The Log

As I’ve mentioned before, my wife and I have been in the process of becoming more self sufficient. A big part of that is growing our own food, which up until now has meant gardening.

But we’ve had the desire to do more. So this summer, we sold our house and started looking for something more rural where we could do more gardening and get some chickens. And at some point, add in a goat.

But finding the right place was a struggle due to the limitations of getting high speed internet access in rural areas. Since I run my own business and work from home, internet access is essential.

Where we live, our high speed access comes from a telco or a cable company. The cable is only available in town and the telco is hit or miss in the outskirts. The only other option (or so I thought) is a local ISP that provides wireless connectivity. But their service is a little more expensive and slower. Where as cable and ADSL offer a max of 7.2 mbps, this local ISP gives you 1 to 1.5 MB/sec on the download and only 512 KB on the upload. I wasn’t eager to try running my business from home on this service.

During the process of house hunting, someone suggested I try one of these newer USB modems from a cell company. Sometimes called Rocket sticks or USB sticks, they are basically a USB modem and a flash drive all in one. I had heard of them before, but blew it off as no where near what I would need.

But I headed down to the Bell store to check out the details. And here I am today, completing all of the regular activities of my workday connected to the local 3G cell network via this USB modem.

The Good

One sidenote — I’m not into networking. It has to be the most boring aspect of IT. So if I use the wrong terminology, please excuse my blissful ignorance.

The first thing I did was perform some speed tests. Rather than using some fancy web service, I simply performed the kind of activities I do every day on my current connection and timed them. Then I did the same with the USB modem connection. Here’s the results:

Well, from these numbers, it’s obvious that this connection is a lot slower than high cable internet, even though they both advertise a “maximum speeds of 7.2 mbps”. I wasn’t getting that — it’s more like 100 KB per second.

But the reality was that the usage was actually pretty good. I could browse the web and pages loaded only a split second slower than on my old connection. Sending email and uploading files was almost as fast as normal. Downloading files and streaming video were a lot slower, but I could simply start each type of activity, move on to something else and come back when they were completed.

Overall, I could live with this performance as it allows me to do my job. I’ve been on the connection all day and have barely noticed. In fact, there where a couple of times where I checked my wireless connection to see if it had switched back to my cable connection because things were running so smoothly.

Even better, Bell is the rolling out a nation wide network upgrade next month as they become Canada’s second carrier to offer the iPhone. Their 3G HSP network is bumping up to the 4G or HSPA. They’re promoting the service as getting 21 Mbps — speed that would exceed even cable and ADSL.

We all know those are maximum speeds and not what you experience day to day. But at even half the speed, this would be a great improvement over the current network.

The Bad

Before I purchased the USB modem, I had called my current ISP for a summary of my data usage. I received the data today and it was a lot higher than I realized.

The pricing on this 3G USB connection is reasonable, or so I thought at first. I should have known that it wasn’t as the first tier starts at 500 MB for $30 a month. And it caps at 5 GB for $85 a month. Anything over 5 GB is priced at 3¢ per MB, which works out to $30 per GB.

And seeing as I’m averaging around 8 GB a month, the total cost at my current levels means I would pay around $175 a month for internet access.

That’s simply not acceptable.

What Next?

I’m not sure where to go from here, and I’m feeling some frustration. We desire to lead a simpler life and being more connected to the land we live on is a big part of that. Yet I have to earn a living, and my ability to do that is tied to my connection.

So do I go with this option and attempt to change my habits slightly? I don’t even do a lot of downloading — there’s no Netflix account in this house. Will I worry about every time I refresh a page?

Or do I go with the local ISP and the slower wireless connection?

If you’ve got some magic answer to this type of issue, let me know. I’m open to hearing any ideas.

This is a first world problem, but 2010 is upon us and my feeling is that rural internet access should be as good as what’s available in the city. And as cheap.

• #connectivity
• #networking