Rural Internet and the Digital Divide

COVID has been a forcing function to accelerate certain technology. At the beginning of the pandemic, I hoped that one of the positive effects might be more significant investment into rural broadband infrastructure. I contacted local politicians and tried to petition for investment into our neighborhood (no luck yet!). Apparently it would take $31,000 to install a dedicated internet access point to our street, and grant money is going elsewhere. We live off the grid just a bit, so with 4 kids in online school and both my wife and I working remotely, the bandwidth has been a challenge. I have spent quite a bit of money and tried multiple approaches in order to overcome the inherent challenges of living just a mile away from the nearest broadband access. Ours is truly a last mile problem. We're signed up for the Starlink waitlist (still waiting), have Viasat satellite internet, 6 T-Mobile phone hotspots, and a Verizon stand alone hotspot (provided by the school for our kids). But most recently I also subscribed to Unlimitedville, an unthrottled hotspot. So far, Unlimitedville has been the superior option over Viasat for reliability, since the latter is heavily impacted by weather. I was told yesterday that T-Mobile will no longer be throttling data on hotspots, so I will be eager to verify that. If you want to check out Unlimitedville with a discount, you can get $50.00 off your order by using this code: AQUMFKP

For those of you who are curious, here are some speed tests from our various options:

T Mobile 5G speed direct on mobile device (throttles speed by up to 90% after 50GB, which is about 2 weeks into the month)

T Mobile hotspot from phone, speed tested on tethered laptop (throttles speed by up to 90% after 50GB, which is about 2 weeks into the month)

Unlimitedville LTE hotspot, does not get throttled (can travel)

Viasat satellite internet, can go down in rainy weather, does not travel