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Comment by dumbfoundded | Hacker News Reader

I have a house on a farm. I only have relatively high speed internet (25mb/s) b/c someone set up a line of sight system pointing at a mountain as a co-op. My neighbors' house about half a kilometer away is blocked by a hill so they can't use it. When it's cloudy, I have to use my phone as a mobile hotspot.

Coming from San Francisco, I didn't realize how many people face this reality of poor connectivity. I don't care much about who is doing this as much as I care that someone is doing it at all. Most people don't realize how much of an internet access disparity exists. Especially as more education moves towards digital, internet access is a fundamental utility.

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My parents still live in the house I grew up in. It's about 30 miles from the nearest big city, a top-10 U.S. city.

- They had dial-up until the early 2000s.

- Then they had that terrible asymmetric satellite service where the upstream service was also dial-up. That lasted a couple of years.

- Then they got some kind of two-way sat service. Still terrible latency, but tolerable for the time.

- Finally, sometime in the early 2010s cable television service made its way to their neighborhood. Television, not internet.

- About 2015 they were finally able to get cable internet, which they have today. It's an amazing 5mb/sec up/down.

When I go there I just tether to my phone because its faster. They never got DSL. I bet they'll never get fiber. Starlink could be a serious improvement to them even at 2x the price they pay now.

So why can't they get Internet via a phone like you do when you go there?

Data caps and throttling make it prohibitively expensive.

I’ve done it for weeks in the past, and (what I personally consider normal usage) burned through my monthly cap in a week, leaving me with large overage charges that wouldn’t be sustainable long-term. I haven’t heard of a US carrier-provided plan that’s less than several hundreds of dollars, and if there is one it’s likely unavailable in rural areas

There's actually resellers that are made for rural areas with unlimited data. They are quite expensive, but not several hundreds of dollars expensive. I'm pretty sure I have seen some less expansive but here's one: https://unlimitedville.com/plans

For a year my family used 4G as our home internet (this was around 8 years ago). At the time it was incredibly expensive because you pay by the gig used, and the pay scale is built around using a couple of gigs. Watching a couple of episodes on netflix bumps you into a higher tier for the month. Downloading and then uploading a single 1GB artifact for work could bump you up 2 tiers. I've looked around a bit, and the situation doesn't look much better today; you can pay for a certain data cap, and then pay something like $10 / month / GB over that.

I was, long ago, a microwave radio tech. It's cool to me that line of sight issues still create issues. For the most part, my old line of work is dead because tech marches on. My immediate reaction is that your neighbor should be able to use a troposcatter shot[1] to fix his issues, but I suppose the provider has bigger fish to fry.

I'm a bit sad about it, because tech advances have technically made this sort of thing dead easy.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_scatter

It's alive and well in San Francisco! Monkeybrains is an independent ISP that does internet via wireless microwave in SF and Oakland.

Well, "dead" meaning broad use. I'm aware it's niche used here and there. Any troposcatter shots? Or is that dead from a price/performance point vs satellite or other?

I moved from Sunnyvale to Los Altos Hills and lost access to broadband. Comcast even told me they offered service at the address, then reneged when I moved in and asked to set it up.

More options would be great, and underserved areas aren't as far out as people often think they are. You can be five miles from Google's headquarters and unable to get decent internet.

Tbf, that sounds like a bit of a weird spot in LAH :). But generally agree with your point!

Depends on the altitude of the residence.

My neighborhood (14 homes) is working towards building a fiber island with wireless backhaul elsewhere. We're the houses right around the Rhus Ridge trailhead. But there are even-closer-to-urbanization neighborhoods without access, e.g., Wildcrest and Wildflower.

My mother's house gets an extraordinary 0.25 Mbit/s download rate. I didn't measure the upload.

50 metres uphill, there's a 4G signal which gets >20 Mbit/s download.

But ADSL is only 0.25 Mbit/s, and that's what you're getting in the shadows.

It's sold as "up to 8 Mbit/s".

Isn't it possible to install a mast with a pair of directional antennas on the house to get this 4G signal? Plug the antennas in an all-in-one modem/router/access point and enjoy great Internet in the house.

4G is amazing these days, I recently moved from a big city (coax 500 Mbps) to a house that only gets 4G and I barely feel the difference.

No, the house is too low behind a low hill for a short mast, and a very high mast wouldn't be ok. The way to do it would be 4G at the top of the hill and a cable or relay to the house, but as it's a populated village that would need cooperation among residents.

If there was plenty of cooperation and interest among the residents, they could install a better shared solution for the whole village than 4G even. There was a company willing to install something like that. But not enough people signed up to make it worthwhile.

I agree with you about 4G. I switched from ADSL+ to 4G last year in the middle of a city, and it's been a good improvement in download speeds, and an x10 improvement in upload. Netflix works excellently. Though there tend to be latency spikes, and new connections to websites for some reason are quite slow. I actually switched to save costs - unlimited data on 4G was less than half the price of bottom-of-the-range ADSL too.

When I want the best connection out of every option, such as a big download. I switch to my mobile phone, which seems perverse but there we are. I get ~90Mbit/s download via my phone. It's faster than wifi at the office, faster than ADSL, and faster than 4G at home too - the phone has a better modem than the standalone 4G router.

However I've tried 4G in London, which is the largest city in the UK, and it was awfully slow there. Too much density I suspect. So it's not a solution for everywhere. I think I'm lucky with it where I live. Around the same city, there are plenty of "notspot" shadows where there's no signal, not even 3G.

Why not just use 4G all the way?

If it's the price tag, this is something companies could fix.

It's really cost. An extra hotspot device is >$100/month. My line of sight is $50month. My phone has unlimited data as well but for things like a security system, it's not something I want to rely on primarily if I leave and need to bring my phone with me.

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