Rural TV and Internet

August 2008 - We are now connected to ADSL wired broadband by Aliant who have extended the reach of their highspeed service. Further information available on this update

When you live 400 feet back from the road surrounded by trees in a rural area nothing to do with communication technology seems to be simple.

In Leeds we lived in an urban area but we were defeated trying to have wireless internet as we had trees at the bottom of the garden.

I like trees and I like decent internet and TV - it seems that the two are incompatible.

Unfortunately we live too far from the telephone exchange to have high speed down the phone line - DSL (even though the next property along the road can get it). We have cable TV on the road passing our house but our local cable TV company does not yet provide internet access in our area.

Satellite Television

We get no TV signal through a set top aerial/antenna. We could get a tower with a TV antenna on the top, but then we would only receive two channels so it hardly seems worth it.

Summer 2006 we ordered satellite TV. The guy came to install the dish and of course we found there was nowhere on our house or barn that would get a signal. This was due to the number of trees surrounding the house and the satellite seems fairly low in the sky.

We installed a post in the garden and he returned and attached the dish and ran a cable from this to our house.

Cable TV

After having have had the dish for a year we thought about looking at alternatives. We have cable TV passing the house and we do have a coaxial cable entering our basement - so I thought our house had previously been connected. They came to install cable TV. Although they do not provide internet at this time I thought we could get connected and then hopefully we would be "internet ready" for when they decided to provide a high speed connection. We wouldn't get rain fade with cable and it would be interesting to use all alternatives.

Well apparently the coax in the basement is "something else" and they needed to string a cable the 400 feet from the road, slung under our utility poles to the house. Unfortunately they could not do this because of... you got it.. trees. We need to do some pruning to allow a cable to be sited four feet below the power lines on the poles along our tree lined driveway.

So again, we have an appointment to install something but we are defeated by trees. I am not sure if we can currently be bothered to do a load of tree pruning at this point just to try out cable TV. The satellite works fine but with occasional "rain fade" in heavy rain when we lose signal. It would be a different matter if they provided high speed broadband internet. In that case I would have been out with the chainsaw in a flash doing some neat pruning.

Internet

So as previously mentioned, we are too far from the exchange currently for DSL and our cable company is not yet providing internet access in our area. We survived 6 months using dialup but this severely affected our use of the telephone. We also found many websites now will not really function on dialup and the reliability was very annoying. Downloads and uploads were very difficult. Windows updates usually involved a trip to the library to download the file which could then be deployed on the home pc's. Video was almost impossible and listening to Radio 4 involved no other simultaneous internet use.

After surviving this for 6 months we decided to spend the vast amount of money needed for satellite internet. The setup and ongoing costs are high but being a long way from family and most of our friends, and internet being our primary communication medium, we felt we needed to improve our access.

So of course when the engineer came to install the dish we again came across the problem of where to site the dish. Another post was installed, this time at the back of the house. This was no easy task as it was winter and the post was installed in temperatures of about -8°c with a windchill making it feel like -15. Breaking up soil and setting concrete in this temperature was a challenge. This post was twice the length of the TV post and concrete was needed for stability due to the increased height and heavier dish.

On second visit we finally got a high speed internet connection. The speed is a little variable and not always the most reliable connection (rain fade is more of an issue than with the TV) but it is a massive improvement from dialup.