Rural Internet - Johnny Two-Wheels

In 2008 I left the confines of city living and joined a tiny minority of humans who embrace rural living. And by that I mean a place where walking "around the block" might take an hour, and a run to the nearest Starbucks is, literally, a marathon. Out here we have our reasons for shunning the urban world, but we still must live. In the current millennium, living well requires the internet.

At first, I got lucky. I bought a house just within range of DSL service from the local landline phone provider. Then our growing family moved deeper into the country, to an area where most houses are equipped with rooftop dishes and antennas and other apparatus designed for connection to the virtual universe. Our new rooftop was adorned with a line-of-site dish pointed towards the nearest water tower. This connected us with a rural internet provider, and thus began a difficult relationship with technology.

At first, we could live with 2-3 mbps download speeds. Dish Network provided most of our TV entertainment, and we owned just a handful of lightly-used devices requiring internet connections. Thunderstorms would usually knock out our connection for a day or two, and I got to know the ISP support people by name, but we survived.

Then came Netflix streaming and YouTube, then kids addicted to Netflix and YouTube, smart TVs and finally a host of connected devices, all consuming huge volumes of content. Our rural ISP just couldn't cut it. I begged for the faster speeds they claimed could be delivered. They sent physical humans to our house, some who shimmied across the precarious peak of our 45-degree sloped roof, 30 feet off the ground, to re-aim the dish at a faster line-of-sight source.

But alas, it was not to be. We were in a valley, about 150 feet lower than the rest of civilization, and the lone water tower with the old, slow equipment was our only option. Maybe the dish mounted to a 100-foot tower would have helped, but that was a pipe dream.

Adding insult to my frustration was the day a cable boring company showed up to bury a high-speed fiber optic line under the ditch in front of our house. At first I thought my dreams had come true. I'd simply ask the owner of the cable to tap me into the line and we'd have lightening-fast internet.

Oh, what a dreamer I was. This cable was specifically designated for the local school districts. Under no circumstances would the schools allow a person such as myself to siphon their capacity with my irrational need for streaming Stranger Things on Netflix. That cable, thirty feet from my front porch, might as well have been thirty light years away.

I slouched into my office chair, fired up my desktop computer, Googled "rural internet options" and found a lot of bad reviews. We could go with satellite internet, with its absurd latency and its waiting...and waiting. Or we could sign up for a cellular-based ISP, put up with slow data speeds from our 5-years-behind-everyone-else cell towers, and hope the company would still be in business a year later.

We were stuck.

Then came the pandemic of 2020. In March I was sent home to work remotely and our daughters were sent home to learn remotely. I quickly gave up on video meetings, which was actually quite nice (I once had a 30-minute conversation with my neighbor during a conference call). The girls suffered through endless "glitches", as they called them, while attempting to learn something -- anything -- to finish out the school year.

This battle was about to become a war. After more research, I learned of massive government gifts to ISPs for the purpose of developing rural broadband. I discovered how these companies take the money and work around the rules so they can use the money for other things that make them more money. In my state, our government launched a $420 million initiative in 2019 named Connect Illinois, which was designed to help bring broadband to underserved areas. As our governor J.B. Pritzker stated at the time, these areas were particularly "downstate", which is Chicago talk for anyone who lives in the vast, insignificant void outside the seven counties that really matter in Illinois. If any of the $420 million ever made it into the coffers of my ISP, it wasn't used quicken our data speeds.

Mild euphoria ensued when I happened to notice our local Verizon tower had been upgraded and was putting out 20+ mbps download speeds. This may seem modest to some, but when the starting point was 3 or 4, I was excited enough to pull up my Verizon wireless account and see if I could add home internet. The answer was yes, if I wanted to put up with small data caps and throttling. Foiled again....

Finally, like manna from heaven, T-Mobile announced a wireless internet plan with no data caps, no throttling and no cords, all for $50/month. We decided to give it a test drive. Our address qualified for the service and I signed up as fast as my fingers could type on our old-school keyboard. A week later, a small, grey cylinder showed up in the mail.

I set up the T-Mobile gateway, as instructed, in the highest location I could find inside the house, near a window I thought provided a line of sight to a nearby T-Mobile cell tower. The signal was weak, but the download speed was a couple mbps better than our existing ISP.

For a few months we tested T-Mobile and made the decision not only to dump our incumbent ISP, but to get rid of Dish Network as well. I had told my wife several times that I felt Dish was the poorest value of anything for which we were currently spending. To me, the service was worth $20/month at best. We were paying over $100/month. She agreed, and we prepared to cut the cord. After a long conversation with a retention specialist, I convinced Dish to cancel my service. Fortunately, I had prepared with facts and data and aligned my arguments properly, and ultimately I was able to successfully end the relationship.

Our old ISP was a bit easier. We parted ways in less than 5 minutes and they even let me keep the hardware. I had fun climbing our rooftop to remove the dishes and brackets and everything else accumulated up there for the past 20 years. The wires were gone, mostly. I did purchase an unsightly exterior antenna to receive local television broadcasts. It was mounted in place of the unsightly ISP dish on the roof. I did all this work myself, assuring my wife the life insurance policy was current.

Over the next year, we mostly enjoyed our trashcan. Every so often we'd lose connection and I'd call T-Mobile for help. I would inquire with the support people where the nearest T-Mobile cell tower was located, so I could properly position the gateway. They would never reveal its location. I once asked why the tower location was a secret, and the pleasant lady replied "It's not a secret...we just don't tell customers where they're at."

So I took it upon myself to find the T-Mobile tower, first by loading the trashcan in my pickup truck, plugging it into the AC outlet and driving...and driving. Within a 3-mile radius of my home, the signal was spotty and data speeds were only moderately improved. Where in the world was this tower?

Next, I visited cell tower mapping websites. Cellmapper.net was tricky to navigate, but seemed to show the nearest T-Mobile tower an astounding 8.25 miles from my home. Surely this could not be. How was it even possible to receive any signal at all from this distance, down in our little valley? Once again I packed up the trashcan and drove to the faraway tower, and like magic, data speeds increased spectacularly. This was indeed my tower.

Once I learned the tower was capable of blasting out 80+ mbps download speeds, my mind went into overdrive. I must get more of that, I thought. Moving the T-Mobile gateway outdoors gave me another 1 mbps download speed, and uploads doubled from the dismal 0.3 mbps we had been living with. But the trashcan isn't designed for Midwest weather, so I decided to invest in a cell phone booster system with an outdoor yagi-style antenna. I also decided to get the antenna up in the air as high as possible...and cheaply. After much research and self-introspection, I decided to channel my inner Jeff Foxworthy and make my own antenna tower.

You might ask, what makes an antenna tower redneck, exactly?

I give you this:

First, obtain 30 feet of 2" aluminum conduit. Yes, the kind used by electricians. They come in 10-foot sections. Buy three and screw them together, tightly.
Climb one of your 40-foot pine trees, hanging on to branches with one arm and the aluminum conduit with the other. Don't worry, the weight of 30 feet of metal conduit isn't as bad as you might image. It's worse...far worse. Also, when in Northern Illinois, always do this in January.
Strap the conduit to the last 10 feet of the pine tree. Now you have approximately 60 feet of elevation.
Take down the conduit and start all over again because you forgot to run the coax through the inside of the conduit.
Run the coax to your house, like a clothesline. Shove it through the random hole in the wall that the Dish guys drilled for satellite TV twenty years ago. Hope and pray the pine tree doesn't blow over, like another one did a few years ago.
Watch as your T-Mobile gateway produces about the same data speeds. Curse yourself for wasting so much time and money.

Admittedly, I jumped the gun with the cell booster system. Turns out those work better for boosting cell signal, but don't always do much for data speeds. I learned that on Reddit, after reading the rural internet discussion. Fascinating stuff from people as frustrated as me. The Reddit folks tipped me off to one last possible solution: MIMO.

Also known as Multiple-Input Multiple-Output, this type of antenna was said to improve data speeds on cellular networks. I didn't have time to wait for Elon Musk to launch satellites above the Illinois/Wisconsin border, so I ordered a MIMO, my last hope. I really needed a new job, and in my line of work I felt my best options were work-from-home positions where decent internet would be critical. If MIMO didn't help our data speeds, I might have to settle for lower earning potential, or move the family somewhere else. Neither option was good.

The MIMO system is sort of two antennas in one, both concealed in a little white plastic box about 12 inches square (they can also be set up as multiple yagi-style antennas, more preferable if you have line-of-sight to the cell tower). Two antennas equals two coax cables, both of which had to be hooked into the T-Mobile gateway. Before ordering, I read the online instructions and decided I was up to the challenge.

A few days later, our MIMO arrived with great anticipation. I went straight to the T-Mobile gateway and began voiding the warranty. Breaking in was tricky, but the instructions were excellent. The purpose of opening up the gateway was to find two tiny wires, unplug them, and reconnect to the coax. A couple false starts later, I successfully connected the wires and fired up the gateway.

With the external antenna temporarily placed on our tower-facing deck, the data speeds increased beyond 10 mbps. By urban standards, I was still slow, but down in a valley with the cell tower over 8 miles away, I was happy with low double-digit download speeds. I couldn't wait to mount the MIMO high up on the roof, next to the TV antenna.

This is where the quirkiness of MIMO became apparent. A higher mounting position is sometimes good, but not always. When I climbed to the roof and mounted the MIMO next to the TV antenna, I lost data speed. The instructions warned that other signals can interfere when the antenna is mounted up in the open air. The best mounting position was often on the side of the house, where walls could block out other signals. I experimented with various locations, all facing the T-Mobile tower, and found the best place was spot just below the peak of the roof, opposite from the nearby Verizon and US Cellular towers.

My antenna positioning success often defied logic. Some of the best speeds came with the antenna pointed straight at the pine trees, or not facing directly towards the tower. The Reddit experts discussed this at length, with no clear consensus on why the MIMO positioning requires so much trial and error.

I also noticed that whenever I unplugged the wires from the antenna and tried out a new location, at first the data speeds were wildly improved. Then a day would pass and I could never replicate those initial speeds. Other times, if I unplugged the wires at the gateway, speeds would decrease when I reconnected the wires. If I reversed the wires, speeds returned to normal.

Eventually I got the new job I wanted and began working out of my home. Without MIMO, it's unlikely I could have made this workable. The flagstone walls of my basement office were mostly cellphone-proof, so I repurposed the pine tree antenna by mounting it to the roof and running the booster down to "the hole", as it was affectionately named. I still have hopes of true broadband, the kind found in towns and cities, somehow finding its way to my neighborhood.

I'm not holding my breath.

Until then, we country folk will have to be creative, just as we are with so many other amenities taken for granted by city slickers...like pizza delivery, but that's a web rant for another time.

Certified World Wide Website

The Joy
of
rural internet

Country Living has its limitations

The need for speed begins here.

Trashcan to the Rescue

The Pine Tree Antenna

Finding MIMO

Tolerable Internet, finally