Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Wireless Internet

Long story short... we had Verizon FiOS at our house up in urban Northern Virginia... it was super fast and had absolutely no drama ever. IIRC it was $130 a month.

Back in February I got called to the family home in a rural area along the Chesapeake Bay to help take care of my dad and then later my mom who were in the final stages of life. I have lived here 98% since. High school has been virtual for my son and we have been getting by with a variety of inferior internet access products.

This past week we had the trifecta of failure.

The internet hotspot on my phone failed on excess use (i.e. they claim Unlimited but at a certain volume they throttle you back to absolute nothingness).

The local internet through some type of radio antenna failed because the owners of the various cell towers elected to change out their equipment based on customer demand or lack thereof. We have had this service for at least a decade. It is no more.

Wife went to town to buy a wireless modem from either the AT&T store, Verizon store or Walmart Straight Talk store. There were no modems available she said.

Keith who provides internet to us and explain how the existing service had collapsed brought out a wireless router modem (about the size of a large box of Pop-Tarts with ears. It has a hundred and twenty volt plug in and that is all).

Keith explained that although it is a T-Mobile network router modem all data strength is the same. We have no T-Mobile cell phone service in this area but all data is the same share... strengthen... or something like that.

So far the service has been amazing. Something like 300 GB per month for $130.

I inquired about moving this device from location to location and from house to house for our needs. Keith said absolutely you can do that in fact that is why it makes sense for a lot of customers. They don't have to carry different internet services at the different homes they have.

I also asked if I could hardwire this device into my car through an inverter and have my car become a mobile hotspot. He said absolutely that was a great idea.

I am sure many of you are way ahead of the curve on me on this technology. I was thinking we were going to have to use satellite Communications on our place in West Virginia, but I'm not sure, this may just work fine. We are in the testing phase now. Keith is a great guy and there is no contract. I love small town customer service. Drop me a p.m. if anyone has further questions or would like a picture of the device we have.

You can now sign up for STARLINK, which is partly available and will be fully up within months, for $99/mo.

We use a Verizon Mifi hotspot at the house. It doesn't cover the entire house so it does get moved around, but it works well.

Have you read their privacy policy? Specifically, the information they collect?

I have not. Are they any worse than Google, Amazon, Microsoft, eBay, Facebook, Twitter...?

5G is “supposed’ to be equivalent to land line Internet, but what they don’t tell you is once a ton of users are on your same antenna you all shard that bandwidth so it can go down dramatically (speed / bandwidth) - however when there are only a few 5G devices it’s going to be smoking fast.

Satellite, DSL, and Cable (only Fiber Optic is a bit different) all have the same issue of sharing bandwidth across a user group... so it comes down to engineering and how you area is fed.

With most of the local companies going bankrupt in RURAL area they tend to suffer a lot...

I have no idea about the last three, I don't use them. But take Amazon for example. They don't "collect" information on your credit cards or purchases. You willingly give them the information by using your credit card to purchase things, using their service. You do that because you get something in return. Do you want your internet provider collecting information on your credit cards and purchases?

What makes you so sure your internet provider doesn't?

We'd both have to ask Stryker. He's the self-appointed expert on all things computer.

with Comcast and soon to be Charter putting data caps in place, is Starlink unlimited internet?

if so, its going to be a game changer if it delivers on its promised speed

The Internet provider can tell where you are going (DNS lookup is how you find a website when you type it’s name www.something.com)

BUT they can’t see what you are sending... because the payloads are encrypted (provided you have that Lock symbol infront of the website name).
That’s because each device gets a “key” the very first time you go to that site, and unless someone in the middle grabs a key per device, per users... they can’t un-encrypt the payload.

They can see the number of flows, type of flow, ... but can’t see what’s in the payload.

Other questions ?

Just use a web browser with a VPN. Something you should do with any ISP anyway.

One of the things that has caused me to not get a piece of property farther out in the county is lack of good enough Internet coverage and speed. I need to be able to telecommute from home some days during the week and need solid service. Maybe something like Starlink may make it possible soon?

A VPN just shifts what DNS, and DHCP (where you get your Internet IP address, and how you find addresses) from...

In other words you are letting a 3rd party have access to where you go, vs. your ISP... Regulatoraly VPN providers don’t have the rules and ISP does so that might let them track a heck of a lot more than you think !!

I use Amazon gift cards for purchases, a + is getting fuel points from Kingsoopers (local Kroger) often X2 or X4, add up quickly. Filled up my diesel for 0.99cents a gallon this week.

I do the exact same thing. I take 5 gallon cans to maximize the discount - which is limited to 35 gallons. A buck off a gallon adds up over a year.

A true VPN is an encrypted tunnel, not a proxy masking your address info.

the ISP - CAN NOT SEE YOU CREDIT CARD NUMBER !!

It’s part of the encrypted payload and only the website & you computer can decrypt... Good God man!
Go back and read what I wrote about what the ISP can see... a few posts up.

Couple of points here:

ALL methods of transport share a common path that is sometimes bandwidth limited. With coax cable, it's a total of 990Mbps to a particular area or neighborhood, with each tap sharing the common feeder. With satellite, it's a transponder of a given capacity (usually 200Mbps), further limited by backhaul at the hub. For DSL, it's an independent unshared line until it gets to the DSLAM (either a neighborhood node, or a Central Office)- after that, it's shared. Fiber Optic is not different. In the case of GPON, it's a total 2.5 Gbps down shared amongst up to 32 subscribers, then to the OLT, where it's aggregated into a shelf which typically has a 10Gbps backhaul. There can be upwards of 5,632 subscribers sharing that same 10Gbps backhaul.

At the end of the day, your "contention" (that's the term used for over-subscription) is based on how the ISP builds it's network, and how many subscribers per node in a given area.

At my ISP (the one I work at), we have some nodes fed by 10Gbps with only 5 subscribers, and others with 200 subscribers sharing that 10Gbps backhaul. Once back to the Central Office(s), the entire footprint is aggregated into several 10Gbps links to the internet, and a few 100 Gbps links.

Also, not all of the "Internet" is located outside your local ISP's network. At my ISP, we colocate with Google, Bing, Azure, Amazon, and Netflix servers (in other words, to watch a Netflix movie, your traffic stays within our local 10/100Gbps network, and never travel to Tier 1 providers on "the Internet")

Jake,

I was part of a very large ISP did everything from Dial up Internet to the full Montey and a big chunk of VoIP, before that I “helped” hand .mil net to the college yahoo’s, that became the Internet. I have somewhat of a security back ground and wrote a bunch of the IT compliance crapola that is not in NIST and other places. When we (a small group of us) introduced cloud and distributed compute to Telecom they / we called it NFV.... (Network function virtualization).

But - Thank God Al Gore showed up - BWHAHahaha...

There are crap loads of marketing and mis-information out there... the real stuff isn’t hidden, it’s just not well understood and gets lost in the noise.
These days I’m a tech consultant on all this jazz.... that is when they can pull me away from gunsmithing.

Read that ISP's privacy policy and get back to me. Maybe they just don't know how to write one. And I don't really care if they can see the number or not, they have no business collecting data on my purchases and transferring it to others. I don't need the spam, and text messages on my cell phone about a universe of schidt I have absolutely no interest in.