Got a text from D&L this morning wanting to know if I wanted to go to town. Badly needing gasoline, I said yes.
Ever since getting a smartphone recently Neighbor L has become addicted to short animal videos, which has had the positive side effect that she doesn’t care how long you leave her sitting in her truck while you fill gas cans or whatever. I got back in to find her learning all about a talking dog or some dumb thing and it occurred to me to ask the question above. She answered in the affirmative, and her service improved at roughly the same time and as abruptly as mine did yesterday.
So what I’ve been blaming (with decreasing levels of conviction) on weather for weeks was apparently a local hardware issue it just took somebody a very long time to get around to fixing. Again, so much for high speed rural broadband.
“high speed rural broadband”
Ours is fine as long as it isn’t cloudy or raining or snowing or windy or too hot or the trees have leafed out or birds are migrating or it’s been on-line too long, etc. Sigh.
Starlink.
Ya, more expensive but you get what you pay for.
WS, I have heard – I don’t know this for certain – that the biggest problem with Starlink in my case isn’t even the cost, which is indeed prohibitive, but the power requirement. I apparently don’t have the amperage to run the equipment.
Hope your local service is not T-Mobil or Xfinity. Both are grade “A” for assholes when it comes to fixing issues with their towers. Had crappy signal coverage in my town for years, repeatedly reporting it got the stock answer “there are no issues”. Went so far as doing a basic signal strength map for them at various points in the town, shrug, don’t care. Now that they switched to 5g, they must have fixed what was wrong as it improved enormously. Never mind the prior 5 years of crap service at full cost, of course..
And that’s why you call when the service goes to hey. Someone finally called, and they traced down the nicked cable.
The Importance of Calling in the Problem:
Big storm. Tornado, etc. Power out for many people. Rural Uncle ran a generator for a week. He sees the Electrico truck out front.
“Yay, you guys are getting my power back!”
“Uh, power came back four or five days ago. Yours isn’t on?”
“Nooo”.
“We just stopped to latch a door that popped open Well, there’s your problem! An electrocuted squirrel. Gimme two minutes…”
“!@#@#$%”.
Yeah, I’ve told that story before, but I enjoy the telling every time.