Now long outdated, this post provides a snapshot of our ISP options back in 2016.
Vis-à-vis broadband internet in rural Brown County:
Even though we live only a few minutes outside of Nashville IN, we have had but one broadband internet option: ATT U-verse. No cable comes out this far, no fiber, with only vague promises from Mainstream that they will eventually wire the county with fiber. Well, I’ll likely be pushing up daisies by the time fiber makes its way up Taterbug Hill.
Backstory of an internet addict in the woods of Brown County
Up here on our rather precipitous lakeside hill, we’ve been on ATT U-verse since acquiring the homestead in February 2012, and the quality of the service, while sufficient for our needs when it’s running to spec, has continued to degrade. Essentially a newer version of DSL, U-verse comes through these hills over aging phone lines that are clearly deteriorating and not being properly maintained, much less replaced. I’m sure ATT has accurately determined that the trend is away from land lines towards cellular. In that sense, I get it — why should they invest in a dying (and expensive) infrastructure?
We’ve been paying for 3 Mbs, but speed tests never rose to more than 2 and change, and often would drop to barely a single Mbs, which is only marginally better than dialup service. During rain or snow storms, it would often dropout altogether.
Once, a nest of wasps in a junction box derailed us for 5 days before a tech could chase down the problem. Nonetheless, when it was up and running, U-verse was sufficient to stream a Netflix movie without buffering, which is pretty much my benchmark — if my connection can smoothly stream a Netflix, it can handle day-to-day surfing just fine.
But we’ve had to make numerous service calls to ATT over the years. Dropouts or dropdowns have been fairly common, and in the past two months have gotten worse, with a 5-hour dropout a week or so ago, and countless annoying 5-minute drops. We’ve had various service techs swap out our modem three times in six weeks, and constantly get pressured to downgrade our service to under 1.5. We’ve refused, as 1.5 would be barely sufficient for our needs. But the errors build up in the box and deteriorate our speed and performance. Something had to change, and quick.
Cutting the cable
The trend in the ISP industry mirrors that of phones, towards cellular. As with phones, the advantages of going wireless are hard to beat. We have used our Verizon phones and tablets as hotspots in a pinch, and the speed is 3-4 times that of our U-verse connection… but there’s this pesky data cap to watch out for or you pay through the nose. An hour of standard-definition Netflix consumes roughly a GB of data (with HD a whopping 3GBs/hour). Stream too much, and you suffer overage charges that can wipe out your budget for the month.
There’s apparently no such thing as unlimited bandwidth on cellular quite yet. But we’ve discovered a plan called Simple Choice by T-Mobile that comes damn close!
Kicking things off is the ZTE Falcon Z-917 hotspot (about the size of an iPhone 4, barely as big as a pack of ciggies). We bought it at the T-Mobile site for around $80, and folded the expense into the monthly payments. Quoting the product page:
The ZTE Falcon® Z-917 4G LTE Hotspot provides simple and easy to manage access for up to 10 WiFi-enabled devices, smartphones, tablets, or laptops on T-Mobile blazing fast 4G LTE network. The Falcon® Z-917 was engineered and designed to give you the perfect balance of performance and style
So that’s the hotspot, here’s the plan: The Simple Choice plan by T-Mobile has a couple of unique features which make it a very viable option for power-users, especially those who use Netflix, YouTube, iTunes, and many other media streaming services.
Go ahead… binge!
Binge On and Music Freedom (and other media-specific features) are really what sets this package apart from all other wireless solutions I’ve found. PLAY CLOSE ATTENTION HERE: No matter the amount of monthly bandwidth you opt to pay for, streaming media from the most popular streaming sites does *not* count against your data allotment!
IOW, go on that Sunday afternoon 8-hour Netflix marathon, and it’s all free to stream, no debits against the data you buy. Same goes for YouTube, iTunes music, and many more media sites (click here for the full list). This is a HUGE advantage, and one that makes Simple Choice a very viable option to standard wired, unlimited plans.
In addition, Simple Choice offers rollover data on plans 6GB or greater (up to 22GBs, which is $90/month). Unused data will rollover for up to 12 months.
And then there’s no overage charges — if you happen to blow through your selected data allotment, your service speed is throttled down to 2G speeds, but you won’t get billed extra. It’s quite likely you may notice no significant hit in performance unless you’re streaming media.
While one can’t quite accurately describe T-Mobile’s Simple Choice as “unlimited cellular data”, compared to most wireless plans it might as well be. When you’re streaming large media files off-book, your garden-variety internet surfing, email, and pretty much everything else you do online (with the possible exception for telecommuters and other professionals who need to share large files online… more on that below) is a drop in the bucket.
So… how’s the Falcon flying?
The ZTE Falcon Z-917 hotspot arrived two days after ordering. I made the order by phone, and the lady created my service account at the same time, so I was ready to go right out of the box. Setup was easy as pie (insert a micro-SIM card in the unit, cop the password, and install the battery — this is a mobile hotspot, remember), and there’s a special password-protected browser URL that calls up an easy-to-use interface giving you access to your hotspot to edit parameters, view your usage in realtime, establish a firewall, etc etc.
My launch experience was exhilarating, to put it mildly. The interface reported a solid 4G LTE connection, with 3 bars way out here in the woods of Brown County. Not bad at all, since by all reports I’ve seen, 4G LTE will function quite nicely with only a couple bars. Browsing some YouTubes was very fast, and a speedtest came in at around 5Mbs, twice what we were getting with ATT, and comparable to the iPad hotspot. Later in the evening, our Apple TV logging into Netflix loaded the show quickly, with no spinning wheels, and ran all evening with zero buffering.
The next day was overcast, and we had a robust late-morning rainstorm, which could well have caused the land-line U-verse to dropout. On the Falcon, we experienced no noticeable affect on performance.
Bang for the buck?
We were paying $50 for a month for mediocre land-line U-verse service. With T-Mobile, we opted for the high-end 22 GBs/month 4G LTE wireless package at $95/month… and unlike Verizon, there is no contract. Is it worth an extra $45 a month to us to double our speed, have plenty of bandwidth for everyday surfing, free media streaming, cancel service anytime, and finally rid ourselves of a copper line that’s in decline?
For me, there *is* the potential for issues when sharing large WAV files when collaborating with friends and clients on audio production projects, or when doing Skype or Facetime conferencing sessions with students. I have yet to see on T-Mobile’s plan where these high-bandwidth activities qualify for the Binge On effect, so I’ll have to closely monitor this sort of usage going forward.
Otherwise… I’m viewing the move to T-Mobile’s Simple Choice plan as a step up in performance with only a minor and acceptable increase in expense.
Broadband for Brown County
There’s a town/county task force led by Town Manager/Economic Development Director Scott Rudd exploring ways to bring broadband to greater Brown County (click here and here for relevant BC Democrat articles) both in the short and long-term. Mainstream Fiber Networks is making headway in bringing fiber to rural Brown County (click here to add your address to the wait list). Even ATT is prattling about testing a point-to-point internet service called fixed wireless in an area of Alabama chosen for its hilly terrain, but no commitment to Brown County has been announced to date.
My preference would be for a blazing fiber connection and truly unlimited bandwidth for a reasonable price. Perhaps Mainstream can make that happen for us up here on Taterbug Hill while I’m still on the sunny side of the turf. In the meantime, we’re quite pleased with the T-Mobile alternative. In the ever-evolving industry of broadband service providers, I won’t have to wait very long before I see additional ways to feed the internet wolf prowling my soul.
