Fast forward to 2011, my family has now moved back to my childhood home along with my brother. The aging DSL just did not cut it anymore and worse yet was the price. Who in their right mind would pay $45/m for 2.6Mbps DSL in 2011? The local telcom only offered 3mg DSL this far out and to be fair it did offer fiber, boasting up to a 60/60 line... but it ended 2 blocks up the street from us... Leaving us with no options, that was until Wave Broadband came through in 2009, purchasing the local cable provider. For a few years we dealt with the terrible speeds and choppy IPTV, but we finally gave in and decided to try it out.
Wave offered a number of plans, but seeing as both me and my brother are "heavy" users and my wife likes to stream movies/tv shows, we went for the fastest line offered this far out. The 18Mbps down/2Mbps service includes a 300gb/month cap, verses the 100gb/month on slower plans. This is not the fastest Wave offers, but it is the fastest they could guarantee a constant speed with. At $50 a month, we ditched the IPTV and have decided to go without cable TV. None of us have time for TV and when we do want to watch something, streaming services like Hulu and Netflix have replaced any need for cable in my mind. I am planning on hooking back up our digital antenna for OTA broadcasts, just in case there is a kids show on OPB my son wants to watch.
An appointment was made and figuring the standard "12-5" window, I took the afternoon off. I decided to maximize my time and have a friend over who needed some car assistance. He showed up right around 12:30 and we got to work on his project. Not 5 minutes later our installer showed up, ready to get everything done... I had not even cleared the brush from the cable boxes (not used in 20 years since the last owners.) The installer was nice, very patient, and was happy to work around our needs. Since cable had not been used in our 1891 house in 20 years, during any project we would rip out all the old RG59. This did not matter, as RG6 was needed.
Now here came the fun part... The main house sits on 8x8 timbers, with less then 8" of crawl space under them in some spots. The networking all lives in the study at the front of the house, opposite of the crawl space entrance. Our installer was not a small guy, and honestly neither am I. We both held a fairly similar 6ft 200pound build. We chatted a bit about what to do and at this point I offered to go under the house WITH him to assist... He somehow took this as I was going under... Honestly, it was not a problem for me. I had been under a few times, knew the obstacles, but never gone quite this far back.
I suited up, grabbed a flash light and shovel and one hour later I emerged, covered head to toe in dirt and dust. This was the most miserable thing I have done in a LONG time. I ended up digging under each of the 3 main beams to create 12" of clearance to squeeze under, and I mean squeeze. There was one point where I took a deep breath half way under and was stuck. I had to exhale all my air just to get through. At no point did I feel trapped though and we did end up getting the cable ran, but next time the installer gets to enjoy the misery of our crawlspace.
With everything hooked up, we ran our first speed test.
Not bad. Not bad at all. It turns out we are at the amplifier for the line and have an amazing signal. Mind you this changes drastically depending on time of day and where the test server is, but I have not dropped below 2.3MBps on an actual download speed. This is 10x better then our 300Kbps download the DSL gave us.
Would I recommend Wave broadband? It is too early to tell. Overall the service is as advertised and the installer was nice, on time, and even shared a few useful bits about the way Wave filters Cable TV. :)
Next up is our router solution and more about the pesky 300gb/month cap and how I plan to to keep track of it.
Marc
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