Who do y'all use for internet in remote places? My In-laws are living full time at the ranch now, and are having a hard time finding a decent internet provider. They used to have Viasat (aka Exede) and they sucked. Speed would slow way down once they used 50 gigs. Hughes net does not look any better. As they live there full time now, they use way more than 50 gb. They are a little south of Kerens, close to Richland Chambers Lake.

Have they checked Verizon? Used it before we got AT&T.

That's the issue. None of the "regular" providers have service out there. No Verizon, no AT&T, no Spectrum... they live on a dirt road, so any of the providers that rely on cable or fiber optic will run their lines down their road.

I don’t know if it’s available there, but we use Next Link Satellite at our house. It is the some situation, the phone lines and fiber are miles away. We can stream three TVs and still have no problem using other devices. You might check with them.

Run around some roads out there and look for "high speed internet" signs. Or look at neighbor's houses and see if any of them have short antennas next to the house like the old ham radios. A lot of rural areas have point to point internet, where one house will have run one or more T1 lines in and sell bandwidth off it, basically making themselves a mini-ISP. Satellite Internet is still iffy at best for the average residential user.

Is there cell service out there?

Try to find a "line of sight" provider (not satellite) with good reviews. Line of sight is highly reliable, has good speeds, but it's not cheap.

Here's the one we use. They don't service north Texas, but could probably provide some contact numbers.

Ranch Wireless

Line of site, not all line of site are the same. If you have a line on one provider you'll have a line on a couple they usually share towers. Water towers cell towers etc.

I think ours is actually line of sight, I remember the guy saying he had to see the tower for it to work.

I have Dish along with the TV. Expensive but a little better than the line of site POS I had before.

No fiber/cable/DSL out here. But we have reasonable AT&T cell service. After living with awful Hughes satellite service for two years, we just added At&T Wireless Internet to our cell phone account.

We bought the box from them for $200 and the service is $110./mo for 150 GB per month. No minimum contracts, and you can drop down to 100 GB/Month and save $30. if that works for you. Download AND upload speeds are reliably 25 Mbps during peak traffic times and 35-40 seems to be the peak. If you prefer, they will bill you for the box at around $6.00 per month added to the bill.

The "box" is actually a cell phone with the WiFi hot spot running, and it has a phone jack to plug in a regular phone We don't need the extra phone number, but it's there to use - with unlimited calling in the USA and voice mail. I was concerned about the 150 GB limit, but I see that we have used 2.5GB to 3.0 GB/day so far, for the three weeks that we have been using it.

Remember that functionally, it is a cell phone, so you can take it with you to use anywhere there is an AT&T signal. Your high speed internet is portable.

Marc

Looks like Nextlink is in that area, might call them. That's my home Internet provider

https://broadbandnow.com/Texas/Kerens?zip=75144

UBIFI check them out. Works on cell signal and it can be boosted. Works great for us.

Yes, there is cell service, and using the cell hotspot is fine for weekend use, but with them there full time, it eats up Gigs too quickly.

Ours is line of site and my house happened to be the high point of the neighborhood so they have a repeater on my roof and I get it free since I provided for everyone else. Speed is outstanding and they do an outstanding job. Unfortunately they are only local.

Why not use the local landline provider Centurylink for DSL?

Check for local fixed wifi providers (Line of sight). There are local companies popping up all over in East Texas. Some are better than others. We get excellent speeds and unlimited data. Downfall is most people are going to need a tower and I think they're somewhere in the 2-3K range for a 60'...we got lucky when they put up a new broadcast station and had full line of sight from the eave..no tower.

nextlink is good if its available out there. That is what we use

I solved that problem by getting an Ipad

Greatness. They are bullet proof. You can even take a picture, crop it and upload it to THF or other venues.

Hughesnet sucks. We tried it and ended up adding a mobile hotspot to our Verizon plan. Works pretty good.