My family recently ended our time living in an apartment and found a home in a semi-rural area. I say semi-rural because we are surrounded by cornfields and country homes, but are 3 minutes from a business park, and 3 minutes form three different interstate exits. Unfortunately, even with the business development happening near out home, the residential infrastructure has not kept up. I work in the tech space, and to be short I am a power user of our home internet service. Whether it is video calls for work, streaming high quality videos, or other personal projects (this site included); I am constantly uploading and downloading from a server somewhere.
We had it made at our apartment. We paid a reasonable rate, had gigabit speeds, and that even included a free mesh wifi system. On our first tour of our new home, I was immediately wondering what kind of service we would get if we moved out there. After doing some research, I found out that we were stuck with one telecom provider. Not only was their no competition, but the only option I could find wasn’t the best. The speeds were 50mbps, I had to either pay for a TV service or telephone service along with it, and it was more expensive than the gigabit we had been paying for in our apartment.
At that point I didn’t think I had an option, so I called scheduled an appointment for them to come out and do an install and tried to forget about my disappointment. This was until the day before the install I somehow discovered Verizon’s 5G Home Internet service. Supposedly, it was cheaper, faster, and more convenient (too good to be true right)? I thought so, but to see if they were lying I went ahead and ordered one, even though I was getting internet installed the next day.
The telecom internet was as expected: comes in through a phone line, maxes out at 50mbps, and has to sit in the middle of our living room, because that is where the only remaining phone jack is in the entire house. However, a few days later a package arrived with Verizon’s 5G modem. To my surprise the sales website was real. The modem took about 5 minutes to set up (4 of which were waiting for a firmware update), and the internet speeds (300 mbps in my area) were much faster than the telecom provider. On top of all those positives, it was cheaper!
I started off feeling let down that my first home would not satisfy my first world desire of decent internet speeds. I obviously have not been using the 5G service for more than a few weeks, but up to this point I am satisfied. If I have any new breaking updates, I’ll be sure to post an update then. Happy surfing.