Internet providers
Annette M. asked 6 years ago
We currently have the max 8 Mbps with Centurylink. Not so wicked, huh? After a long process of verifying that my address was eligible (a drive by verification if things were in place to offer us service) for Spectrum I scheduled the install. The contractor showed up to do the install only he couldn’t because our home is more than 300 ft from the road. Talk about frustrating that the person verifying did not verify correctly. To my questions now … waiting to hear back from Spectrum to tell me what if anything they will do and how much additional cost. The installer mentioned a hard wire (3/4″ in diameter) would have to be run to get closer to my house. Assuming that is the same type wire that is run along side the road but what exactly is it? They quoted a neighbor in my same situation $2000. This is the only other internet provider I have found assigned to our road so I find it frustrating that they can deny service. Would like to determine what type of wire is needed for distance over 300 ft so we can determine if it is more cost prohibitive to trench and bury it ourselves leaving the connection or install to the providers. Also open to other internet options I might not have discovered in my research. Thanks so much for any knowledge you can offer.
Marcel Brown Staff answered 6 years ago
This is an interesting situation you have. I’ll be very interested to find out what you end up doing. I can not imagine that Charter/Spectrum would support a connection to a wire trenched and ran by a customer, but perhaps they do things like this in special circumstances. Regardless, I have no idea what that wire would be exactly. Perhaps an outside-of-the-box solution would be to set up a small shed near the road with electricity run to it. Charter could install their modem in that small shed. From that modem you could run some fiber optic cable with an Ethernet-fiber transceiver on each end. That way you would in effect create a very long Ethernet connection, but since the cable is fiber, it can handle the distance without issue and also not create a grounding problem since fiber isn’t a copper run and wouldn’t carry electricity. Or you could install a point-to-point wireless link between the small shed and your house for the same effect. I have no idea if Charter would agree to that or if it would even be feasible for you, but when you’re desperate for good Internet, you might need to go to extreme measure. Again, let me know what you end up doing or what options you have available.