Rural Broadband with Telecom XT
Because I am now located in the outback of New Zealand's rural landscape I have fewer options when it comes to internet. I guess I should appreciate that I have any options as all... I mean, it is amazing that I can connect to a world wide network of hundreds of millions of machines at all....
Anyway, I rely on the web for my work so it is quite important to me. I tried the Vodafone option but could not get a strong enough signal so it was useless. Now, with the device from Telecom I can surf via XT at speeds averaging around 0.8mbs
Now this isn't amazingly fast but I was stuck on 0.3mbs connection with Orcon in the suburbs of Christchurch
Improving the signal and speed
When I first plugged in the device I was getting speeds round 0.25mbs which was not really suitable for my needs, especially when you consider the costs of these connections. At first I thought it was not going to be an options but as I worked on the problem in my head, first considering mirrors (or their equivalent for radio waves) then towers, I came onto the idea of trying the old sky dish bolted to the house.
My quick experiments with holding the USB device at the focal point of the dish (on a USB extension cable) seemed to indicate that there was a good speed boost. I took the dish down, removed the sky controls from the focal point and neatly fitted in the USB stick. I mounted the whole contraption in my attic to be out of the weather (and eyesight, those dishes are ugly).
The final thing to try (althoughit is another cost) is one of the external, directional antena the some companies produce. The stick I have (Sierra Compass 885) can take an external input and thse things can really boost the performance (or so I'm led to believe)
Update! Further Improvements with Directional Antenna
After doing some research I decided to spend a few more dollars on trying to improve the speed and quality of my connection / signal.
view largerI purchased a directional antenna (from Tennatron Industries) that promised to boost the signal strength. This is possible because the Sierra USB modem has an external antenna jack.
After bolting the antenna to the roof of my house and running the supplied cable down through the ceiling to my office I get a consistent speed of 4 megabits!
