A couple years ago, and totally fed up with the dismal performance of the AT&T DSL line we had out here on Taterbug Hill in Brown County (speeds averaged around 2-3Mbps max), I took a chance on a T-Mobile hotspot. I blogged about it at the time.
The T-Mobile plan was a great improvement, delivering between 5 and 8 Mbps on a good day. And with their “Binge-on” feature, which basically ignores the data usage of bandwidth hogs like Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Video and many other media delivery sites, it would get the job done… most of the time.
However, the T-M plan, like all cell phone plans, does impose data caps and throttling, so on months when we had massive transfers (system upgrades, non-Binge-on media, or the big audio and video files I often have to deal with in my work), we’d hit the ceiling. So I wound up with two T-M hotspots, and a monthly internet bill of around $200.
And even then, on a really heavy month, we could come up short. What we really needed was a cellular solution with no data caps and no throttling… which not a single cell carrier offers.
So I quested about for several weeks, and found a handful of companies that specialize in rural internet solutions. After trimming the list to three ISPs (Evdo, Unlimitedville, and BroadbandQWireless), and painstakingly comparing their packages, prices and performance promises, in early November 2018 I finally pulled the trigger on the unlimited bandwidth package offered by Broadband Q Wireless.
The BBQ package provides a top-flight router/modem, the renowned Mofi 4500, which has two blade-style receiving antennae, and two pole-style transmitter antennae to deliver the internet into the house. Unlike the Falcon hotspots we had, this is a full-featured router with 4 ethernet ports, and as many wireless connections as a family might need.
Broadband Q Wireless takes your order over the phone. Their goal is to offer internet where no landline or fiber is available, so to make sure they can cover the bases they buy bandwidth from all four major carriers (ATT, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon). When you call to start your plan, BBQ takes your address and pairs you with whichever carrier offers the best signal in your area.
With a 10-day trial and no contract, I was eager to get this bad boy working as soon as my provisioning package arrive in the mail. Setup was entirely plug & play. I just had to attach the four antennae and the power brick, set the unit in a window facing our nearest tower, and power up. The Mofi took maybe a minute finding and establishing contact with the tower, and when I saw all three LEDs lit, it was ready for pairing. I hit my Mac, which immediately recognized the Mofi, and after entering the password, I was online. Easy peasy.
How’s the speed? My first task was to fire up the Speedtest.net widget to see how fast my data was traveling. It was exciting to see a whopping 12 Mbps download, and around 6 Mbps upload. Subsequent tests have yielded results all the way to 18 Mbps download, and sometimes over 10 Mbps upload. This is 2-3 times faster than the T-M hotspots, and since the receiving antennae could be replaced with an external antenna if I wanted, I can only imagine the speeds I might get. For the record, BBQ states on their website to expect “speeds up to 50 Mbps.
Being this far out in the boonies, I doubt I’d ever get that fast, but who knows? In any event, the performance has been reliable, with no outages and rare slow-downs. and I don’t worry about watching my usage anymore. When the grandkids are over, we’ll have two big screens streaming Netflix, plus our computers and devices, and it handles them all with ease.
How much, you ask? I dropped about $300 to fire up the plan (which pays for the Mofi and the factory setup for my location), and since then I’m paying $150/month for the BBQ plan. So I’m saving $50 from what I was spending on T-Mobile, and enjoying way faster speeds with no data caps.
Now, $150 a month for internet is salty compared to cable or fiber in more urban areas, but that’s just the price you have to pay (at present) for the privilege of living way out in the hinterlands of Brown County. We love these hills, and we love good internet. Broadband Q Wireless let’s us enjoy both.
