… and I’ll say it again, If you really *need* the Internet, you need more than one way to connect.
Circumstances this past week really brought that home again.
We are spending the winter season at our home park, Paradise Island RV Resort. There is WiFi here, and it is pretty good right now. But as more “snow birds” flock to the park and connect, the bandwidth and speeds do suffer. And a single infected computer can really bring things to a crawl. Chris has been taking her laptop over to her Mom’s place and working there. Marilyn has cable Internet.
There are phone connections at all the sites here. I called AT&T and had our site set up with high-speed DSL for the months we will be here. They have a plan where you can get only data if you do not need a voice line.
That is perfect for us, because we use our Verizon cell phones and Google Voice.
We were very happy with the speeds on our DSL connection until the DSL stopped working Friday. I had experienced a couple of short outages previously, but this time it didn’t come back on. I finally called tech support on Friday evening and they walked me through all the things I had tried at least 3 times before.
They determined the line was bad. I figured I’d be without DSL until Monday, but they said a tech would be out in the morning.
To get work done, I connected to the WiFi. It worked pretty good, but it wasn’t as fast as our dedicated DSL.
Chris need to do some heavy duty uploading, so I took her laptop to the park office and plugged into their high speed line.
The tech didn’t make it in the morning, but he did call and said he would be out at 2pm. He was here promptly at 2 and traced the problem to 2600 feet from our site. He found the problem, connected me back up, and we were back in business!
I sure hope that doesn’t happen again. But I am prepared. If the DSL goes down, I’ll connect to the park WiFi. If that is not good enough, I’ll turn on the Verizon Cellular Broadband.
What will we do next year when we are traveling out west? Cellular and WiFi is not always available.
I will probably need to upgrade my MotoSat DataStorm satellite Internet system because Chris really *needs* the Internet.