woods. We lived there for 4 years. It was quiet at night and the stars were very bright. We bought a telescope to enjoy them.

We used to sit around the fire pit or get naked and get in the hot tub and enjoy a glass of wine.

We could shoot anywhere on the property and ride our quads for miles and miles. Our private dirt road led to a lake and we'd ride the quads down there and have a picnic, swim and watch the sunset.

Friends would bring their motor homes homes up on the weekend and we'd blast music and party all night.

We had wild turkeys, deer, quail mountain lions and bears. More than once I chased a black bear off the back porch.

In the summer, the house was always dusty from the dirt road. In the winter, the road was muddy from the snow and rain. I borrowed a tractor from a friend to keep it graded near our house and keep rock on it. I got into a fist fight with a neighbor that was tearing up the road (to make a point to me) on his quad. Had to get the wife a 4X4 so she could get home in the snow.

Never had any problems with the septic system or well but we didn't have a lot of water pressure.

Because of the trees, I had to trench out from the house about 100' to get a satellite TV signal. After abut a year of dial up, I added a satellite internet dish. There went what gaming I was able to do (Kingpin, Unreal). It was $60 a month with high latency and a 10 GB cap.

There's always trade offs. In this day and age I am pretty sure not having broadband (30 MB) would drive me nuts. Living in the country with broadband would be ideal.

 

[vi edit]

Nope, no magical technology. Verizon's LTE coverage in rural areas is pretty amazing, but you'll be stuck hotspotting a cell phone most of the time to do it. Their home access is kind of a ripoff at $20 for the home router. Plus you are stuck with a fairly small bucket of data. 10 gigs of data is $80 a month. That's plenty for basic web and VPN/remote support. But you'll murder it in couple hours with Netflix or the Xbox downloading a game/update.

You options are to stay put with modern conveniences you have, or to find a different part of town/state/country that can provide your needs. There's places all over the midwest that offer the combination of acreages and broadband. You just need to look.

 

[Eug]

Back in the day my sister's neighbourhood had no broadband. This was at the outskirts of town, with 25-50 acre lots. mostly forest and farmland.

She just stuck it out, because the city was expanding and eventually broadband would come to them, but one of her neighbours couldn't wait. He paid multiple tens of thousands of $ to get DSL to his house.

The rest of the neighbourhood got broadband maybe 7-10 years later IIRC.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Growing up, my parents didn't jump on the broadband wagon until way late in the game, and even then, they only kept it for about 6 months. Nowadays in my current place, I'm tethering my phone for web browsing, and head to the library if I want to put YouTube videos on my hdd.

 

[mnewsham]

Unfortunately, I do for work and so does my wife (she has a home office).

I think this just is a little too far out for what we want, I was just hoping there was some technology I was not aware of that people used that made the access to high speed internet in the boonies not as bad as it used to be. I'm online often working on server problems remotely and we watch netflix a lot in the evenings as well when we are doing laundry, relaxing, etc. We just got the xbox for Christmas and have downloaded many games/patches/etc that is just not possible without high speed internet.

There are technologies that exist that would allow you to do what you want to do, however I am not aware of any widely available commercial market for this sort of thing.

You can get a high end 50Km+ radio that will do line of sight transmission of 1Gb/s

You would just have to find someone with cable access who would let you set up the transmitting radio on their property and then run the cable access or whatever to the radio. As long as you have line of sight to your property you'd then set up a receiving unit on your end and hook that up to a router for your house.

It would be $1500-3000 for that sort of setup though, and that's all assuming the county doesnt have any sort of regulations forbidding that kind of radio. Not to mention the hassle of making sure you have line of sight, as well as finding someone willing to let you setup a radio on their property.

 

[Insomniator]

No chance in hell I would buy a house without broadband, and chances are if the house is an area without it I wouldn't want to live there anyway.

Telling your kids to go outside is a hilarious suggestion...broadband is a necessity these days, esp if your family is already used to it.

Man the country sucks.

 

[brianmanahan]

Man the country sucks.

wrong, it is way better than towns/cities

 

[brianmanahan]

There are technologies that exist that would allow you to do what you want to do, however I am not aware of any widely available commercial market for this sort of thing.

You can get a high end 50Km+ radio that will do line of sight transmission of 1Gb/s

You would just have to find someone with cable access who would let you set up the transmitting radio on their property and then run the cable access or whatever to the radio. As long as you have line of sight to your property you'd then set up a receiving unit on your end and hook that up to a router for your house.

It would be $1500-3000 for that sort of setup though, and that's all assuming the county doesnt have any sort of regulations forbidding that kind of radio. Not to mention the hassle of making sure you have line of sight, as well as finding someone willing to let you setup a radio on their property.

my ISP is just such a setup. they were just a couple guys living in the same rural area who knew about ham radio, found out about this, and started an ISP on a single tower.

now they cover almost 3 counties and are making some serious money, because there are no other good high-speed options.

 

[Blitzvogel]

my ISP is just such a setup. they were just a couple guys living in the same rural area who knew about ham radio, found out about this, and started an ISP on a single tower.

now they cover almost 3 counties and are making some serious money, because there are no other good high-speed options.

That's pretty awesome. Though the buy-in to such a service must be expensive, buying a tower transmitter/receiver system and all.

 

[Zodiark1593]

No chance in hell I would buy a house without broadband, and chances are if the house is an area without it I wouldn't want to live there anyway.

Telling your kids to go outside is a hilarious suggestion...broadband is a necessity these days, esp if your family is already used to it.

Man the country sucks.

Broadband I argue is not a necessity. Light tasks such as browsing and email can be accomplished via dial up or satellite if patience is asking too much. If you want video, the nearest Starbucks or library can likely accommodate you. Chances are you go there at least once a week anyway.

 

[boomerang]

Then the town should have made an agreement with comcast to hook up every residence of the town. If they didn't put something like that in the exclusivity contract, sucks for the town.

Yup, I said that earlier.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Yea I want to live in rural area, but I would not live without high bandwidth internet access ...

There are options out there, just have to be willing to budge in one direction or the other ... Price, Home, Internet ... good internet low price usually means crappy home, good price and good home means crappy internet ...