In an earlier post, I talked about the struggles with had with a local provider, finally settling on a Verizon hot-spot for our needs.
It worked well but this post will warn other rural Internet users about a device often connected to televisions: Amazon's Fire Stick.
Our usage amounts to limited streaming (an hour or 90 minutes), one Yoga class online, and a 30 minute office hour meeting with students in a week. Thus we never went through more than 70 GB of our 100 before hitting the data cap and having speed slowed down. I understand from friends who watch a lot of films, TV, or play games online, that blowing through a Terabyte in a month is not unusual.
Watching anything streaming meant attaching a laptop with a series of adapters that would make Rube Goldberg proud. An in-law with (of course) unlimited fiber Internet suggested Amazon's Fire Stick. We got the lowest-cost model, running 20 bucks with free shipping. It installed in a snap and we watched without issues a documentary about those who raise show chickens, plus an episode of All Creatures Great and Small. With Alexa and an intuitive control, I figured we had it made.
A few days later, Verizon notified us that we'd hit 90 GB of use on the 6th day of the month.
The verdict? Fire Stick. These devices will continuously auto-update (and the updates are not tiny) while the TV is off, as the device connects to one's router. Moreover, when using Fire Stick, it defaults to the highest video-quality possible, a Niagara of megabytes per hour. Finally, it plays previews and other features that devour 1s and 0s faster than a sailor on leave with pay in his pocket.
The solution is simple: unplug Firestick. We've used half a gigabyte since. We will plug it in again when we next watch something. But even then, the updates would begin to download, many of which we would never need. Thus there's some very good advice here about how to reduce data usage. We turned off all the data-gobbling settings right afterward, and unplugged the AC adapter.
We are considering Starlink, with its 1 TB cap, or awaiting the coming of fiber to our part of the county.
Many of you will not have that choice, and a cellular router of 4G or 5G may be the best choice. But watch those "smart" devices that hoover up data. These now include many appliances, security cameras, and the like.
Most of them can be dialed down if you know how. It's not in the interest of Big Telecom or firms like Amazon to tell you.
Incidental and ironic postscript:
A Google search for the string "The Idiocy of Rural Broadband" turned up no hits for my own blog, one they host! Perhaps nothing shows because I refuse to run advertisements here.
Microsoft's Bing did turn my site up faster and as a second or third hit. I'm using Bing on my iPhone for the default search engine, for what that's worth, since it links right to Apple's map application (Safari does not take you to Apple's own map application, incidentally!).
Google seems only to want to push advertisements to us, not feature free content. At least Microsoft, a company I've long mistrusted, got it right.
Large companies are not our friends. They see us as revenue streams, not people. They have no one-on-one relationship as a locally-owned merchant or service may.
Act accordingly whenever you can.
Image source: Tom Woodward at Fickr.
