hi.. we live in bland on scenic highway and embarq does not offer high speed here.. but they offer it in town and 12 miles up the road they do whats that all about find that crazy..

hey Bi0sC0mp. for a long time i did not think that i had high speed in my area. then i started checking around and guess what. i did. what embarq is trying to do is not overload their servers at first. if they came to your home a few years ago and buried a new phone line then you can get high speed.  the problem is that if they told everyone they could get high spped now then the lines would be overloaded and cause a disastrously slow internet connection even with high speed. you should find the closest embarq van in your area and ask the guy personally. also ask your neighbors and see if they have it. hope this helps

I have some experience with this, although I am not in Bland, I am 4 miles outside of the town of Wytheville.  I was told by the local supervisor that we probably would never see high speed, and that baffled me because we are only 4 MILES away from town limits!  I contacted a couple of other people with knowledge on the situation, and this is the answer I got. high speed internet uses a “switching station”, and the farthest it can reach is three miles.  So, unless you are within 3 miles of a so called switching station, you cannot recieve the signal. The closer you get to the three mile limit, the worse your signal is and you can’t get a high rate of speed, and if there are no switching stations three miles from your residence you won’t get any signal at all.  I have to tell you though, if you call embarq to ask them any questions relating to your area, ASK FOR THE AREA SUPERVISOR! They will tell you they can’t reach them directly but will give you a phone number for them.  My experience is that the people that you call when you call the 800 number have no idea what is going on in this area.  Just thought I would share my experience, hope this helps! :)

I called Embarq last week only to get the same ole; same ole….“we’ll call when it’s 30 days out”. I was trying to find out after realizing we couldn’t get the WiFi since there are trees between our house and the transmitter antennas in Bastian.

Like you a friend has their DSL service just off the Bastian exit where they upgraded the switch last year.

I have a HughesNet system you can have…

i got wildblue at the moment wonder if hugesnet would give me a good deal if i switched hmmm what all comes with that system u got

A friend of mine gave me his 3 month old system last year when he found out they offered DSL where he lived. I was going to do a self install and use it but at the time rumor had it either Embarq was going to be offering service or Bland Co’s WiFi would be up and running. So here I am 10 months later still waiting.

I’ll just stick with DU for now until Embarq gets off the stick and upgrades our system. I even checked into Ntelos 3G service but it only works “good” in Mercer county at this time.

I have the dish, about 6ft of the OEM pole, modem and the software.

same here going to move soon as soon as we finda place we like and has dsl hehehe

Bi0sC0mp - 05 February 2009 02:11 PM

same here going to move soon as soon as we finda place we like and has dsl hehehe

Good luck with that it took what seemed like forever before we found what we wanted in Bland County.

dont have to be bland just need to find another area thats nice to live any input be great

I recommend New Mexico.  :) LOL

http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/controller?item=planFirst&action=viewPlanDetail&sortOption=priceSort&catId=409&typeId=5&subTypeId=13&lid;=//global//plans//mobile+broadband+plan

A friend of mine just demonstrated his verizon 3G phone speed here and it’s pretty fast. So maybe that’s another option. I don’t know how fast it’d be on a PC, but it loaded up ebay and a few other sites pretty quick. It also played video fast without buffering too much. (unlike our service a work)

around 60 bucks a month but limited to 5gB…I don’t know how to measure that in normal surfing??? Any Ideas???

I’ve had service through verizon for some time now.  I’ve only had data service for about 3 weeks now.  According to my phone, here’s the stats my timers have recorded on the phone:

Transmit data - 12413 kb
Received data - 154571 kg
total data - 166984 kb

I don’t know if that includes all data from the mild amount of internet data I’ve pulled, but maybe your friend could see what his phone says or look on his bill…the bill should show how much data is used.

That’s not how fast you’ve sent or received data, but how much.  You’ve received 154,571 KB, which is 154 MB.  Just to give you an idea, I’ll download a single TV show that is 300 MB in an hour over DSL.  So I’ll download twice as much as you’ve received over 3 weeks in just 1 hour.  I’m a software developer, and the development tools to write programs for the iPhone is over 1 TB total (that’s 1000 MB).

It really depends on how you use the internet.  Browsing web pages and sending email, which sounds like what you do, isn’t all that demanding.  Streaming video, downloading video and music, real-time gaming (WoW, first-person-shooters, etc) is what eats up the bandwidth.

DSL is really the best option if you can get it.  I wouldn’t go with Jet Broadband (cable) for a few reasons.  First, they are more expensive than DSL.  Their basic package is $29.95, and it is only 1/2 the speed of the slowest DSL that Embarq offers.  Second, they have caps on how much data you can send and receive.  Their basic package is 20 TB.  One TV show is .3 TB.  One Movie is .6 TB.  The iPhone development tools I mentioned are 1 TB, and they update them around once a month.  So it would be easy to hit that cap, then you have to pay $15 a month for every additional 20 TB.  Third, cable is a shared resource.  Everyone in your neighborhood with cable is sharing the bandwidth of a single line.  Depending on how many people are in your area, the bandwidth pie can be carved up so small that your speed is reduced.  The speeds they quote are “Up to”, meaning the service plan you pay for is the best throughput you MIGHT get, but they don’t guarantee you will actually get that speed.  Usually around 3-8 PM performance is the worst, because kids get home from school, followed by the parents around 5, and they all get online at once.

To compare, Wifi, cellular and satellite internet are also shared resources.  The more customers, the smaller the slice of pie, and the slower the performance.

DSL is the WAN equivalent of a Base-T LAN, where each computer has its own direct connectivity with guaranteed throughput.

My section of bland (bastian) we don’t have a “real” cable company, it’s some group from Bristol or somewhere like that and they’ve said there’s not enough coustomers to spend on upgrading and offering cable modem service (Comcast is in Rocky Gap) almost everyone in the county has a “bland county flower” adorning their home I only know of one actual “cable” customer on our road. Embark will eventually get around to upgrading and offering service so that’s what I’m going to hold out on. I don’t care much for “fair” access policies or BW caps (those were probably great ideas in the 1800’s when everyone had 14.4 modems) but not in this day and age.
When in Princeton my cable modem always kicked algore and I know there were 100’s of customers, but that was the days before Hulu also.

I’m going to take the Hughes system to the curb in a few months for trash pickup…I’ll prolly keep the modem for whatever reason.

I belong to 15 or so forums and that’s usually eats up most of my “surfing” time.

DE: is the iphone an open source unit or does apple keep it clamped down like all the other Apple family of devices?

iPhone is buckled down much tighter than other smartphones (Blackberry, Windows Mobile), but not as ridiculously bad as BREW or Java on standard cellphones.  Application development has to occur on a Mac (at least using the actual iPhone SDK), so you have to use specific hardware for development.  You have to be accepted into the Apple developer program to be able to sign applications, which is the only way to actually get an app to run on real hardware (unless the hardware is jailbroken).  It’s $99 annually for the developer program.  It’s fairly easy to get approved into the program for individuals, but it takes many weeks to enroll as a company.

Once an application is complete it has to be submitted to Apple for distribution through the App Store (part of iTunes).  It can take weeks to get approved.  Usually there is a week delay before it can be reviewed, then if any little thing is wrong it is rejected, and after the developer fixes the problem there is another week or so delay before it can be reviewed again, etc.

Development isn’t nearly as tough to get into as console gaming systems or generic cell phones, but it is certainly harder than relatively open systems like Windows Mobile and Blackberry.  So I guess it’s somewhere in the middle.

Thanks for the answer….I’ve always avoided apple stuff since the late 80’s and early 90’s, It’s one of those personal grudges that really has no merit.

Add: compaq and Lexmark to the list….

Now if I wanted a real grudge it’d be our linux based sun machines we have here at the hospital that I’m always getting called in on because they’re doing something squirrely and no one knows how to shut them down properly.