N1ATP

Project Rural Internet

The town has committed to extend fiber to every house in the community so that all children have the same opportunity to succeed as if they live in a metropolitan area. We are looking forward to this with guarded optimism. It seems like a ambitious task to connect every household in a small rural town spread over thousands of acres and miles of country road. However, the offer is for Gigabit service for $70 per month. Can’t wait!

Living at the “end of the line” has proved challenging at times. We do loose wired  services (electricity and wired phone) when we least expect it. Thus, the AT&T WHPI Service may remain as a main house phone and backup internet. The Mikrotik router can be configured for 2 WAN and auto switch-over should the primary feed fail. Time will only tell.

FIBER PROJECT UPDATES

We live at the end of a 1.25 mile private road with 8 houses. Kind of “at the end of the road” in more than one way;

  • 2017 Fall – utility poles surveyed for height. Our private road has numerous spots with long hanging wires causing issues for construction vehicles.
  • 2018 Spring – replacement of short utility poles started.
  • 2019 Winter – Utility lines moved to new poles.
  • 2019 Spring – ready for fiber runs.
  • 2019 Fall – Fiber is to our property, but not lit up and we are missing the run into the house. Hoping for Spring?
  • 2019 Christmas – Whip City Fiber called and announced it was my turn to get lit up. 2 minor problems; 1) we are not here full time so a coordinated date was needed, 2) Do the installation trucks have 4WD and capable of a steep driveway in the winter? No snow (on December 23rd) and we will be high-speed. Snow, and we will wait until after the mud-season. 2″ of hardpack placed us out of reach. Funny thing – 3 days later I received a call from the their tech department – my internet shows off-line??!! How about not yet installed!
  • April 2020 – Please come and install fiber as a necessity for work in a Covid 19 Self Isolation environment. All installations stopped. Installers do not have PPE to protect themselves.
  • July 2020 – Finally! Contracted fiber installers are able to come and run the last 200′ in conduit from the pole to the house and install the ONT. Great! Small inconvenience – they are only allowed to the enter the basement by the town due to Covid. No problem – light up the fiber!
  • July 2020 – THE FIBER IS LIT UP!

HOUSE SETUP

Reality sets in – time to rewire the house and loose up all choke points. Another problem appeared:

  • All TV services is planned to be via fiber. The provider I picked is Youtube TV since the same service can provide multiple streams for the same price. Additionally, the house has Netflix and other streaming services.
  • Problem occurred where the fiber service has short glitches, but also causing the TV feed to buffer. I therefore decided to go with a used router, due to budget,  which has multi wan service and auto failover to a Verizon LTE backup feed. Since the house is a Smart House, the remote monitoring and control to my cellphone is via internet.
  • Router  – Luxul ABR-4500 is the primary Dual WAN router. When I run single WAN it is capable of the full gig. When I run dual redundant WANs the speed drops to 0.6G (I actually see 800M+). I cannot tell the difference with a typical household setup. Dual WAN it is.
  • Problem with the luxul router having short WAN hiccups. Found the issue to be a DNS conflict between the fiber provider and my router. Some tweaking and we are now all set!
  • We live in a log home and find that WiFi strength falls off quickly with the 6 to 12″ log walls. WiFi access points have been upgraded to a Luxul roaming WiFi Access Point system supporting AC technology. Problem is the effective range of the signal at these high frequencies and speeds. The Roaming controller does an excellent job in moving the mobile devices to the best access point. I love it! Currently we are running with AC1900 mbps AP’s. Goal may be to add a AC3100 AP in the living room. Keeping an eye on ebay for the “right price” opportunity.

Do I LOVE having high speed internet – without doubt – YES!

2022 UPDATE

Crazy, but we are completing year 2 and starting year 3 on Fiber. Overall it is simply great – love it! At times when the town or area looses internet typically due to trunk line problems, we loose both internet and TV since we are in the boons and over the air TV is useless. When we spend longer periods of time here we install the old AT&T WHPI box on the second WAN port and we typically never realize the town / area has lost Fiber. This has happened a couple of times in these two years. Overall, we cannot express how much we like our service. The town of Otis, MA has done an excellent job in a low-density “last mile” environment. Congratulations!

All the hardware has been replaced from the above to a complete rack of Luxul:

  • Luxul Router with dual internet
  • Luxul Managed POE Switch
  • Luxul Roaming High Speed Access Points in all areas of the house. We have learned that log homes has so much attenuation of 5ghz frequencies that a roaming network and short distance to AP was needed for ultra high speed WiFi.

I found that Legrand/Luxul rack devices have a happy compromise of advanced features and simple interface. No plans to change this any time soon. My rack is nowhere as color coordinated as this picture, but contains much of the same equipment.

Overall, the house is wired with Cat 6 Ethernet cable. Over the next year I can see a rewiring of the main areas of the house between the main rack to sub areas with cluster switches. Overall, the network performs really well, but in places are a bit hokey in appearance. Time to clean up from the evolution process to a permanent installation.

AT&T WHPI

Back in 2016, after numerous hours of research, hunting and pecking I discovered a AT&T service a lot of full-time RV’ers use called Wireless Home Phone & Internet (WHPI). However, all of my reading indicated that it was only available in certain regions. Consulting the AT&T website confirmed the same. A note in one of the many user comments indicated that by finding the right sales person I should be in luck. So the phone hunt started. Sure enough, I friendly female said “no worries” and the deal was on. We were suddenly online with cell-based broadband internet.

So what did we get?

  • 4G LTE House unit with WiFi, phone and Ethernet connectors
  • 15 – 50M download speed and 5 – 15M upload (typically the higher values, but depending on number of tourists in the area). Just did an 2Gb software update on a computer with an average download speed of 49M. Awesome!
  • 250G data per month (seems to be plenty). We average 170Gb.
  • $10 per extra 10Gb (not the usual $10 for 1Gb!)
  • Ability to downgrade HD video streaming to DVD quality (very important!)
  • Cost $60 + tax per month

2021: This has become our backup internet feed at home and our travel router. We no longer connect to a hotel router (security and convenience) but simply pull out the small box and turn it on. All our devices connect automatically and we never run out of data.