Adventures in Interwebbing

As you may know, this service is provided to me by a company called Stagecoach Wireless. The service is pretty good, sometimes there are outages or very low bandwidth that make it impossible for me to do things like raid in WoW or watch movies in Hulu (two of my most common internet pastimes). Overall it is great to have a reliable and affordable access point from my boat, in fact it is a requirement for my living situation.

So a few weeks ago my wireless internet went down. I contacted the owner of this internet service who may or may not live there on the Harbor but now it says his voice mailbox is full an all of my support emails to his company have bounced. Now, I have pre-paid for a full year of this service, 6 months of which has been rendered. Also, I am a little worried about him. The last time I heard from him was April 23rd. I called the Harbor Police and they are looking into the matter.

In the meantime, I just could not live that long without internet service. I looked into the available wireless broadband services (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon) and decided to try the AT&T service since it has a 30 day return policy. So far it seems to work pretty well, in fact marginally faster than the wireless service I was using. The major problem seems to be with the limits of usage. I am allowed 5GB of upload/download per month. They have a handy website that you can monitor your usage with and this pro-rated billing cycle is 13 days long. For that 13 days I am allowed 2.2GB. As of today I have used 1.6GB of that watching 7 shows (~4 hours) on Hulu, zero WoW raids plus some light browsing. Something tells me this arrangement will be disappointing and expensive.

Update: The harbor called and said they were able to get him to answer and he is on vacation. One would think he would have someone take care of his business while he is away on vacation, you know, in case someone has a problem that causes them to not have internet for 18+ days. I knew that it was a likely possibility and I am sort of sorry to have bothered him but, I also feel a little bothered. I was already calling local ISPs inquiring if they would be interested in filling in that opportunity to provide service to the harbor. Even now, the problem seems to be either a mis-configured or damaged wireless bridge that took him 4 weeks to deliver to me when I first started the service. I feel like as an American, internet service is an inalienable human right. This situation is very trying for me.

-Aaron