Two years ago I wrote about the Trials and Triumphs of Rural Broadbad. The post detailed some of my experience in obtaining a decent internet connection in a pseudo rural part of central Kansas. In the end, after six months of work, my wife and I were able to get a decent connection that gave us peace of mind and allowed me to work from home. It was sufficient enough to enable other common luxuries, like Netflix, Hulu, and some light online gaming.
The connection we managed to get was a point-to-point wireless system from a tiny local ISP. Overall it worked quite well but was still pretty lackluster compared to many of the connections I was used to at previous homes, most of which were based on cable lines.
During the six month period before we found a stable connection I spent a large amount of time talking with a local telecommunications company that had been busy running fiber lines to less well represented areas. Unfortunately the answer we received at the time was that they had no plans to run lines to the area we lived in and that, if we were to contract them to do it ourselves, the cost would be $90,000 or more.
While I was prepared to pay the cost to get a good connection, $90,000 was way more than what I could consider reasonable or responsible, so I abandoned the hope of getting a fiber line and settled with my point-to-point connection that was sufficient, if not great.
Fast forward a year and while driving home one day I saw a sign that made me stop.
Blazing fast fiber internet coming soon.
There was a phone number included so I called it and sure enough, it was the same company I had contacted about paying for a fiber line; the same company that quoted $90,000 for the project.
They had placed signs along the road because they had decided to run a fiber line into the area, precisely where they had a year earlier told me they had no plans for. I would have been irritated for them leading me on previously if I wasn’t so elated to have them moving our way!
Our house is located 1/2 a mile off the route they were running. In order for them to run that last half mile (remember the cost to run fiber is $30,000 per mile) they just needed three of the four houses on the road to sign a 5 year contract. That meant us and two of our neighbors.
Everyone signed!
On Thursday of last week our fiber line was turned on, changing our home internet from a 30/10 mb/s on a good day to 1000/100 mb/s all the time.
Phew!
Two years after moving to this house in a rural area, surrounded by woods and wildlife, we’ve achieved what I thought was nearly impossible (without spending $90,000): good great internet.