Redneck Bar & Grill

In a perfect world, everyone could have trouble free high speed internet for $2 a month, and we would all get to pet unicorns whilst fair maidens adorned us with flower wreaths in a beautiful garden that never experiences below freezing weather. Oh yeah, and world peace. And really low calorie beer.

I finally went out and bought a Sierra Compass 597 Aircard from Telus. Hopefully I will at least get to see the elusive high speed unicorn. An aircard may not let me actually pet the darn beast though.

We have been suffering along with all of our crappy internet problems ever since I first bought a computer in ’99. First dialup, and what a betch that was. We struggled along with dialup internet here in our Central Alberta home right up until 2006. That was when I decided to start looking into high speed options.

I already knew that DSL through the phone lines was not an option. Our lines were installed when I was 8, because I remember them going in. There was no fibre optics type cable in our out the way neck of the woods. A quick phonecall to Telus confirmed that telephone line high speed internet wopuld never happen for us, since we live in a real backwater locale down several dirt roads. The phone company will never be upgrading these lines!

Next I looked into wireless internet, where you buy a modem and receive a signal broadcast from the nearest town. Nope, too far away and too many land features such as hills between us and every town. Of course I had to live in the dreaded “internet dead zone”. Just five miles away they have so much internet they can download entire movies, and here we can’t even download a large email without problems.

That was when I stumbled across Xplornet Satellite internet service. Internet anywhere. It seemed like it was the answer to my problem. Within a month I purchased the system and had it hooked up. It functioned… fairly well…

This internet dish is not the same as what you would have for TV. We have that kind of dish as well for all of our satellite tv services and it works great unless it is precipitating really hard outside. For internet you need a larger dish with the capability to upload information back to the satellite and the regular tv dish doesn’t do that.

Our satellite internet is not what anyone but the satellite internet company would call high speed. It is faster than dialup, I’ll give them that. About 3 times faster. When it is working. Cloudy weather, technical difficulties and such can happen. But basically it has hardy worked at all this month. Or it works for five minutes and then boom! nothing. Satellite internet really sucks. And every time you phone the service line, they instruct you to monitor internet speed for a couple weeks before they will try to help much.

I decided to bite the bullet and got this Rogers Rocketstick Wireless USB Air Card. It worked great in town. The service in the store was awesome. It was a pretty red colour and the software was user friendly. Guess what? It didn’t work at my house. Not enough cell phone reception. So I had to take it back. Again, the service from Rogers was great and it didn’t cost me a dime to try it out and return it.

Now I have this Sierra Wireless Compass 597 Aircard from Telus. They made me sign up for a year contract, and I can’t return this one but the USB card itself was free with that contract. It isn’t a pretty red, just plain ‘ole black. However, it does get enough reception to function at my house – barely. I will probably end up getting a booster antenna yet. The plus side is, I can now use my laptop anywhere I can get cell phone reception. Look out world! Now if I could figure out some way to hook it up to our cheap wireless router…