DSL Options

[Action_Johnson]

I recently moved and bought a house in rural America. My ISP options are Ziply (formerly Frontier), or Earthlink. Satellite isn't an option because I'm deep in the woods with heavy tree cover.

 

I currently have had Ziply for 3 weeks, the first two weeks I saw internet speeds of 16Mb down, 1Mb up. Not bad for DSL, and honestly I was completely content. Last week my internet got accidentally disconnected by a tech, and after approx 8 hours of phone time with Ziply, my internet speeds are now 8.5Mb down, and still 1Mb up. Long story short, they accidentally provided me more bandwidth than their arbitrary limits of my area say I can get, No amount of asking for purchasing another line coming in changed the situation. 

 

So I said "F* off" and called Earthlink last week to see about getting an install started. On first contact, Earthlink said I'm eligible for 25 down / 2 up, two days later they called me and said I'm only eligible for 6 down / 1 up, the same as what Ziply says I'm eligible for. 

 

MY QUESTION:

 

Is there anything I can do on my end to speed things up? Anecdotally, it seems that changing ISP's won't matter because I'm limited by my region's telephone nodes?

At 8.5Mbps download and 1Mbps upload, I'd say my internet is barely serviceable for my needs (I actually do upload quite a bit of my job to Dropbox for client asset delivery).

 

PS

There is one silver lining in this is though: My bill is extremely cheap, and my ping's are awesome. Less than half the price of Comcast in the city, and less latency too. CS:GO my pings in the 20's, vs 40's to 50's via Comcast.

 

And of course I'm spiked in, ethernet 4 life

 

[DakotaWebber]

If both ISP's are saying

that that area is only eligible for those speeds it would be due to the physical infrastructure to your home

 

The only thing you can try for a better speed is try to get cable or fiber installed by contacting your local council or an ISP, maybe mayor or whoever in your local government about the internet, and ask or suggest if there are plans to improve, but if you had to pay costs for a specific install to your home you will be paying  $$$

28 minutes ago, Action_Johnson said:

At 8.5Mbps download and 1Mbps upload, I'd say my internet is barely serviceable for my needs

[Skipple]

If you have $$$ to burn you can always pull a Joe Rogan and have a business line installed to your house.

 

Other than that you are shackled by the ISPs available in your area.

[Action_Johnson]

1 hour ago, DakotaWebber said:

If both ISP's are saying

that that area is only eligible for those speeds it would be due to the physical infrastructure to your home

 

The only thing you can try for a better speed is try to get cable or fiber installed by contacting your local council or an ISP, maybe mayor or whoever in your local government about the internet, and ask or suggest if there are plans to improve, but if you had to pay costs for a specific install to your home you will be paying  $$$

Got it, that's kind of what I figured, it's the actual 50 year old infrastructure in the area. I couldn't imagine calling up a fiber company and having a line brought out, that seems like it would cost tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[Donut417]

11 hours ago, Action_Johnson said:

s there anything I can do on my end to speed things up?

Nope. DSL is distance limited. The further from the co or the remote box you are the slower it gets. This is the biggest CON of living in Rural America. Because your home is not profitable enough for any ISP to give a crap about. Companies like Comcast won't run service to there because they need to be able to have at least 100 people on a node, with the population density in rural areas, that's just not possible. So Slow ass DSL is all you get. You can try to find a WISP (Wireless Internet Service provider) or go to an LTE cellular connection, but those connections may have limits. This is just how the cookie crumbles.