Catching Up With New Broadband Methods
I’ve written on this before, but can’t think of where I wrote it or how to find it. But my thoughts, until now, were that before the year 2000, there were three wires that came to your home: electricity, telephone, and cable TV. You can put Internet over power lines but there are issues, so you don’t see it much. But you can put Internet over the phone line, and you can put Internet over the cable. This has made two sets of local internet monopolies: the phone companies and the cable companies.
There are companies who will hook up fiber-optic Internet to your homes. I have friends who use that service, and there’s an awful lot of dark fiber out there, waiting for us to move up to needing it. But it isn’t common, because this means that there have to be backhoes going all over cities to allow the new fiber to be run all over, and any other options would require the same thing. But most houses get wired for phone and cable when they’re made, so those runs already exist. If I was in city government, i would be unsure about letting more than a few of those go on in my city, which is why, most of the time, there’s a local cable monopoly and a local telephone monopoly, and your only choices are between those.
In my case, the choice was was between the cable-based choice that my apartment complex offered and the telephony option now that Frontier had bought out Verizon’s landline component, but I found that TMobile was offering broadband at much better speeds than I had before. When the boxes came, I started worrying about where the phone jacks were, because with the bookcases in the house, the spots on the walls where they would be are covered up. I didn’t worry long, because in skimming the users’ guide, I saw the crucial line:
Note: Battery and sim card are pre-installed.
I had thought that mobile-phone internet would be the way to get around local internet monopolies, and here it is, in my house!
I max out at 30 Mbps around here, but often get closer to 5-10. I’ve seen Kbps readings on Fast.com when I wanted good bits, and I’ve used my phone as a mobile hotspot when things have just absolutely sucked. I’m seeing 110 Mbps. I’m not 100% transferred, but it looks good so far.