Posts Tagged ‘connectivity’
Weak Link
There are many days when the Wintervale connection to the world via the internet is annoyingly flakey. The problem is mysterious and invisible, frequently interrupting progress in the middle…
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Hi, I’m back. That’s the way this works. After a seemingly interminable pause, activity resumes as if nothing is amiss. You wouldn’t notice a thing, unless you were attempting to visit with others via Zoom.
“Your internet connection is unstable.”
As soon as that message appears, even as I rush to write a chat message to everyone to explain that I could hear them all even though my image may have frozen to them, my fate is doomed to closing and then immediately reconnecting, minus all the text I had just entered in the chat window.
It’s life in the country. For all the advantages we enjoy living out among farm fields and forests, it comes at the expense of having a reliable internet connection. The industry can’t balance the economics of running fiberoptic cable to handfuls of houses scattered across many wide miles.
We don’t stream. We rent DVDs through the mail.
If we want to accomplish something without interruption, it takes a lucky combination of atmospheric conditions and an absence of too much competition for the limited bandwidth. Oh, and we can’t have already exceeded our cap of monthly allotted usage.
In all of the Zoom meetings I have participated in over the last month, I was the weakest link.
It’s too bad because I love the possibility of connecting with my multiple remote communities, but I love living where we do even more.
Cyndie pointed out that our new openings around the two big oak trees beside the driveway allow for excellent viewing of the rising moon.
Since our internet browsers weren’t having much success loading pages, we were more available to get out and enjoy the lunar view.
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Speedy Stability
Oh. My. Gosh. The signal booster kit arrived yesterday. Without a moment of hesitation after getting home from work, I opened packages and inventoried the goods.
Got what I wanted!
Everything matched my expectations. Still, I was not overly confident it would work for us. Sellers of this equipment clearly express the ultimate results are dependent on a lot of variable factors. I wanted to take as few steps as possible toward testing things out before putting in the effort to permanently install and wire all the components.
There was no getting around needing to have that outdoor directional antenna mounted on the peak of the roof, though.
With Cyndie inside the house getting readings from my phone and the internet hot spot, I adjusted the outdoor antenna in every direction for her to record levels. Using two-way radios, we methodically ran through the steps 8 different times. It didn’t seem all that critical, because all the readings showed improvement, but I settled on splitting the difference between two of the best decibel readings while aiming it toward a hint of an opening between trees.
After doing a little web site surfing and making a test phone call, the results were exhilarating enough that Cyndie suggested we not disconnect the hastily routed cables and use it as is until I can work on the more permanent installation over the weekend.
We took advantage of one of the window screens Delilah wrecked and duct taped around the cable as it passed through the screen to get the signal in a window from the outdoor antenna to the amplifier.
We are now enjoying an unprecedented 3 strong bars of 4G LTE signal without interruption. The best we had prior to the signal booster was 1 flaky bar of 4G every other day. On days it couldn’t grab 4G, it would settle on 3G, but usually reset every few minutes, or simply drop down to 1x and provide little to no forward progress on getting anything accomplished.
What a difference this makes. Pictures uploaded to my blog library in one try! Shocking! And no waiting!
It’s almost like living in the suburbs again. Except, we don’t have houses nearby, or traffic, or the sound of leaf blowers.
I tell you, the kit is not only improving our connectivity, it is boosting morale!
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Relative Something 