Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Who has a tower to get internet service

Does anyone here have a tower at there home to be able to receive internet service?

Pros?
Cons?

Could you be more specific? A tower- Fixed wireless? Cellular? microwave?

I'm a telecom engineer who has installed several remote internet solutions including all of the above. Each specific technology has it's own pros and cons. Without knowing more, I really cannot answer your question.

Sir,
To be honest...I am not 100% for sure.

We had a local company that sold us IS. It came from a tower to a receiver on the roof of our house. I worked great for years and poof on Oct 1...it was gone. I was told the company had bought band-width (don’t even really know what that is) from AT&T and the contract was up on Oct 1, 2020 and AT&T did not renew. Now to receive from another tower...we are told we must have a tower.

It is not cellular...as we are living on cellular data now which is also poor in our area. We are told we can also put a cellular booster on this tower help get better cellular as well.

So I assume it is fixed wireless...but don’t know if it could be microwave???

Not really a tower but we had a telephone pole set in our back yard for the wireless antenna. We live in a low area so we needed to get as much height as possible.

They telling us we need a 70’ tower.

OK, I'm going to assume it's Fixed Wireless, in the 5-6 Ghz band, based on what you've said.

Long story short, the service depends mostly on the service provider.

Pros: Only internet you can get based on location.
Usually faster then copper twisted pair DSL service

Cons: Can be oversold A LOT (like anything else, but FW is particularly bad in many markets- lets say that there is a 1000 Meg total uplink to the base unit... that base unit can feed several dozen subscriber towers/antennas in it's footprint. That means that if you buy 50 Meg service, you may only be able to get a fraction of that depending on how many subscribers are on the feeding tower.)

Can be cheap unlicensed band equipment- depending on your ISP, they may use cheap hardware (like Ubiquity) that is consumer grade, in the unlicensed frequency bands that can get interferrence, and not keep service up at all times.

No matter what, there will be atomospheric conditions that will affect service- rain in excess of 6mm per droplet greatly affects it.

Depending on quality of components and distance to feeding tower, re-aiming might be required on occasion.

Trees, leaves, and sometimes (depending on location) even large truck traffice can affect service.


Longer story shorter, if a fixed wireless tower is the most cost effective option in your area, it's probably for a good reason. There's nothing wrong with it, as long as you have appropriate expectations... speed will be inconsistent, and there will be drops more regularly than a wired or fiber solution. Speeds are usually pretty high, but inconsistant.

There are no fiber or wired options for us I am told. I am not really looking for the most cost effective option...I am told it is the only option.

Installing this tower is going to be expensive. If it works well...don’t mind.

I would like to hear alternative solutions...if there are any. I am told there aren’t.

Probably only satellite. That's stupidly expensive too, and has more cons than pros vs fixed wireless.

If they laid fiber to your location, figure $10 to $20 a foot from the end of the current line.

When we use contractors, the rule of thumb is $150,000.00 per mile.

Holy Crap our company hires contractors. Average $10,000 per mile for Buried fiber. In Nebraska.

I don't know when starlink will be viable

but supposedly in the short term you'll be able to get around 400mps for $80 a month once they get enough satellites in space to create a network of signals

WOW, I'd love those numbers... ( I'd also love those numbers to advertise our internet rates to people, so they understand why they cost so much)

What's somewhat funny is that installing a 12 hair fiber for a mile is basically the same as a 144 hair fiber for the same mile... the cost of the cable is almost nothing- it's all labor.

What I find amazing is that when I was a kid we had to have a tower to get TV on the ranch. We also used it for 2-way radio. It was a huge pain in the ass. Storms, wind and lightning, wreaked havoc on it—working on it yearly.

Got satellite TV and cell phones...got rid of the tower...all good. Towers became a thing of the past. The one at the ranch cut up for scrap.

Internet comes along. First use dial-up modem, then DSL some places, and satellite. Then this fixed wireless takes over cause there are towers all around this part of the country. Worked great for 10 years—receiving antenna on the roof. Then poof on Oct 1 AT&T takes back some of its tower space and our internet is gone. Now I am told I need a 70’ tower to get internet again and it is my only option. I am having flashbacks and not liking it.

If you have cell phone service, you should be able to get internet from a mobile hot spot. They do fairly well. I used one for years, our signal varied depending i which end of the house the hot spot was. They are wifi, and you can get a wifi extender for inside if need be. Verizon, AT&T, Boost etc.

I used Rohn 25G tower first for commercial television antenna with rotor. Then added small satellite dish for Hughes net. Then added an antenna for first point-to-point internet service. Last point-to-point internet service they put a small antenna on peak at front of house. Zero issues with the Rohn tower. You can have it if you want to come and get it...

Only issue I had with last point-to-point internet service was that they over sold their tower that I was connected to. Initially service was good. However, toward the end they over sold the service and refused to upgrade their equipment because local Telco was expanding fiber service. 12:00am to 7:00am was good service. However, once kids and teenagers got up and started streaming Netflix and FaceBook, service went down to almost dial up speeds. And they were TOTALLY unresponsive to any complaints about quality of service.

I wouldn't trade where I live for any other place, but for years both cell and internet service sucked. Had dial-up, and everyone knows how slow it is. Then Sprint put up a tower less than two miles from me, and I used a wireless hookup from them. It worked great for about a year, and then their tower begin to experience problems, and finally it quit working. I then switched to Dish satellite internet, and when I wanted to an upgrade, they switched me to Hughes. Hughes sucks, as they charge the crap out of you for very limited usage.

Finally, AT&T build a cell tower about 2 miles away, one that I can see across the fields. Cell service went from one bar here and there to four bars. and I got AT&T fixed wireless which for the past year has worked great. I can do anything on a computer that I need to do. I know some people have said that the more people that use the service, the slower it gets, but I'm somewhat fortunate in that there is fiber optic available in part of the area, and a lot of Mennonites who don't want internet, so I'm thinking there won't be a lot of people wanting what I have.

We have a dish on the roof, you need line of sight to a tower. My GUESS is you had line of sight to the AT&T tower, now they don't use that and the next closest one is not line of sight until you get 70 feet up.

this was actually one of the differences we found moving NH to WY. East Coast multiple options of fibre is just what is there, it's normal and unheard of to not have multiple to pick from. Then come out here and it makes sense since there;s so much open space. Heck cable TV isn't an option here! It is in town, but not once you leave the core part of town.

We moved across town when we bought a house rather than rent. About 3 mile move. We went from 1 tower as the only option to 3, one of which is faster service than the other 2.

We use Viasat for internet, so far, so good.~$150/ month for 100 gig.