Internet

Internet

Simon's current favorite is Ridge Wireless. For $100/month, you get a guaranteed 5 megabits both up and down. Currently, there are no plans to limit the actual speed on the $100/mo. plan, and the speeds we are actually seeing are between 15 megabits and 26 megabits. Simon helps out by doing the installs for neighbors who want it, saving about $168 in labor costs (normal cost for the install is $250, $82 of which is the radio and its parabolic dish).

Verizon has recently added a new 4G tower, and Simon is getting 23 megabit/second downloads and 8 megabit uploads. However, Verizon has monthly bandwidth caps of 6 gigabytes, so a movie download a week is too much. The cost for going over the limit is $15 per gigabyte, so that extra movie costs $16.50 instead of Netflix's $1.50 charge. For those of us higher on the mountain (farther from the cell phone towers) the high speed 4G numbers are only available with an external antenna connected to your USB internet device. You can also make your own antenna.

Commercial Internet Providers to Montevina Road

Ridge Wireless 10 Mbps symmetrical $90 + $200.00/mo Static IP address by special request
Ridge Wireless 5 Mbps symmetrical $90 + $100.00/mo Static IP address by special request
Ridge Wireless 2.5 Mbps symmetrical $90 + $50.00/mo Static IP address by special request
Surfnet 1 Mbps symmetrical WiFi $350 + $49.95/mo ??? static IP addresses
Surfnet 2 Mbps symmetrical WiFi $350 + $69.95/mo ??? static IP addresses
Surfnet 3 Mbps symmetrical WiFi $350 + $89.95/mo ??? static IP addresses
Etheric 0.75 to 1 Mbps WiFi $100/mo 1 static IP address
Etheric 1 to 4 Mbps WiFi $139/mo 2 to 8 static IP addresses
Etheric 1.54 to 6 Mbps WiFi $229/mo 4 to 16 static IP addresses
Hilltop 1.4 to 1.8 Mbps down, 0.756 Mbps up WiFi $395 + $49/mo 4 to 16 static IP addresses
Sprint Wireless Mobile 4G Hotspot $19.99/mo ? static IP addresses, no data caps
Verizon Wireless 0.921 Mbps down, 0.404 Mbps up EVDO (cellphone) $35 + $59.99/mo 0 static IP addresses
Verizon Wireless 4G 23 Mbps down, 8 Mbps up 4 G LTE (cellphone) $100 + $50.00/mo No static IP addresses, 6 GB monthly cap
AT&T DSL 0.384 Mbps symmetrical DSL $179.95/mo 29 static IP addresses
Covad DSL 1.536 Mbps down, 0.384 Mbps up DSL $175.00 + $69.95/mo 1 static IP address (add $10 for 13)
DSL Extreme T1 1.5 Mbps symmetrical T1 $359.00/mo ??? static IP addresses
Viasat Exede 18 Mbps down, 2 Mbps up $50.00/mo 0 static IP addresses

 

Test your Internet speed:

Speedtest.net 
DSLReports.com 
Speakeasy

 

The Montevina Network Project

 

The Montevina Network Project is a way to link up the houses on the road into a high-speed network.

We do it just for fun.

The ad-hoc network is free of monthly charges, and is maintained by the users themselves (although a few of the more technically savvy individuals are on hand to help almost all the time). The equipment costs are modest (under $100 usually).

You maintain the link yourself (with the help of your tech-savvy neighbors when needed).

You may be able to see the signal from BirdfarmRelay on your laptop computer. Without a dish to magnify the radio signal you may not be able to actually connect to it, however. But if you have an inexpensive dish you can get about 20 megabits per second from that signal, free of charge.