Having just waged, and WON, this battle, I wanted to share our solution--
Many of us live in areas where broadband via cable or phone line is impossible. And while WiFi and cellular might be in the area it's inaccessible in our particular locations.
So we go with…
satellite
It's slow, goes out with bad weather, and--worst of all--is THROTTLED. Half of a movie will eat up an entire day's allowance.
No automatic software updates or YouTubes for you.
So, going back to "inaccessible" wifi or cellular for a bit.
Our regional cell carrier has an excellent home-based internet plan. (
Viaero, for anyone who wonders. I'm happy to plug them.)
Unfortunately, while I can get a
perfect signal on the hill 100' above our house, our house wasn't ON that hill. It's 100 feet lower. Not to mention the fact that signals are screwed up by this hill behind the house... The same was true for the local wifi carrier, 10 miles away.
So the question became how could we get a receiver up on the hill?
Putting an antenna up there seemed logical, except that with every foot of antenna cable that's run, you lose signal quality and if nothing else, we needed to get the cable down the hill and into the house. We were looking at a bare minimum of 100' of run. Any signal gained by the antenna would be completely lost with a run that long.
This is what we ended up doing:
1. We mounted our $100 parabolic antenna on top of a high point (in our case it's the new house we're building, that sits considerably higher than this one) and had a 15 foot antenna cable run to our carrier's router box.
2. We sheltered and powered our router in the new house, but we had also considered building a small, watertight box up on top of the hill (had we mounted the antenna on a post as we'd originally planned) and powering it with a solar panel/fence charger type set-up. Routers don't pull much juice.
3. To get it the 200 feet into the house, we strung buriable
ethernet cable (you can get it on Amazon for $50, give or take, for 500 feet and put on your own ends) from our carrier's router to a plain-jane wifi router here in the house.
Unlike the antenna cable, ethernet doesn't experience signal loss unless it's over about 300 feet.
So that's my best suggestion: Find somewhere on your place that you can get any sort of signal, hoist an antenna above it to max out the signal, hook in the carrier's router and then run ethernet cable to wherever you actually need service.
Good luck!!
~*~Erin~*~
