One of the joys of living in a rural area are the limited options for high speed Internet. I have no access to cable or DSL. Bell and Rogers provide Internet over microwave (WiMax) from towers in the Newmarket area, but the signal peters about two kilometres west of my house. To the east is a high speed Internet wasteland.
The only option has been satellite Internet, a costly service that provides limited bandwidth with high latency (the round-trip time to web servers). The service was good for the first year, acceptable in the second but increasingly unreliable in the third. I discovered that I was regularly running afoul of the 'Fair Access Policy' that reduced my bandwidth by 90% if I downloaded more than 55MB or uploaded more than 5MB in an hour.
I stumbled on the Rogers Rocket Mobile Internet Service that uses the 3G cellphone technology introduced to support smartphones and other mobile devices. Intended for mobile users, the helps fill in some of the high speed Internet coverage gaps as shown in the yellow areas of the southern Ontario coverage map. Be warned - EDGE connectivity (the red areas) is significantly slower than the HSUPA service, with a maximum download speed of 287 kbps.
The costs are steep: a 5GB/month plan is $88 plus tax, and additional traffic is charged at $30/GB. However, the overall monthly bill is capped at $108, which is only slightly more than what I was paying for the satellite service. Testing so far has been positive. The bandwidth is no worse than the satellite service and often better. Latency is much better so web browsing seems 'snappier'.
There have been challenges. The RocketStick is a USB modem, intended for a single PC. The connection will fail intermittently but re-connecting usually resolves the problem quickly. However, sometimes the USB modem appears to hang and needs to be physically power-cycled. The most technically challenging problem has been getting Voice over IP working. The solutions will be the subject of subsequent posts.
All posts in this series:
- Rogers Rocket Mobile Internet Service - SheevaPlug
- Rogers Rocket Mobile Internet Service - Voice over IP
- Rogers Rocket Mobile Internet Service - A Lesson in Assumptions
- Rogers Rocket Mobile Internet Service - Automation
- Rogers Rocket Mobile Internet Service - Multi-PC Setup
- Rural Internet - Rogers Rocket Mobile Internet Service
