@Hazel123 If anyone can sympathize with you about internet misery, it would be me. I've dealt with it for years. The tale is long.
Even though I am only 3 miles outside the city limits, DSL has never been available and my options always limited. When I started out I had the 1 choice... slooow dialup.
A few years later, I had 2 choices...dialup or 2 Mbps satellite (which here satellite providers limit you to a certain amount of bandwidth for each month and you pay extra if you go over your limit) After paying a $395 connection fee, I was locked into a three year contract but I thought "hey anything is better than dialup, right? Wrong!)
When the weather permitted satellite to work, my speeds never topped out over 1 Mbps, usually less.. I went back and forth with the satellite company because service was unusable most of the time (Keep in mind this was before I ever had a router in my house. I had one PC) The company's argument was their speed was not guaranteed and I should have read the fine print in the contract.
Then we got a third option which was for wireless. When the ISP set up a tower 600 yards from my house. I said YAY! so I ditched the satellite having to pay for the year left on my contract, and yes the SOBs held me to it despite the problem being theirs. I happily paid the $395 connection fee to get wireless internet. At the time the wireless was a 5 Mbps plan but it was steady at 3 mbps most of the time. So I invested in my home network equipment and was able to use all the cat 6 cable we had run in the attic and never used.
I had retired so I opened a little PC repair business in my garage.Speeds weren't ideal for all that downloading but I made it work by working in the wee hours of the morning because speeds would increase then.
As time passed service remained steady but my speed kept getting slower and slower, usually around 1 Mbps. The ISP said it was because so many people in my area was using their service and their bandwidth was shared among everyone. They were unprepared for the demand and would have to upgrade their equipment to resolve it and had no plans to do so. Speed kept decreasing until it was at .5 Mbps which is dialup speed. I encountered the same scenario as you where they finally found they had piggybacked the fire department onto my access point and it had been that way all along.
Fast forward a couple of years and the ISP sold the company. The new owners upgraded their office control equipment but not the tower equipment. I got a speed increase to about 2.5 Mbps. (still not the 5 Mbps I was paying for) They still had no plans to upgrade the tower equipment. Then service began dropping ALL the time. The ISP determined it was due to my neighbor's trees blocking my signal so I paid $300 for them to set up an antenna pole so my radio could get over the trees. Back to 2.5 Mbps again.
Who REALLY solved all my internet problems was God. This last Nov. a tornado blew through here and knocked down the tower and devastated a big chunk of the community. Then the ISP had no excuses so had to put better equipment in the new tower. It took out all my neighbors trees, too, so I didn't need an antenna pole any more. It's a good thing because the tornado had sucked that sucker right out of the ground. I upgraded to their 25 Mbps plan but in nonpeak hours, like now, I actually get 50 Mbps. During peak hours when all the people around here are streaming it's usually around 15 Mbps. After many years of absolute misery, I can live with that. Seriously though, I'm glad to finally have decent internet, but I would never have wished such loss for my neighbors in order to get it. Luckily, no one was killed.
I can't relate to all the folks here who have access to fiber and fast speeds. I've never had it and never will. I'm sure you feel the same. It's 2023. This kind of infrastructure should be available to everyone. I can only say, I hope you and your son can get usable service with your new provider.
. However we did have Storm Arwen in 2021 which was pretty bad with no internet or even mobile signal for over a week (as well as no electricity!). Since then the mobile signal has never been anything like what it used to be. Used to be a strong 4 bars and up to 20mbps. Now it also drops out a lot. I think they just didn’t bother to invest but did basic repairs. Knowing 5G would mean work was to be done (at some point). The broadband also has not been what it was since then.
