Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF
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Remember when the InitiativeQ fellow said we would have plentiful wireless internet all over the world that would enable his Ponzi scheme? Well, my family and I are vacationing in East Bumfuck Ohio at a cabin on a working horse ranch. We are about an hour outside of Cincinnati. The place is gorgeous, we have our own private lake and last night I cooked three ribeyes that in total weighed 5.4lbs. It has been a great vacation so far, but the internet situation is pretty horrible.
My wife booked the place and only after booking found out that they do not have internet available at the cabin. No real revelation there, but mildly inconvenient. I had hoped that they would have coverage with Sprint, and checking their coverage map it looked like we would, but only just barely. Well, we don't. So tethering my laptop to my cell phone was not much of an option. Sprint Unlimited plans only allow 100MB of roaming data and only at 2G speeds.
So I tell the wife that we can afford to disconnect and as long as the feces does not hit the fan we should be fine. If it did, I would go buy a wireless hotspot. The next day after we get here of course the feces hit the fan. Nowhere in this town is there a place that offers wifi. Off to WalMart. They have two options: StraightTalk Wireless and Verizon. The StraightTalk Wireless hotspot is (I thought) the same price but data was marginally cheaper so I went with that. The clerk brings out a battered box from the little locked area and I make sure that we can activate before I leave the store to make sure it works. She says no problem.
So I buy the hotspot for $49.99 and a 5GB prepaid card for another $50. ~$108 after tax. She scans everything and she calls to activate it and they say that the hotspot has not been run through the register so it is not able to be activated. This begins an ordeal. Back and forth between the sales clerk (who was super helpful and very courteous, as best I can tell absolutely none of what happened was her fault) and the call center morons on the other end of the line. The clerk keeps telling the call center person that there is no way to rescan it without reselling it. The call center person keeps insisting that she rescan the item. A manager is brought over and he reiterates that there is no way to rescan without a sale being processed. This is their only hotspot in stock by StraightTalk so if they do a return they cannot resell it. It goes to be sold as refurbished and cannot be resold. The register will not allow it.
I get on the phone and ask to talk to that person's manager. I am pretty sure she just transferred me to the guy sitting next to her. Same shit. I ask to be transferred again to the highest person in charge. Same shit, but this person seems like he might actually manage something. Another transfer to a different department and there is no one available who can fix this mistake. We had been on the phone for approximately an hour at this point. I am getting incensed. Well, more correctly I have been incensed for a little while.
At this point I ask the clerk if we could just do a return and get the Verizon one. She is almost as annoyed as I am and expresses enthusiasm at the idea. Five minutes later the first hotspot is returned and the Verizon hotspot is purchased. Five minutes after that the hotspot is completely activated and paid up with 5GB of data. As a final knife in the side the Verizon hotspot was on sale so it was slightly cheaper overall, but data refills are more expensive.
The clerk thanked me for showing her one tip for dealing with call center customer support.
"Is your manager available? Yes? OK, then, can I talk to their supervisor and we just skip a step because I don't think your manager will be able to help me either?"The Verizon activation process was seamless. Fire up the hotspot (no call center bullshit), connect to the hotspot and be greeted by a webpage where you do the whole process. The only hiccup in that was that Chrome was not able to autocomplete any fields and when I would accidentally tap on it to do so it would exit out to another page and lose all my progress. But between that and dealing with call center shenanigans I was ecstatic that it even worked.
So now I have internet access in East Bumfuck Ohio, in a cabin on a horse ranch.
So, burn rate on data. That's something I never realized was so high. 5GB seems like a fair amount if you are not streaming video. It isn't. I burned through almost half that just streaming music from Spotify for a few hours last night and watching two YouTube videos where I set the streaming quality to 360p. Without even maintaining our usual habits and trying to be miserly we are burning through ~$30 of hotspot access per day. The kid's tablets are not joined to the hotspot. No Netflix, no Amazon Prime, YouTube has been at 360p and only two videos.
So yeah, rural internet availability, and especially prolific wireless rural internet has a long way to go. I know some people who have wireless hotspots just like this that they take to their vacation spots. I can only assume that they have to be very miserly with data. No video streaming, probably no audio streaming, limited web browsing and such.
Amusing dog story time: The first night we were here the horses come over to check us out. I was on the dock when I saw our male dog go over to check them out. He skulks under the fence and tip toes slowly over to the horses. I was enjoying a drink seeing how this will play out. The horses are all entirely still and watching him out of the corner of their eye. He sneaks up just close enough to get a sniff of them and you can tell he is very curious about the horses. One of the horses snorts and him and prances kind of playfully. It freaked him out so much that he started yelping and running towards me. The horse runs behind him all the way to the fence and he runs down to the dock towards me and safety. It probably took an hour before his tail became untucked from between his legs.
He has not been back to investigate them since. When he hears them snort he spins around to face the noise and lays his ears down. I don't think we have to worry about him going back in the field.
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@Polygeekery
Yeah, audio chews up data faster than most people realize. “Max” settings of 128Kbps still works out to 1MB per minute, which means you’ll eat 0.5GB in a single work day.
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Some friends of mine actually have TWO of these hotspots as their primary internet access because they live in an out of the way place a couple hours south of me and there's no hardlines out to the place they're staying. He manages to get by on those for most things, though his primary Internet access reason is to play WoW, so when a patch releases he has to go into town and sponge a restaurant's WiFi for a couple hours so he doesn't burn through too much data. She doesn't use internet much at all beyond a game here or there and maybe Facebook.
Every once in a while when he comes back up to the area for dental work he'll stay at my place (he roomed with me here for a couple years) and spends a weekend abusing my 150Mbps cable connection to download as much as he can on Steam before he has to leave :D
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Why not just stay disconnected? You're on vacation.
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@mikehurley said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Why not just stay disconnected? You're on vacation.
I don't always have that option. I was hoping to be able to, but something came up that required my attention.
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
YouTube has been at 360p and only two videos
Doesn't matter. Do Not Watch YouTube Over A Limited Connection.
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@pie_flavor It probably still downloads/streams at 4K and then downsamples it locally while rendering.
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@mott555 said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@pie_flavor It probably still downloads/streams at 4K and then downsamples it locally while rendering.
I don't think so. I think my mistaken assumption was that it would only download the 360p stream. YouTube tends to download all available streams in the background so that if you change resolutions it can quickly change without having to play catchup.
If you manually set it to a lower resolution it should only download that one but I bet it doesn't. That would make too much sense.
Another YouTube annoyance is that if there is ever a hiccup in a stream it automatically defaults to 144p. It does not even seem to attempt to go down to 480p or 360p or anything. Just straight to 144p.
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@mikehurley said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Why not just stay disconnected? You're on vacation.
I don't always have that option. I was hoping to be able to, but something came up that required my attention.
Right, because your work involves listening to music and watching RedTube.
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Meanwhile, my brother somehow got unlimited LTE data plan for 30/month in local currency (about $8 at the moment). I couldn't find it anywhere on the carrier's website, but he's using like 50 gigabytes every month for over a year, and he never received any notice that he can't do that. In other news, I've got my home internet upgraded from 150 to 300Mbps for just 15zł extra. When it comes to internet connection, Poland is one of best countries in the world.
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
I don't think so.
I guess I should have put sarcasm tags in my post. TRWTF is that I can make a completely insane suggestion like that, and people will take it seriously because that's just how bad IT actually is.
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@mott555 said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
I don't think so.
I guess I should have put sarcasm tags in my post. TRWTF is that I can make a completely insane suggestion like that, and people will take it seriously because that's just how bad IT actually is.
Your suggestion might even have been better for bandwidth than downloading all the streams. But I suspect that their app for mobile doesn't do that (unless maybe on wifi) but using a hotspot you could very well be using a regular web browser inside a non-mobile device.
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@lolwhat said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@mikehurley said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Why not just stay disconnected? You're on vacation.
I don't always have that option. I was hoping to be able to, but something came up that required my attention.
Right, because your work involves listening to music and watching RedTube.
Yours doesn't?
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@lolwhat said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@mikehurley said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Why not just stay disconnected? You're on vacation.
I don't always have that option. I was hoping to be able to, but something came up that required my attention.
Right, because your work involves listening to music and watching RedTube.
Yours doesn't?
You have to test the firewall settings.
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@lolwhat said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Right, because your work involves listening to music and watching RedTube.
Yours doesn't?
No, but it involves browsing WTDWTF
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@mikehurley said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Why not just stay disconnected? You're on vacation.
I don't always have that option. I was hoping to be able to, but something came up that required my attention.
How do you become aware of something requiring your attention while you're properly disconnected.
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@pleegwat said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@mikehurley said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Why not just stay disconnected? You're on vacation.
I don't always have that option. I was hoping to be able to, but something came up that required my attention.
How do you become aware of something requiring your attention while you're properly disconnected.
Cell phone still works, just not the 4G connection.
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@pleegwat said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@mikehurley said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Why not just stay disconnected? You're on vacation.
I don't always have that option. I was hoping to be able to, but something came up that required my attention.
How do you become aware of something requiring your attention while you're properly disconnected.
Cell phone still works, just not the 4G connection.
You need one of these for your cell phone:
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
I can only assume that they have to be very miserly with data. No video streaming, probably no audio streaming, limited web browsing and such.
My first high-speed internet connection was at university. The first year was capped at 2 GB. I ran a small FTP-server for some of my friends to download TV series from (at that time, for most series, someone with a capture card hooked up to a TV was pretty much the only option to get a series on PC).
I actually had to cap their downloads as well, because every portion of upstream comes with a percentage of downstream and at a 2 GB cap, that was actually noticeable.
Thank God the university was able to strike a deal and go unlimited in the next year.
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@mott555 said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@pleegwat said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@mikehurley said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Why not just stay disconnected? You're on vacation.
I don't always have that option. I was hoping to be able to, but something came up that required my attention.
How do you become aware of something requiring your attention while you're properly disconnected.
Cell phone still works, just not the 4G connection.
You need one of these for your cell phone:
Of course that's a thing.
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Filed under: Or did you forget sarcasm tags again?
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@JBert Actually, I think my very first smartphone did have some kind of dial-up connection. If you were outside of Wi-Fi, you had no data unless you manually launched the data connection first. I think this was in the Windows Mobile 5 days.
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@mott555 said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@JBert Actually, I think my very first smartphone did have some kind of dial-up connection. If you were outside of Wi-Fi, you had no data unless you manually launched the data connection first. I think this was in the Windows Mobile 5 days.
I had a cell phone back in the day that had a RJ11 connector on the side of it. You could dial in to a connection and then start the modem on your laptop. I think I only used it once or twice. Unlimited plans weren't really a thing back then.
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@Polygeekery I don't understand how this is even a problem anymore. The FCC set it up so that most of rural America has broadband now, didn't they?
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@Polygeekery Maybe worth it to purchase a month of Spotify Premium (or do a trial or something) and download the music (assuming you'd be happy with a single playlist and you don't want to play a bunch of random stuff, in which case you're probably better off with a radio.
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@pie_flavor said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
YouTube has been at 360p and only two videos
Doesn't matter. Do Not Watch YouTube Over A Limited Connection.
Yeah, personally I've disabled mobile data for the youtube app completely, so it doesn't work at all even if Wifi just goes down briefly.
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Amusing dog story time: The first night we were here the horses come over to check us out. I was on the dock when I saw our male dog go over to check them out.
This sounds a bit dangerous. Horses can potentially be shy / easy to scare, and depending on how small your dog is, a horse that's scared for no reason at all kicking him could badly injure the dog.
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@topspin Very indeed. Either that happened to a dog I knew (a dog I even liked) or somebody beat them in with a 2x4. Either way, bad news.
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@topspin said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
This sounds a bit dangerous. Horses can potentially be shy / easy to scare, and depending on how small your dog is, a horse that's scared for no reason at all kicking him could badly injure the dog.
My brother-in-law grew up out in the country. They don't actually have a farm, but they live next door to one, and the neighbors have horses.
He says that they used to have this little yappy dog, the kind that would be a car chaser if he lived in the suburbs. Instead, he decided to be a horse chaser. Well, one day he actually caught one, or at least came close enough to get kicked in the face for it. They found him half-dead and badly bloodied the next morning and realized what had happened.
Dad had to get to work, so he didn't have time to deal with it; he asked Mom to take him to the vet. Mom was a bit surprised by the request. "Are you sure?"
"Yeah, I think he needs to now."
"Well... OK, if you say so..."
He heads off to work. Comes home that evening to find the dog, all bandaged up and wearing a cast or two, and an annoyed wife complaining about how he must love that dog a whole lot, because getting him fixed up cost $600.
"What? I told you to take him to the vet!"
"I did! Where do you think all this expensive treatment came from?"
"
I meant to take him to the vet to have him put down!"Well, this is the thing that BIL's parents didn't quite understand. He grew up in the city, where that was a perfectly reasonable idea. His wife, on the other hand, was a country girl, and...
"What? Why would you go to the vet for that? You need to put a dog down, you take him out behind the barn and hit him in the head with a shovel!"
Well, the dog eventually recovered and lived for a few more years... before dying from being kicked by a horse. At least he went out doing what he loved.
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Amusing dog story time: The first night we were here the horses come over to check us out. I was on the dock when I saw our male dog go over to check them out. He skulks under the fence and tip toes slowly over to the horses. I was enjoying a drink seeing how this will play out. The horses are all entirely still and watching him out of the corner of their eye. He sneaks up just close enough to get a sniff of them and you can tell he is very curious about the horses. One of the horses snorts and him and prances kind of playfully. It freaked him out so much that he started yelping and running towards me. The horse runs behind him all the way to the fence and he runs down to the dock towards me and safety. It probably took an hour before his tail became untucked from between his legs.
He has not been back to investigate them since. When he hears them snort he spins around to face the noise and lays his ears down. I don't think we have to worry about him going back in the fieldThat's adorable!
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@Gribnit said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
didn't they?
that's hilarious.
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@Gribnit said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@Polygeekery I don't understand how this is even a problem anymore. The FCC set it up so that most of rural America has broadband now, didn't they?
My old rural area got a federal grant to provide fiber broadband to farms. It went way overbudget (think something like $30,000 per household) and was also finished about 4 years after the deadline.
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@topspin said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Amusing dog story time: The first night we were here the horses come over to check us out. I was on the dock when I saw our male dog go over to check them out.
This sounds a bit dangerous. Horses can potentially be shy / easy to scare, and depending on how small your dog is, a horse that's scared for no reason at all kicking him could badly injure the dog.
Possibly. There are lots of things that could injure or kill us or our animals. This to me seemed like a very minor risk. These horses get rode every day and they didn't seem like a danger.
I could get my face eaten off by a random dog. That doesn't mean I am going to stop petting them. I just use my judgment on when it is prudent to do so.
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@mott555 without fiber broadband a farm can't stream out separate video of each plant growing all the time
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@masonwheeler this same dog is the first dog that my wife and I got back when we were dating. Shortly after we got him I had a family reunion type thing at one of my rural family member's home. They have a beautiful ranch and had just finished digging a new pond a year earlier. My cousin loads us up in the Polaris and takes us out to see it.
While there my wife remarks about how our male dog had never been swimming. She also says she would like to see him do so but he won't get in the water. My farm boy cousin spots on the ground, says something about how he can take care of that, grabs our dog and chucks him out in to the pond as far as he can.
She gasps. I was OK for a moment but he was under the water for what seemed like an eternity. Long enough that I had started to kick off my shoes and had thrown my Blackberry on the seat of the Polaris. Finally his head popped up and he swam to shore.
He still doesn't like swimming. I wonder if that is why?
Another funny story from that same reunion: Our dog had been off exploring the fields around their house. They have several thousand head of cattle and several hundred of those are Angus in a field by their house. He comes back with a big brown smudge on his back. My wife says:
"What did you do, get mud all over you?"And reaches down to touch him. A moment too late I say:
"That's not mud"Yep. It was cow shit. He rolled all around in it and she put her hand right in it. I have no idea why. I would not have e touched it even if it had been just mud.
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@Polygeekery That's how I learned to swim!
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@polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
I could get my face eaten off by a random dog. That doesn't mean I am going to stop petting them.
I will. I stay as far away from all dogs as I can as much as possible.
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
just finished digging a new pond a year earlier. My cousin loads us up in the Polaris
Your cousin loaded you in a SLBM? That's a big pond.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
I stay as far away from all dogs as I can
I can't, they naturally come to me.
They can sense when you like them
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In Denmark unlimited* costs 130 dkk/month. This is roughly 20 usd, about one hour of minumum wage work before taxes, approx 2 after.
*1tb/month
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@swayde I pay $35 for 2 GB. So in conclusion, fuck you. :P
(That being said, I've never hit that cap and if I did, it'd just slow down, not stop. I also wonder what the difference is in standard speed between the services because you can have all the capacity in the world but if it's slow it'll still be frustrating.)
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@dangeRuss said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@Polygeekery Maybe worth it to purchase a month of Spotify Premium (or do a trial or something) and download the music (assuming you'd be happy with a single playlist and you don't want to play a bunch of random stuff, in which case you're probably better off with a radio.
I pay spotify to have it cache the music. You don't even need to download it, the cache is enough to make my 2Gb data plan to survive the month.
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
I don't always have that option. I was hoping to be able to, but something came up that required my attention.
I was wondering why a bunch of my posts got deleted off the forums
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
He rolled all around in it
Yeah, my dogs tend to roll all over the bugs and beetles they sometimes catch, and sometimes the dead things too. Kinda odd...
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@heterodox said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
(That being said, I've never hit that cap
I presume you have WiFi available? My data usage on mobile is usually below 5gb/ month (my subscription isn't unlimited). On WiFi I use around 50/g month.
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
So yeah, rural internet availability, and especially prolific wireless rural internet has a long way to go.
Definitely, at least here in the US. My Mom and family live on a farm not too far away from the city where I grew up, but off of the major roadways. The only cell service that works there is Verizon and there's no other decent option for internet. (They had slow dial-up for many years; after that I believe they had "satellite down, dial-up back" for a while.)
Because of the expense I avoid any serious internet usage when I'm there, and I already don't get phone calls. It's a nice time to unwind.
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@swayde said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
On WiFi I use around 50/g month.
Doing what?!
(Fake edit: Upon further reflection, I withdraw the question.)In the past month, I've used 1.2 GB mobile data and 11.33 GB on WiFi. Top apps on both are YouTube then Chrome. I guess I just don't use my phone that much.
@Parody said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Definitely, at least here in the US. My Mom and family live on a farm not too far away from the city where I grew up, but off of the major roadways. The only cell service that works there is Verizon and there's no other decent option for internet. (They had slow dial-up for many years; after that I believe they had "satellite down, dial-up back" for a while.)
Yeah, my ex lived in a more rural area-- no cell service to speak of, and satellite Internet that was... horrible in terms of bandwidth even when it was working. Communication was a big challenge.
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@heterodox said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Doing what?!
P0rn obviously ... lots of big, fat smut
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@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@mikehurley said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Why not just stay disconnected? You're on vacation.
I don't always have that option. I was hoping to be able to, but something came up that required my attention.
I hate to tell you this, but you weren't on vacation. If something came up that required your attention and they called you for it, you were on call. Do you get paid extra for being on call during your personal "time off"?(1)
Somebody's lying to you about this vacation thing, and I think the prime suspect is @Polygeekery although your employer isn't far behind.
(1) If you're on call, it isn't time off either.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
Do you get paid extra for being on call during your personal "time off"?
In his case it's "owning the business"
Or being a shit-lord ... either way it's covered.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
@Polygeekery said in Internet access in rural America and StraightTalk Wireless WTF:
He rolled all around in it
Yeah, my dogs tend to roll all over the bugs and beetles they sometimes catch, and sometimes the dead things too. Kinda odd...
So do mine. I've never managed to find out what exactly is so attractive: sometimes it's her own poo, sometimes it's another poo (dog or other animal, I rarely get to see it early enough to identify it, and when it's smeared in the fur, I'm not going to do any forensics on it...), sometimes it's a stick she just chewed, sometimes it's... I don't know, just for the fun of it? Maybe she has an itch on her back?
Anyway, back to horses & dogs (what, isn't that the topic of the thread?), I don't have any amusing story but I've spent enough time around horses to know that they aren't monsters from a D&D playbook. Even when they kick, they haven't got 100% accuracy. Conversely, dogs are quite good dodgers, especially when they are wary of the target already. And most animals do have some preservation instinct and will flee if possible (I guess being dumb enough to fight a loosing fight and die in it is a uniquely human trait?).
So yeah, accidents happen, but I wouldn't really worry about a cautious dog going around to investigate horses, as long as both see the other coming and have room to get away from each other.
