No Internet, No Landline Phone, Aaaaargh!

[Wayne and Carolyn Mathews]

I waited at home most of the day for the telephone people to come move our phone/DSL line approximately 50 yards from our Monty, where we've lived for a year, to the new house. (Not ready to leave the RV.) At 3:00, I called to be sure the guys were coming; we'd been on the schedule for over a month for today's service. Oops. Not coming. I was told, "I'm sorry. The men said it will be a couple of weeks before they get out there. They have to dig a trench to the new house, and right now they don't have a trencher on hand." Duh. You KNOW you're living in the boondocks when your tiny local phone company doesn't even have a trencher on hand, right?

So, in the morning, when we hitch up and take the Monty to Idaho Falls and leave it for some warranty work, we will lose our internet and phone connection. After I unplug the phone and computer and pull the connections out of the window, I'm going to wrap the end connections in plastic and hope that I can take my laptop and a chair out to the pole where all the cables are, plug in, and check the MOC postings. I'm already having withdrawal!

On the bright side, I'll have a lot of new MOC posts to read if I have to wait "a couple of weeks" to have internet access again.

See you down the internet road! (We hope to SEE and MEET a lot of you at the 7 Feathers rally next June.)
Wayne and Carolyn

[Driftwoodgal]

Our phone company is Verizon. They contract all of their trenching out to sub contractors. We are almost using tin cans for phone service. They even charge us for touch tone calling. I think you can still get a party line in our area.

The thought of DSL in our area is probably 20 years from now. I may not be around to see it.

Good luck with everything.

Colleen

[Wayne and Carolyn Mathews]

Colleen, I feel your pain. We are Verizon cell customers, but our landline and DSL come from the locals. We just got DSL up here in the last year. DSL: Don't Stay (on) Long. It's neither fast nor stable, and has gotten as expensive as Wildblue satellite internet service, so we may explore that opportunity as soon as soon as we're settled in the house.

Interesting, about Verizon. I'd considered using a Verizon internet wireless connection, but any cell service out here is so hit-and-miss that I was afraid I'd end up in worse shape than I'm in now. It seems that no one I know is happy with the company they're with; Wildblue is expensive and has no service techs out here, Verizon is expensive and the coverage isn't good, and the local company is expensive and slow to get to its customers. (Unless something has changed in the last few months, all Wildblue customers in Montana had to wait for service techs to come from Washington. Ridiculous.)

We're pulling all the plugs in less than an hour, so I supposed I better start going through the checklist: Fasten shower door, velcro cabinet doors, remove flying objects from the walls . . . It's my least favorite job of RVing. But, the fun of traveling and meeting people outweighs any inconvenience. (Guess you can count a trip to the dealer as "traveling." And for sure, I'm going to meet a service tech today!)
Carolyn
PS: Maybe investing in a high-quality string to connect the tin cans would boost your service??? And be sure to use name-brand asparagus cans, not generic-brand bean cans. That might help, too!

[Waynem]

Guess I'm to late to say good luck.

What about wireless at the terminal and the computer at the house. Lynksys system. Build a little box on three sides to keep the elements out. Mount it on a pole, Communicate!!! The Lynksys plugs into the DSL line. Duh! Why didn't I think of that.

Eidted: The Lynksys can be use later on in the house. You can sit in the living room and talk to us while reading a book.

[sailer]

Well here in northern wis i have a big pine woods behind us and the air card was slow so i got a antenna to get better but with 50' of big cable it was still bad so i got a booster but still slow so today i got 30' more of big cable and now the antenna is 14' above the tv tower on the house,, well the house is a a frame so its 25 to 30' tall pluse a tv antenna on top of about 20' , so i now am up about 60 to 65' above the ground but still not above the woods but not to bad ,,,, sailer

[dsprik]

FAA will make you put a red blinking light on that if you get any higher, John.

[Wayne and Carolyn Mathews]

I'm back in service, temporarily. Our phone/internet line is strung down the road from our old house 2 miles east of us to the new house; the phone company has it hanging on a jackfence and wrapped with those plastic ties about every 12 feet to keep it off the ground. From the fence to our house, it's on top of sagebrush. That's what we'll live with until the phone company can get a trencher to finish the fiber-optic cable from where work on it stopped (about 3 miles west of us) to our house. However, between now and that time, we'll lose service intermittently because of unrelated work on all the phone lines out here.

Moving from Austin, Texas, one of the tech leaders in the world, to Horse Prairie, Montana, has been quite an adjustment in a lot of ways!

Carolyn

[Waynem]

Okay! We'll stop talking about you now!

Welcome back to sanity. (If you can call the internet sanity.)

[Wayne and Carolyn Mathews]

Out here, the internet is not only sanity, it's a way of life. The cost of shipping most things to us (clothing, computer ink, etc.) is still a lot cheaper than driving 2+ hours to buy it!
Carolyn

[Waynem]

Well, without the internet think of how much money you would save.

Oh! You would have to retrieve the "Sears" catalog!