I live out in the woods. Not really impressively far, like an hour outside of Boston. Somewhere where you think they would have decent internet service still. But no. We live in the black hole of internet, our town has no Cable service, and we are outside of DSL range. So we to date have been using the only other option available, WiMax service via our friendly town electric company. This gets us about 1 Mbps download speed, roughly equivalent to slow DSL speed, but good enough.
Things were going OK, although since I work from home and use the internet a lot, i would prefer a lot more bandwidth for the $59/month I am paying. That is a relative ripoff compared to those who live in denser markets, but it's manageable considering the lack of competition we have in town.
To get that speed, I have a 2GHz radio modem sitting at the top of a 60ft pine tree. I had a guy free-climb it about 5 years ago and install it. It has direct line-of-sight to Wachusett Mtn, where the wellspring of internet goodness lives in our area. Without direct line-of-sight, its not possible to get that kind of speed with our system. You can use a slower modem that goes to a nearby relay tower, but then we are talking about 1/2 the speed, 500kbs or so. (We used to have that before we upgraded to the current configuration.)
So like I said, things were going OK, until last week, when our internet connection got flaky. I had always dreaded that moment, the moment I realized whatever problem there was could only be solved by fixing something at the top of that big big tree. The Internet Tree, as we lovingly referred to it. The source of all our music and news and movies and software. The internet sap had finally dried up!
Panic set in. But I had it in the back of my mind when this day came, I would just convince our friendly light dept to send out a bucket truck, perhaps at my expense, to go up there and fix it...
Next Installment: Your radio modem is where ??
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