We live in town but our house is a mile off the main road and up in the trees. We cannot get Comcast because they could have to go over or under a railroad track to get to us and our home is the only one here. DLS isn’t an option, our phone lines are old and buried and the phone companies have just said no.
We have used a TMobile hot spot and the connect is good but they charge $70 for 18 gigs which means we save it for just doing homework or surfing the web.
We got an ATT hotspot because they will do 100 gigs for $60 but we cannot get anything to work even though it says it has full bars.
Is there something else to try? It’s not easy to live without internet-we can’t even update our phones without going into work or starbucks because everything requires you have some WiFi connection.
What did ATT say about their hot-spot, or was it that you were getting full strength 3G so not quick enough for what you want?
In the UK, family and friends who live in remote areas with a long run of copper to their properties (so < 1Mbps) have had good experience with fixed WiFi solutions. Do you have this in the US in rural areas? Or satellite if you can put up with the latency and have line of sight?
Check the interface/portal of the hotspot and look though the connection and network sections.
I also use a 4G hotspot so try to cut down the data use as much as possible. Tips:
If you are using Windows 10 make sure you change the settings for the connection in use, so it is set as a metered connection.
There are other options to make sure it does not automatically try to update drivers and windows store apps.
In-line compression will also save data and there are a few options.
You can do this with Opera browser for desktop and mobile, and enable the turbo mode.
It has several settings and levels of compression.
You can add a similar 3rd party compression proxy to the desktop browser you currently use.
SkyZip proxy is less reliable and some times is down for days, but when working will make a big impact on data use.
This also has several levels of compression.
Note, added compression can cause an initial lag before the data arrives, but once downloading will finish a lot faster.
You may even notice that you now have a faster browsing experience generally.
This is very useful on shared connections with multiple users.
Mobile browsers make use of AMP optimised pages and higher compression.
You can add this ability to chromium based browsers with the AMP browser extension.
This will swap any sites over to the mobile format if available.
Whatever we are getting isn’t fast enough to even load a page on eBay-it just spins. I tried to run a speed test and I get an error.
The only ISP in our town said they could come to our house but it would cost us $30,000 to bring the line to our home. There is nothing I’m aware of in the US
Have you tried taking the ATT hotspot to an area closer to a local tower, such as work, or the Starbucks you mentioned, to verify you can get internet through the device?
In my experience with other mobile broadband devices, you usually can connect to the providers website even if you have not paid for a plan. That way they can sell you a plan. Try connecting to the ATT website where you check your mobile account balance.
There seems to be mixed information here, or you are not telling us details we need.
You say you tried to run a speed test but it failed.
Do you mean you could not load the page, or that you could load the page but the test failed.
If you could load the page, then we are now aware that you can actually connect to the net.
If you cannot load any pages at all, then we still have the issue of no connection, so trying different sites won’t help.
The details you can find in the hotspot configuration page should show if it is actually connected, rather than just how strong the signal is if you were using it.
They behave like mobile phones so will need various details to be filled out.
Often this will be configured when you first setup your SIM and the details will be sent via an SMS update.
Did you do this stage ? If not you may need to have the details sent again or manually input them.
Any wireless ISPs in the area? I don’t mean LTE with a cell network, but a dedicated wisp who will come out and install a small dish like antenna for their service.
Thank you for your ideas! Went back into att for the third time and got a new person. The device was never activated. It now works better than I expected. I wish I had gone back sooner.
Excellent news at least it was something simple in the end.
Unlike regular internet it needs to be registered once you get it, just like a phone and SIM.
Hopefully this amount of data lasts you the month, but make sure you are cautious of the quality setting in any video you stream.
If you are not viewing on a big TV then lower quality should do, especially with low motion shows, like the stuff on TWiT where people tend to be sat and the camera does not pan.
For a gauge of what to expect, I average somewhere around 60GB per month using all my data saving tips and allowing myself to more or less watch anything I want.
Don’t forget in Windows 10 to set the connection to be a metered connection, then go to the advanced settings and put your data cap value in.
You will get warnings before you run out of data.
