Ok I have lived rural for a while now so this is nothing new.
I currently have DSL - 12MB is the advertised speed, when it works I get around 7, not going to complain too much about that. Except it's not very reliable - seems to really suffer in the mornings, which is when I'm trying to get work work done. Seems to work ok in Evenings/Prime Time for the most part, so at least my Netflixing isn't affected overly much.
Work pays for my AT&T phone. Which is fine, except I don't get crap for a signal with AT&T where I live. One bar on a good day, most days no service. When I moved in I had decent service (2 bars 4G, no LTE, but worked for voice calls at least)... now it's not, and being rural, of course AT&T isn't exactly jumping to get it fixed.
So for now, I've got WiFi call enabled - except in the mornings even that doesn't work.
Wife has Verizon, that works great here in the mountains. Seems to be the only carrier that does work well around here.
So I am looking at options. I can bitch to AT&T or my DSL provider, I know exactly how far that is going to go though.
I could move. Not really, but it's an option that someone will undoubtedly recommend, and it's true. But I'm not moving. I just bought a chainsaw.
Satellite (HughesNet) - won't work well for VOIP, so not really an option there.
Mountain area, with lots of trees - P2P isn't an option.
My real thinking here:
Wife already has a verizon account, I could add a line and dual sim my phone (iP XS) with a a Verizon line. That would get me calls out everywhere I go locally. Problem is calls in to my AT&T number would still fail (unless I used Call Forwarded), and my calls out would show up as a different phone number, unrecognized to most people at least the first time I called out.
Could upgrade her plan to a hotspot, and use WiFi calling on my phone through her hotspot. That works, so long as she's home.
I could get a mobile hotspot for the house, and only use it when our DSL is out. Would be nice if I could set it up as a sort of failover, but then again, I wouldn't want all the PCs and god knows how many consoles all deciding to do updates at the wrong time and hitting the hot spot.
Nothing is really calling out to me here as the best option, just a lot of pretty bad ones and a handful of mediocre ones.
I currently have DSL - 12MB is the advertised speed, when it works I get around 7, not going to complain too much about that. Except it's not very reliable - seems to really suffer in the mornings, which is when I'm trying to get work work done. Seems to work ok in Evenings/Prime Time for the most part, so at least my Netflixing isn't affected overly much.
Work pays for my AT&T phone. Which is fine, except I don't get crap for a signal with AT&T where I live. One bar on a good day, most days no service. When I moved in I had decent service (2 bars 4G, no LTE, but worked for voice calls at least)... now it's not, and being rural, of course AT&T isn't exactly jumping to get it fixed.
So for now, I've got WiFi call enabled - except in the mornings even that doesn't work.
Wife has Verizon, that works great here in the mountains. Seems to be the only carrier that does work well around here.
So I am looking at options. I can bitch to AT&T or my DSL provider, I know exactly how far that is going to go though.
I could move. Not really, but it's an option that someone will undoubtedly recommend, and it's true. But I'm not moving. I just bought a chainsaw.
Satellite (HughesNet) - won't work well for VOIP, so not really an option there.
Mountain area, with lots of trees - P2P isn't an option.
My real thinking here:
Wife already has a verizon account, I could add a line and dual sim my phone (iP XS) with a a Verizon line. That would get me calls out everywhere I go locally. Problem is calls in to my AT&T number would still fail (unless I used Call Forwarded), and my calls out would show up as a different phone number, unrecognized to most people at least the first time I called out.
Could upgrade her plan to a hotspot, and use WiFi calling on my phone through her hotspot. That works, so long as she's home.
I could get a mobile hotspot for the house, and only use it when our DSL is out. Would be nice if I could set it up as a sort of failover, but then again, I wouldn't want all the PCs and god knows how many consoles all deciding to do updates at the wrong time and hitting the hot spot.
Nothing is really calling out to me here as the best option, just a lot of pretty bad ones and a handful of mediocre ones.