Joining the Connected World in Rural Texas

I feel like that guy who lived in the rain forest for several years and forgot how to interact with society when he finally comes back to civilization. Why? For the last 2 years I’ve had Wild Blue satellite internet service through Dish Network. It kept me “online”, but it was not up to par with most cable and DSL connections. I would equate it to using smoke signals from the rain forest to talk to the neighboring wilderness man 4 mile away.

Yesterday I had Wickson Wireless DSL installed at my home and I have rejoined the connected world. The installer, Ricky, was very helpful and knew his technical details as well. Some technicians only know what they are trained to do, and have trouble thinking outside the training manual. Ricky had solutions for some of my unique problems (i.e. the large tree blocking my path to the tower) that were very efficient and more importantly aesthetically pleasing (i.e. my wife won’t hate me when she gets back from Hawaii). He had me set up pretty quickly and I was actually connecting with the data rates advertised on their website! Ricky put an actual cat-5 wall plate in so my cable from outside to inside looks clean and professional.

Now for a little rant about my old Wild Blue service. The installer who came out to initially set it up didn’t know what he was doing, and ended up poking a large ugly hole through my wall and leaving it so that there was a clear path through the wall from outside to inside. He did put a plate on it, but there was extra space between the hole in the plate and the cable. Then, he failed to put a solid mounting bracket on my dish so when the first heavy wind came through, it blew the dish out of alignment with the satellite and we had intermittent internet connectivity for weeks before another technician could come out. They tried to charge me for this second technician to come fix their mistakes as well!

Another thing was that Wild Blue advertises DSL speeds. This is where they got me! Yes, I got roughly 512 Kbps down and 128 Kbps up. However, my average time to live (TTL – latency) was around 1500 ms, sometimes spiking up to 1700 ms or more! This renders the service almost useless except for browsing web pages (and even then I would regularly have timeouts). Trying to VPN or SSH to a server was horribly frustrating.

With Wickson Wireless I’m getting 910 Kbps (roughly 1 MB after overhead) down and 715 Kbps up and my TTL is around 70 ms to 200 ms. I was amazed that I could be watching several YouTube videos at once, stay connected to my office VPN, and even SSH to a server and have it be very responsive! Now to be fair, I did move up to the 1 MB/768 KB package. There is a lower package available but after 2 years of Wild Blue, I have a lot of catching up to do! Regardless though, I would still be getting the better TTL no matter which package I chose.

As I was saying… it’s about time I go ahead and head on back over to YouTube for some good ol’ pop culture catching up! Thank you Wickson Wireless for providing great service, and to Ricky for being helpful and knowledgeable.