Keeping Our Security System Local (For Now)

I cannot live without a home alarm system. It's just how I roll. Now in the country, it's good to have it include fire notification as well.

Several years ago, after a lightning strike blew up our home security system, the then-giant security firm ADT revealed that it had begun to act arrogantly toward residential customers. We said farewell and went with a locally owned firm, Richmond Alarm. They installed a new control pad, surge protector that ADT neglected, and lower monthly monitoring fees.

I consider a good home-alarm system as essential to my peace of mind as clean water. Richmond Alarm had been around a century and seemed unlikely to be going anywhere.

Then they vanished. An out-of-state firm purchased them and swore nothing would change. Within a year, an internationally owned company called Johnson Controls took the helm, outsourced customer service to an Indian call center, with nice but poorly trained workers who read scripts. I began to get voicemail reminders multiple times monthly from India, reminding me to pay my invoice. I blocked all the numbers.

I've never missed a payment, and we auto-pay. Meanwhile rates went up and local employees got the boot.

Now we are about to give Johnson the big farm boot. We considered DIY options from Nest and Ring, but in the end, our setup is complex, covering out-buildings and our home, while our data caps low. We lucked out finding a firm whose headquarters is a few miles from our farm. They can reuse most of the Johnson hardware and upgrade a few dodgy sensors to communicate with our control panel and phone apps.

All that with no hit on our puny WiFi internet data caps.

The moral here? If you live rural without broadband and need a security system, your options may be limited. Starlink's base plan provides 2 TB of data a month, as compared to Verizon's 100 GB. We don't stream media except a movie every few months. We don't watch TV series (unless we can get a DVD). The guy from our new provider looked at us like we were from outer space, but then he said "Starlink would be perfect for you if you add a doorbell camera." 

That may be down the road, or even a DIY setup. Security systems are not cheap, and monitoring is a monthly expense, but the price of a break-in is years of trauma.

Right now, I'm thankful to have a local option again. And I'll be in line for a Starlink antenna.

Image courtesy of Lorie Shaull at Flikr

The Idiocy of Rural Broadband, Pt. 2

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.

The Idiocy of Rural Broadband

Here I am, a hypocrite. Yes, me.  I long have celebrated the pokey "cup and string" Internet out here as a great reason to live in the country. 

The typical rant: After all, fiddly-foo, brain-addled screen addicts would lack the data to live their zombie-halflives here, and thus they'd stay in their Stepfords and other boring cul-de-sacs.

End of rant: That all sounded great until I got de-prioritized in January after 100GB of data, because the pandemic and a medical problem have me working from home. Zoom uses a chunk of data, even without HD video enabled.

Throttled

The other satellite provider here offers an even lower strangulation point: 50 GB per month. My old plan with 50, plus the option to buy more priority data, has vanished. There is no cable out here; I even called a cable monopoly I absolutely despise, just to check.

This was looking grim: I could teach from my hermetically sealed campus office, but that meant getting close to undergrads I simply do not trust. Until I had my vaccinations or a good prognosis from my doctors about some tests for prostate cancer underway, I was not going back to campus.  We knew one person hospitalized for COVID and two others now in a graveyard. By semester's end, a quarter of my students would have been found positive, about half had been in quarantine because of exposure, and one landed in the hospital with a throat swollen shut by COVID.

Data strangulation sounded better. We'd figure something out.

I reasoned that there had to be some other option aside from watching the data-count creep up to 100, then the Internet slow down to a crawl.

Enter, BOIP

This sounded promising, "the technology infrastructure company that economically and efficiently delivers high speed broadband access and computing services to underserved and distressed residents on behalf of civic organizations and community stakeholders."

 Small firms like BOIP (Business over internet protocol) offer a WiFi router for a home network, and they have contracts with major carriers such as AT&T or Verizon to get your home the precious data.  The router must be purchased for about $300, but it can be returned for a refund and the contracts are month-to-month.

They bring broadband via a cell tower to a box in the house that looks like an alien critter. If you know satellite Internet, you know how weather and other factors influence latency: speed lags below what would otherwise be optimal. BOIP's tech person and I talked 0s and 1s for a bit...several bytes actually (Hah--I know enough UNIX to be dangerous to myself) and he claimed that it would provide a consistent signal at a speed that might be slower overall than satellite at its best, but without latency: enough for Zoom, streaming films, and ordinary applications.

No data cap, no strangulation point. I was certain there would be a catch. Everything in this sad world has a catch, from the doctor paddling you for that first breath until the final clacking of the casket lid.

Exit BOIP, Enter UbiFi

The catch was the carrier BOIP uses. After about 2 months, disaster. 

The folks at BOIP are as nice as they can be, but suddenly they lost the carrier they'd been using. We got an apologetic e-mail with 72 hours notice that we might lose Internet.  I asked on our local county group, and this was not the first time BOIP had this issue.

We were teaching remotely. I tried to be as civil as I could be, but I called BOIP and said, basically, "heck no. What are my other options?"

They didn't know but were trying as hard as possible to find a new carrier. So I looked around, and I found a national rural-WiFi service, Ubifi. I bought their router installed it doing stupid-UNIX tricks, and in ran it alongside BOIP for a month. Both services cost us $99 per month.

Same speed, similar latency, but one difference: Ubifi has a contract with AT&T and are big enough to merit the behemoth's favor. BOIP scrambled and found someone new to host them. We kept their alien invader, too.

So there we were: two routers going, comparing services. After a month, I returned BOIP's router and got a full refund for the device. 

Lessons Learned

If you are not good with arcane computer code, you may want to pay someone to install a WiFi router for you. I did it myself for Ubifi; BOIP came to the house and advised me on location and setup (which they did for me).

In the long run, something better will emerge than WiFi. We'll have Elon Musk's space empire Starlink service, 5G WiFi, or orgone-ray generators to get us our episodes of All Creatures Great and Small.

Any of them, including our current service or BOIP, prove cheaper and faster than conventional satellite. Data throttling is an evil thing. Rip that dish out of the ground. I cut mine down with a Sawzall.

 Now if we just have enough firewood for all this home-office stuff. My wife is retiring and I will work more from home in Fall, even though I return to in-person teaching.

 Next year, six cords. Period. And take those pills the doc gave me. No cancer but I'm on yet another old-guy diet.