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Looking for High Speed Internet around Lake Anna?

By Kelly Phillips
07/01/08

Well the war is on……..

A word about terminology so as not to let it confuse you. 

High Speed can be anything that is NOT dial up. 
So all high speed is not created equal. 
Broadband is anything that is not dial up. So this means nothing to you except how broad is that band because the broader the faster (aka bandwidth). 
Wireless, means there is no wire connected to your building from an outside source; it means any signal you get is floating over the air.  This makes satellite services and cell phone internet services wireless.  Which means DSL and Cable are NOT wireless. 

That is not to be confused with the fact you can have a cable connection and still set up your laptop with a wireless connection in your home.  So that is the very basic run down of the terms you will see when high speed is offered.

Please to those who are able to break the terminology down to a more accurate point (techy's)....don't.

A small history of high speed in the Lake Anna area.
First there was dial up, and all was well until the world started running faster….
Lake Anna borders 3 counties that have been rural for many years.  Even after the creation of Lake Anna itself.
Adelphia (now Comcast) made it into the area back in the late 80’s, though many people did not realize there was a wire running down the Spotsylvania side of 208.  It was also routed to Rockland Creek Subdivision (Also in Spotsylvania County) because a high executive of Adelphia bought and built in the subdivision, and needed the service.

Then came DirecPC, which became DirecWay, which became HughesNet.  This seemed to be the best choice for those that had no choice other than dial up. Or at least those with a “clear view of the southern sky”.  This caused many to figure out where south was and could they have it too? The high price (600 for the equipment, and started at 49.95 a month) kept a lot of home users away from the service, but many businesses found it as a necessity to function and signed up.

DSL was spotting itself into the area, but because of the restriction of having to be (approx.) 1500 ft. from a switch that actually was set up to provide DSL. This left many without this option.  The approximate footage is determined by the quality of the line that is being run to that switch.  Which in the case of the rural areas is very very old wiring as many will testify when there phone service becomes very degraded with hard rains.  Time for some new lines Verizon???  We think so.

Then companies started popping up with satellite services similar to HughesNet.  I say similar because with HughesNet, your dish shoots out to a satellite in space then down to a server, which processes the request and sends the information back to you.  On secure pages like banks and such, it must shoot out and back two times, which is why those pages seem to load MUCH slower. 

The new companies are placing their dishes locally on a towers.  This then runs through a cable to their servers to process the request.  Your limit on this is you need to be approx. 2 miles from a tower that has a dish on it.  You hope the dish is capable of handling the amount of people using it, or you may end up like some without internet for 2 weeks while they upgrade the dish.

Now you had to figure out where the tower with the dish on it was (North, East, West or South). The miles you are from it, and if anything is going to get in the way of the signal….hello TREES!!!  You still need to purchase equipment and have a monthly charge.

The satellite war around Lake Anna has been the most entertaining of all them.  One company had a tower up at *Mr. Smiths farm. 
Mr. Smith said, take it down, oops there goes a handful of internet connections. 
In the meantime it turned out Mr. Smith got a better offer from Company B to put their tower there….LOL, way to make friends!!
So Company A made a deal with one of the clients they were servicing and now left with out internet.
So Client A said, sure put your tower in, in exchange for free equipment and monthly access. 
In the mean time Company C calls to say, Hey Client A!! Guess what?! We now provide service in your area!! 
And Company B calls Client A and says hey we have access for you. 
Client A says we are staying with Company A.  Hmm, Client B says, but they moved their service…..Client A didn’t tell them where!

*The names have been changed to protect my lack of research on the facts.

Now during all of this the cell phone companies came out with wireless internet options, for not only your phone but cards you can use in your laptop and desktops to get your internet.  The price at that time was starting out at 60.00 a month, as far as I know it still is. 

Your equipment purchase to run your computer is just the card. 
The downside to this was you could only run one computer off of the card, if caught networking this service and many were, you were charged per kb that was downloaded.  This easily ran into the hundreds, which left many angry users. The companies response to this was “you should have read the agreement.” 
Rumor has it that this policy has changed but I have not had time to actually go through and read each of the provider’s agreements to see if this is true.

So now depending on where you live in the Lake Anna area you have access to…
*Cox Cable
*Verizon Wireless
*AT & T Wireless
*Other Cell Phone Companies Wireless
*Verizon DSL
HughesNet
Standard Broadband
CVALink
Virginia Broadband
And of course….dial up.
I apologize to those companies I have not named here, I’m just ignorant to your existence, but would be happy to add you to the list.

*The ones with asterisks can accommodate VPN connections last I knew of.  I know with out the special service from HughesNet you cannot go onto a VPN connection and I have no idea one way or the other with the others.

So how do you sort it out?  First step is to see what is available to you.  And I will show you the easiest way to do that.

Comcast
I’m not holding my breath for this one; they had a survey crew come through my neighborhood about 4 years ago and bottom line…not enough money here to run cable.
They tend to go into populated areas only, unless the CEO wants it somewhere!
This is Cable internet. 
It will actually be quickest to just call them.  The reason being, is they have different out companies depending on where you live.
888 823-4281
You can try this link….but you will probably end up with the number above.
https://secure.cox.com/Service/Offers/AvailableServices.aspx

The only choices for searching an area in Virginia are Fairfax, Fredericksburg, Hampton & Roanoke.

Verizon
They offer DSL, and as far as I know, are the only one’s that offer DSL, can we say Ma Bell?? 

This will only work as I mentioned above, if you are within the correct distance to the box for hook up, and if that distance is not degraded due to old wiring.  You can go online to see if it is available in your area. 
http://www22.verizon.com/content/consumerdsl/check+availability/check+availability.htm

But BE WARNED!!  I have gone through this process 7 times now (always the optimist).
You use the website, plug in your phone number and they say YES!!! We can do this for you!!!

So you proceed to the ordering of your new High Speed DSL!!  Good bye stupid satellite I’m moving into the fast lane. 

They have your equipment at your door in 1 or 2 days!!  Oh yes, happy dance….in the meantime they are sending emails, saying this won’t be totally verified until we send a tech out to the box to double check. 

And right after your equipment arrives you get THE EMAIL!  We are sooooooo Sooooorrrrrryyyyy but we can’t accommodate your order at this time, we won’t tell you exactly why, but if you call us, our phone people won’t be able to shed much more light on it either, but call if you need to. 
And oh, by the way, send us back our equipment or we are going to charge you. 

It is a life lesson in disappointment, anger and total helplessness.  But, I say if you know what to expect, give it a shot, who knows, maybe one day I may get that, "your service is now active!!!"  Oh but to dream!!

HughesNet
They have several levels of home plans, they also have business plans as well though their website isn't posting the prices for this, they want you to call. 

As for availablilty, a view of the Southern Sky, well they actually don't say at what angle that view needs to be, so you actually just have to hope you are seeing the view they need to see and order it, and hope that it all works out.
http://www.hughes.com/

I can tell you last I was aware of the business plans started at 99.00 a month. And if you call them out to install and you are obviously a business and you signed up for the home plan they MAKE you upgrade or you don't get the service.

They also now offer a VPN connection, which I do not even want to think how much that will cost. 

The downside to HughesNet (other than it is NOT cable or DLS) is they limit your downloads.  And if you go over that, you are penalized for 24 hours with internet speed that I did not believe was achievable, 1 – 5 kbs (that is 1 – 5 Kilobytes a second. 

To give you an idea of how slow that is….this article (just this article, not everthing else on this page that needs to load as well) is 35kb.  So it would take 7-35 seconds to load it. 

When confronted with their degraded service due to my awful mistake of doing a windows update, they had nothing to say about the fact that degraded actually meant SLOWER than dial up if that is possible. basically it was with an attitude of hang it up and come back in 24 hours you bandwidth hog!!

As of 07/01/08

CVALink
This company has been around for some time now.  They started with offering dial up services and have recently started offering satellite services.  Though I was able to find pricing, the website is going through a make over so I was unable to get any specifics such as whether there is a download threshold (aka bandwidth limit) to the service or where their towers are.  So at this point it will be best to call them. (540) 967-3973

VABB (Virginia Broadband) – Working with Rappahannock Electric Coop for dish placement.
You can view their coverage area map at: http://vabb.com/coverage.php
Just select your zip code from the drop down menu.  Don’t let the blue dots throw you; it is actually the coverage area, although the legend indicates a pinkish color.
From there if it looks possible, just give them a call.

Standard Broadband
Standard Broadband has no information online, their corporate certificate has them located in Mineral, but their billing is sent to Arlington, Virginia.
No phone number available online, could not find anything on this company on the internet.  Hmmmmm.

Cell Phone Internet Options
I do believe every cell phone provider now has a data connection option and you will just want to go to your cell phone provider’s website to check prices.  Also check to see if they have a limit on networking this connection to other computers.  It could cost big if they do and you do.

Have any information on the subject?  Please feel free to email me and if it is helpful information I can add it to the article.

information@bluecreektechnology.com

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