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General discussion

Southern Illinois ISPs Dial-up and DSL

Feb 28, 2006 6:50AM PST

Back in my days of College (Go Salukis!) I worked at a local ISP in Southern Illinois, for those of you that don't know Southern Illinois is actually a separate state from Illinois.

Dial-up:
Tom I totally agree with what you said that it would take 4 - 5 times to get a stable dial-up connections in Southern Illinois. Most of our users would call and ***** that they would either kept getting disconnected or just could never get faster then 14.4. I think it was the further you got away from "town" the worse your connection was. Two stories come to mind. One smaller town in particular had the weirdest problem. The town was divided by train tracks and on any given day only one side or the other could connect. We never could figure out this problem. The second in evolved a horse rancher/farmer. The farmer would get disconnect from dialup after 30 seconds. Ever single time?.All of us took a shot at trying to figure this one out. Check all setting, reinstall the modem?etc etc?till one of the techs kept hearing a small pop in the phone line. This is where it gets amusing? we had the rancher turn off his electric fence and re-dial, sure enough?he was able to stay connected. The charge on the fence was enough to somehow cause the phone circuit to his house to short.

DSL:
I still stay in touch with people in that area and they say DSL service is becoming more widely available, however?the performance quality is going down hill. I agree that WiMax could potential be the best bet in rural areas, or even EDGE or other cell technologies. Towers are cheaper to deploy in the long run I believe.
Besides?.what else is there to do around that area. There are enough liquor stores, might as well have a good broadband connection to go along with them.

~Mike P.

Discussion is locked

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Luckily
Feb 28, 2006 7:54AM PST

A couple of years ago were were able to get DSL here at the house. That is when the ONLY ISP (and still the only one) started to offer it. The people that live near me that only have dial up are still only getting 26.4 kbps which is what I got when I had dial up.

The local phone company (our ISP), when they were installing my DSL line, they had a horrendous time getting it installed, it took almost two months to actually get a signal out here. But, they done something one day and I came home and I was getting 48.8kbps and I KNOW that had something to do with them upgrading our line to a digital line. However, when I dial out to the Internet now, its still only 26.4.

The other problem with DSL out here is that I am paying $65 a month (Service + Router Rental). And on DL.TV they were talking about people paying that much for FIBER, that just drives me insane!!!

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Sorry to rub it in
Feb 28, 2006 8:48AM PST

I pay $40 for fiber, 10 mbit symmetrical.

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Oh..
Feb 28, 2006 10:27AM PST

Thats nice, just nice, yeah, rub it in! lol

I'm so tired of paying $65 for 1mbit and not getting it! I hate my ISP! YOU HEAR THAT HIGHLAND (my ISP), I HATE YOU!

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barbed wire
Feb 28, 2006 11:58AM PST

That's what my mom used to say they used for phone lines out in the boonies (where I live now, down the road from where my grandparents lived -- my mother had experience talking on the phone over those wires! As of the 1990s, there were still people in my phone exchange that had party lines!

We have Time Warner, and that's because they spent the time getting the cable to everyone's house. They ran cable on the poles by the road, and then they have this neat machine that looks like a roto-tiller, and it buries the cable just under the ground as they run it across. The cable itself doesn't cost much, so they can run another one if one of them gets damaged or dug up.

We can't get DSL out here. We live less than 1/2 mile from a little phone company substation, and the Verizon rep I spoke to said others in my area had DSL, which I can't understand, but I gave up waiting. I really think Cable Modem is faster, anyway.

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Just the opposite
Feb 28, 2006 12:04PM PST

Where I live we can now finally get DSL but not cable. The cable company won't come out this far.