Get Rural Internet High Speed Broadband Access

I work for a small payroll service bureau. Our office located in the rural part of Western New York up on a hill in the middle of nowhere. Even though most of the local towns do have broadband internet access using cable and DSL services we do not because we are located 10 miles from the nearest town. Getting rural broadband internet access is very difficult in our area.

Over the years we have tried many different ways of connecting to the internet. First we had Compuserve, then dial up using a local ISP, next we tried satellite services from Hughes and Wildblue. Obviously the dial up connections were pretty bad even by dial up standards. Our phone lines are not the greatest so the best we were ever able to connect was between 28k and 56k.

Until recently we've been using DirecPc from Hughes which works ok for downloads but the latency of a satellite connection makes browsing and things like FTP and Telnet painfully slow. A couple of years ago we bought an air card from Verizon Wireless to use on my laptop when I travelled. This worked great even when I was on the road in my car.

Finally Verizon upgraded their wireless broadband internet service in our area. The cell signal near our office is excellent, so I decided to try to install the air card on our network. So I bought a Linksys Wireless-G Router For Mobile Broadband.

I had to upgrade to a new aircard from Verizon because our old one was not compatible with the router. I also had to upgrade the firmware on the router. After these two upgrades the connection works better then I thought it would.

If you are one of the millions of rural americans that are still using dial up or satellite services for your internet service, but have good cell signal. You really need to check out your cell provider. The linksys mobile broadband router is available for Verizon, AT&T and Sprint. The router cost only about $130 and the wireless broadband service is $59.99 for 5 gig per month of bandwidth through Verizon. Our office of 15 employees does not even come close to using 5 gig per month (I thinks we use less than 500 meg per month).

Finally we have high speed broadband access for our office and I have plans to do the same for our home connection (which is still Wildblue).