** Posted on November 20, 2025 Posted by Leave a Comment

**I like where I live for most things, **but one of the things I don’t love about it is that it is in a not great place for Internet access. I’m on a rural road where providers will not send cable or fiber, because it’s not profitable to do so. It’s always been an access desert: When I moved here in 2001, the only local provider of Internet ran at a speed of 9600 baud, which even for the turn of the century was appallingly slow. Then came satellite at a blistering 1.5mbps (provided there were no clouds), followed by DSL at 6Mbps for a decade and a half, which finally and grudgingly on the part of the DSL provider bumped up to 40Mbps. However, Brightspeed (my current DSL provider) has no intention of ever upgrading anything here, and the connection we do have has been getting progressively spottier.

But! Finally! Networks with 5G capability have finally begun to admit I can get signal at my address, and have offered home Internet via wireless to me. I had a couple of vendors to choose from and I went with Verizon, for no other reason than my phone is already on that network and I know it works here. I got their rectangular prism of a router a couple of days ago, and, after I moved it into Athena’s room, where my computer would not somehow confuse its ability to pick up a signal (this did happen), we were good to go.

And how is it? Good enough so far. The download speeds I get are *wildly *inconsistent — sometimes it’s at 20Mbps, sometimes it’s at 220Mbps — but most of the time it’s between 80Mbps and 120Mbps, which is twice to three times as fast as the DSL line. The upload speeds are a magnitude faster, too, which is nice. All for a cost that is a third less than my DSL package. Verizon doesn’t have bandwidth caps on the level of service I ordered (which honestly means that bandwidth caps of any sort are just excuses to charge more, not an issue of network capacity), so there aren’t going to be any particular cost surprises on that score. An average 80-120Mbps throughput is still far lower than one can get with cable or fiber (the church has 300Mbps via cable), but, from where I’m coming from in terms of speed, it’s a genuine and substantive bump up.

I’m going to keep the DSL for a month or two to get a bead on the quirks and capabilities of the 5G set-up, but if things continue as they have we’ll make that switchover. The only drawback for this is that we got the DSL as part of a package with our landline, and I am loath to give up that number; it’s still a point of contact for several things. I will have to figure out what to do with that.

In the meantime: Hey, do I feel faster to you?

— JS