I think CenturyLink and others are missing the boat in servicing the foothills region. The median income in our area is quite high, and good internet service is highly valued. For the occasional e-mail and simple web browsing, 1.5 Mbps DSL is fine. We had our sights on something a bit more. Here's some history and some information that you might find helpful. Here's a link to a message I sent out to friends about my experience.

My history on Internet Service Providers in the foothills outside of Denver goes way back into the early 1980's. I have had occasion to use electronic mail (in one of its original forms), file transfers, log in's to various computer systems as far back as 1982. To gain access to these services for both personal and business ventures, I have been with a variety of providers. Dimensional (Denver only), Earthlink, NetCom, Wispertel, Skybeam, and Mountain Broadband to name the internet connected ones. Until about 6 years ago, we did not have a high speed service so all the internet stuff was done via a dial-up connection. I even "networked" our personal computers to share the dial-up. Couldn't do much in those days, or at least, not if you wanted to get anything in a finite amount of time. Web pages were simpler then.

When the local company Wispertel first offered service, I was intrigued. Enough, at least, to jump in with both feet. Wispertel was all RF linkages. There was a site on a neighboring mountain, I had a good shot at it (line-of-sight) and a convenient place to put the transponder (a small-ish box about the size of a shoe box). I ran cable from this location to my office downstairs about a week before installation (to save some money). I purchased (not leased) the transponder and paid a small charge for insurance, in case of a lightning strike or other hazard. The transponder was capable of 20 megabits per second (20 Mbps), but all I figured I needed as around 5 Mbps (tops). Installed, and we were happy.

Some time later, the service became slower, and I contacted customer service. Turns out, they had oversold the central transponder, and there was not enough bandwidth remaining to support what I was paying for! That's not good, so they "downgraded" me to a cheaper plan, but left the radio in the higher capacity mode, just for those times when bandwidth became available. It was a reasonable compromise. Besides, they told me, they were in the process of introducing another access point on the tower, and could move me to that when the installation was complete. I was put on the waiting list for that access.

Then, Skybeam bought Wispertel. And the story turns dark. Over the next couple of years, the service continued to degrade. I established a monitor that ran occasionally during the course of a few days and measured the system throughput. It was getting worse than it was before. Again, contacted customer service (this time out of Texas, Skybeam's HQ) and was informed that, indeed I had a service that I was not able to receive, and would be "downgraded" yet again. And, yes, another access point was being scheduled for installation. So, a year had transpired, and they were "still getting to it".

About 2 years ago, after not even being able to get reliable 500 kilobit per second (500 Kbps) service, ping delays as long as 500 ms to their own DNS server (and many timeouts), I contacted Skybeam again. And got absolutely no response. After a few weeks, Skybeam called about the cancellation and wanted "their radio" back. I sent them the invoice that I had paid, years earlier to Wispertel, in replay with a strongly worded "stay away from me"; I never heard back. From others who got frustrated as well, turns out they never returned to claim the radios. Interesting business model.

So, I had Qwest (now CenturyLink) DSL installed (1.5 Mbps max download, 800 Kbps upload). And that was pretty good. Except when the power went out. Turns out, the phone service would stay operational, but the DSL connection would go down; there was no backup power provided for that. So, while Wispertel and Skybeam were up 99+% of the time even during a power outage, Qwest/CenturyLink would be offline 95+% of the time). Oh, well, it was better so much more of the time than Skybeam, I was happy.

Not too long after this, we had our first grandchildren, and uploading picture, downloading pictures, and Skype became something we did much more of. Not only did we find that the Qwest/CenturyLink connection was a bit slow to get this accomplished, Skype was very problematic, thus reducing this to an occasional attempt with poor video quality and horrible synchronization of voice to image. I began looking for alternatives.

I saw the service called Exede was available as an Internet only service, providing 12 Mbps downloads and 3 Mbps uploads via a synchronous satellite. But, they charge by the number of bytes of data transmitted and received (both directions). It was an expensive proposition, especially if we wanted to occasionally stream a movie. DirecTV and DishNetwork also had data services, either bundled or separately. The download speeds were slower, but still very acceptable, and the upload speed was a reasonable 1 Mbps. But, they still charge by the amount of data you send/receive. Unlike our cell phone service, the unused bandwidth did not "roll over" to the next month. If that had been the case, I think we would have opted for satellite internet service and a TV show package.

When we got back from vacation, I found a flyer in our mail from Mountain Broadband, providing service up to 15 Mbps in our area. I was intrigued, and questioned whether this was a rehash of a previous service. It was not; they have their own infrastructure. Further conversations resulted in our acceptance of their service as our ISP. Additionally, I figured we could change our home phone service to BasicTalk by using our new high speed internet package, and save money there as well. Now, for a consistent 10x the internet speed and my same home phone number, we pay a few dollars less than we did before.

So, we can stream movies in High Definition (Netflix and YouTube, so far) with no pauses for buffering (2 hours). Skype is now in HD quality and lips are synced with the actual video. Phone calls are crystal clear.

And the page load and data transfer speeds are incredible. Updating the Garmin, for example, used to take 9-16 hours to download the updates and an hour to perform the upgrade. Now the entire process takes under 2 hours. Software update downloads take only a few minutes. And picture uploads are incredibly fast. So, yes, we are pleased!

I have been running a speed test every so often and monitoring my upload/download speed. For one service I used quite often, the monitored speeds were very slow. A speed test run at the same time showed that I was not using all the bandwidth I had available, so I started looking into a technical solution to the problem. The issue was with the router; Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) was enabled. And the service I was having trouble with mentioned at SPI routers would limit the available bandwidth for those packets. Turning SPI off resulted in an immediate increase in speed. Other than this, I've had no issues in the two weeks we've had the service.

We are pleased!