I'm Loving . . .

our new internet service!  Wow, what a difference!  Living "out in the sticks," our options for internet service are limited.  During our first year and a half here, we had to suffer through using dial-up.  Ugh!  The fact that we had high-speed cable internet service previous to moving here made it all the more unbearable.  But, then we were introduced to a DSL wireless provider that was offering service to our area, so we made the switch to that.  It was a major improvement, to be sure, but it has been anything but high-speed these past three-plus years.  Sometimes it seemed no faster than dial-up speeds; other times it seemed much faster; but, at no time, has it ever been high-speed.  To watch a 3-minute Youtube video would take around 10 minutes, and forget about watching anything streaming.  But, worse than the slowness of the supposed "high-speed" we were supposed to be getting was the frequent outages.  For the past six months, it was common for the service to be down multiple times daily (ten minutes here, an hour or two there, and so on) - very frustrating.  I spent countless hours on the phone with tech support, but to no avail.  The low speeds and outages continued. 

Finally, a couple of weeks ago I did some shopping around to see if there were any other providers in our area.  Long story short, there was a provider that was broadcasting off of the tower that I can see from my back yard, and could give me "direct line of sight" service at high speed.  They assured me that I would see a huge difference with their service.  They were right.  They came out yesterday and installed the service and it is like night and day from what I had.  Simply awesome!  I actually watched some of the Masters golf tournament streaming online yesterday without any pauses for buffering.  I also watched an episode of The Office from nbc.com, which was simply impossible before.  And, as for youtube videos - no waiting at all anymore!  Imagine that - you click play and watch the video (instead of pausing it to give it ten minutes to load).  Very cool!  The best thing of all is that this new service is actually $5/month cheaper than what I have been paying (although I did have to break down and pay an install fee). 

I'm loving our new service.  It's good to be back in the 21st century again!