Frustrated with the lack of fiber in actually rural areas
So, this will be a pretty long winded venting of frustrations....but maybe someone at Windstream will see it and be able to do something about it...
I live on a small farm. It was my parents until a year ago, I have known the place for almost 50 years. It sit's between 2 cities. The capitol city ~12 miles to the East, and a small city ~12 miles to the West. Has a state hi way running along one side. Over the years I have watched them install fiber optic cable into the ditch along my land. My father worked in Network Operations for the local telephone company that is now owned by Windstream, so I know what they were putting in, I even still have the end of the cable from where they spliced it 100 feet from the driveway. Anyway, I know that cable is old, they put it in in the 1980's and was for voice traffic at the time. But still, I know fiber when I see it being installed, and I know where it runs. I know there is fiber in my ditch that carries the internet traffic between the 2 cities. When I, unfortunately, lived in the smaller city, I had fiber to my house from Windstream (Kinetic) and it was great, never had much issue with it that wasn't actually my fault.
Anyway, recently, in like the last 2 years, the county that the farm is in installed fiber conduit through the entire county...got funding from the infrastructure bill. Was supposed to bring actual broadband internet to the rural residents. But so far all they have done is run fiber to the homes in the villages which already were getting at least 100mb DSL...my parents had DSL from Windstream and were lucky if they got 7mb down and 0.75mb up...And I am sure they are running it to the housing developments that are springing up everywhere...
When the hell do I get it? Why is it so hard when the fiber is already literally 500 feet from my house. I know they are deploying it where they will make the most profit from it, but damn it, that funding was supposed to help the ruralest of the rural...like farmers, not towns people who already had decent service.
Right now I am stuck on TMobile 5G, because at least I get useable speeds, but wireless will never beat fiber. Plus, I can't even open ports in the router due to CGNAT, so my sons friends can join his Minecraft server...I still have the fiber to my house in town, so I am VPN tunneling back there for port forwarding, but I hope to rent that house here eventually so I'll need to move the rest of my equipment to the farm...
Thank you for letting me vent.