COMPUTER HOOK-UP

Hi Giggles:

I live at P.P. too.

I subscribe to the Choice Hot Spot at Coki Point.

Reasonably good wireless signal.

F.I.

Heya giggles,

I also telecommute from stt, the extremely slow speeds take a little getting used to but it is possible. After doing my research on which providers to use, I came up with the following:

DSL from innovative @ 1.2 Mbps up and down. This runs me about 80 a month.
For a backup, I use my jailbroken iphone with internet tethering (att)

The other broadband option I found is hughesnet satellite. You can get faster download speeds with satellite, but it has a much higher latency than the dsl. Since I need a low latency connection, satellite was not an option for me. Also, the other downside of satellite is that you need to have a dish installed, which may or may not be allowed at pt pleasant.

Hope this helps

thanks for the information I really appreciate it
G

Beware of Innovative. I suggest you get a back up if you decide to go with them. I have had nothing but issues and can say I have yet to go more than 2 consecutive weeks with no issues. I have had less than a 1/4 meg bandwith of which I subscribe to 1mb for a week now. This is the 3rd time in the past 2 months that this has occurred. I notified them this past Monday (1/11) and they initially told me 24 hrs. I called them again today and they said it will hopefully be fixed by Tuesday (1/18) if not, call them back then. Just wanted to let you know of my experience. If your work depends on it I would suggest a back up.

Cheers,

Dave

I am on STT and work from home.
I have both BroadbandVI and Innovative DSL, for backup and to double the bandwidth.

BroadbandVI provides a decent 1 Mbit (both up and down) connection. They've been up and running without any issues for a few months now. Knock wood.

Innovative was another story. *long story disclaimer*

It took me over a month to get their connection working (with daily phone calls to them). Once it worked, I got 1 Mbit (it is *NOT* 1.2Mbit, it is very precisely 1). 1 Mbit worked for about a week after which speeds went down to 100Kbit or less. They were unable to restore 1Mbit and I downgraded my connection to 500Kbit. That worked for another month. It went down once or twice (as in completely, or speed degraded to 100Kbit) but was quickly restored. Then as of this Tuesday, it degraded to about 80Kbit down (faster uplink but that is useless) and that's the way it is now. It is not that Innovative can't fix it - I am sure if technician actually came to check the connection it could be fixed. However, from my experience it will not be fixed until sometime next week optimistically.

That means that so far my Innovative service worked "as designed" (even assuming that 500Kbit is "as designed") only about 70% of the time since it was turned on. I.e. it DID NOT work about 1/3 of the time 🙂 Fwiw I decided that if it is not fixed by early next week - I am going to cancel my Innovative account (and I will not pay them either, they can't provide usable service).

I also tried Choice - they are easy to get, but speeds are relatively slow even "by design" and get worse if your location is not getting the best signal. Still it is better than what I am getting from Innovative now and not affected by poor wiring, bad maintenance of switches or their technician not feeling like visiting your location.

I have not tried satellite internet here, but I do have quite a bit of experience with satcom elsewhere and it is definitely not suitable for modern "work from home" use unless you are very conscious of connection limitations and have relatively light use of the network (in which case your phone 3G connection would probably be sufficient anyway).

So, from my experience I would definitely suggest BroadbandVI if you can get it, Choice if you can't and would probably avoid Innovative unless there were no other options (I don't consider it an "option" at this point)

Many times the problem with Innovative is not their service but their infrastructure -- i.e., since you are relying on wireline, if the wires are in poor repair, you will have trouble no matter what they do at the office end. Often my Innovative service gets a little kaflooey when it rains and then is fine when things dry out again.

Dave, sounds like we are in the same boat then 🙂 Well, may be if we keep calling. I called tuesday, thursday and today. Will repeat on Monday, then we'll see.

I downgraded the service to 512Kbit because they could not keep 1Mbit anyway and I didn't feel like paying extra for fictitious bandwidth.

Many times the problem with Innovative is not their service but their infrastructure -- i.e., since you are relying on wireline, if the wires are in poor repair, you will have trouble no matter what they do at the office end. Often my Innovative service gets a little kaflooey when it rains and then is fine when things dry out again.

I found no correlation between rain and quality of service. They certainly like to blame the wires, but as someone who has a bit of a clue I can tell you that often problems result from failures in their equipment which are often human-caused. Moreover, these issues could be fixed very quickly if Innovative cared to stay on top of them. All it takes is a 15 minutes tech visit to replace a single blade on the chassi that stands right outside the gate. That's how they keep service up elsewhere - by maintenance.

In any case, whatever the reason - bottom line is that Innovative service is probably not suitable for someone that requires reliable (i.e. mostly on) connection for work. If I only had Innovative - I'd be out of work by now.

Check out Broadband VI. My service works great most of the time. It took 3-4 tech visits but they finally got me the advertised speed

I have the opposite with Innovative, been using them at 1mbps stably and reliably for 2 years. Even was online through Omar. I'm even surprised by my good luck on this.

On internet here, there have been many threads, and the bottom line is that your best choice is often dictated by location. I am in Welcome near town and seem to have decent wirelines to Innovative so I have little problem. Others are not so luck. Broadband is a very good option if you are in a location serviced by them.

Sean

I have had Broadband VI since 2005 and the service has been good. Have had some short outages. They are easy to work with. I have their one Mbs service and they have tweaked it so it works with the streaming video services I use (Netflix and Slingbox). I have BBVI's radio and my routers connected to an UPS so as to minimize power related problems.

As a back up or when I'm away from home I tether my I-Phone to my laptop. Speed is excellent 2.4Mbs, but the latency is high as the connection to the Internet occurs in Wichita KS.

Jim

I am going to be living at my house in Tabor and Harmony, STT for 5 weeks starting in March and working remotely from STT to the States and will need a good and reliable connection.

I am debating on what I should do for service? The tenants in the apt use AT&T air card and swear by it. But they want a two yr contract with a $175 cancellation.

Innovative - they sound like a disaster! How long will it take me to set up service with them? Not very reliable as I read on here? What do they charge for a set up?

Broadband VI - $200 just for the set up and to use for 5 weeks? Is this worth it if I am not going to be back for another 9 mo's?

Choice - dont get a hot spot at the house - had them at Pt Pleasant Jan - 6-13 and were down for three days at the Coki site!

Any other ideas out there or what would you do?

Wish I knew how to snag one of these work from home gigs. I would be perfect for it I think.

Wish I knew how to snag one of these work from home gigs. I would be perfect for it I think.

Scremped, if you only knew how stressful it is, and I have a wife who is taking care of the physical aspects of our business and let me do this for a month, you would be perfect....I work seven days a week and 10-12 hrs a day....to be honest it is me who is deabting moving to STT and the best way is to spend 5 weeks there, if it were up to the wife, we would be there 6 mo's ago.....I am lucky to have such a kick butt wife!

Still looking for an opinion?

That's pretty much what I did at my last job, except I was at the station most of the time, until they got me log me in software to allow me to run the computers from home, but either way it was a lot of work for one person.

I think the stress of a work-from-home gig depends on what your job is, and maybe how you pick and deal with your jobs/clients/employer. I work from home and I love it. I hope I will never have to work elsewhere. I do property management and web programming.

More on topic, as of yesterday my Innovative experiment is over. I canceled the account. Unfortunately, the service worked for about a week at 1 Mbit, then went down for a week. They were only able to bring it up to 512Kbit then, and it stayed that way for 2 weeks. Then it died completely (speeds under 100Kbit, really can't consider that any kind of service) and after 3 weeks of being on the phone with them every damned day I gave up. They are nice enough people, but they don't have a clue and don't really like to work too hard. Can't blame them, but in any case - that makes for very poor service.

BBVI seems ok, though they have their own moments (weird routing and resulting slowdowns).

I'm starting to think the only reason I have such good service with Innovative is that I'm the only one who has it working at his house! No one else using the pipes = great service for me I guess, until it goes down and then I'll be SOL 🙂

My dad had to stream the Superbowl last night off my Slingbox as he's in DC and they had 3 feet of snow that knocked out their Comcast Cable. He was pissed about an 8 hour outage, told him it would probably be 8 weeks here! Anyway, he has FIOS for internet and got really good quality off my Innovative 1mbps uplink (he's got 45mbps down) to watch the game. Although I had to explain to him several times that if he changed the channel it changed it for the whole party...doh!

This may have been one of the only times someone in the VI was providing IPTV to someone in the states as THEIR last resort for service 🙂

Sean