I N T E R N E T N E W S

~ 4Pairless ~

Read: “High-Speed Tower Coming To Oxtongue Lake” by Chad Ingram in the Minden Times

~ BELL ~

Read about Bell’s data plan for the Turbo-Hub

RANDOM BITS OF INFO AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE ON INTERNET ACCESS AT THE LAKE

Please send in your ideas, experiences, and suggestions for hi-speed internet access!

Apparati referred to below:
Rogers: (Rocket Stick — ZTE MF636 USB Modem)
Bell stick (Novatel Wireless U727 USB Modem) works well.
Bell Turbo Stick

Cottage Life discussion forum

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July 11

From:  GORD HEMSWORTH

I have been using the Bell Turbo stick for a few days now after trying the Rogers Rocket Stick with poor success. The Bell stick is connecting at about 1500 to 1700 speed compared to 100 to 150 for the Rogers and 20 to 25 for dialup. So far so good . I was able to take advantage of a Bell promotion and wil be able to only pay $10 per month with no access fee for the months we do not use the stick.

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July 9
From: IZAAK DE RIJCKE

I have had very limited success with the Rogers RocketStick.  On the other hand, a Blackberry based on the Rogers network seems to work fine anywhere on the Lake….. The problem seems to be the type of network available from Bell’s new tower at our Lake.  It only uses Edge, while many other towers use 3G, GSM or HSPA.  I found my RocketStick to work fine after driving down to Henrietta’s and there a HSPA network was available from the other tower in Dwight.  Maybe we should encourage Henrietta’s to open another room with tables for a BYO laptop internet cafe!

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From:  MICHELLE BOWMAN

I’ve been using a Rogers stick with pretty good success / speed on Keysbury for over a year and my neighbour says her Bell stick works well.

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From:  GORD HEMSWORTH

…[Judith Clapp] told me that the Rogers stick did not work well here and Bell worked better. Of course I had to try the Rogers stick because we get a full signal for my daughter’s Rogers phone at the cottage.

The price and system access fee was better for Rogers at the time and we had lots of problems with Bell Sympatico here at home before we switched to Cogeco.

To put it simply, Judith was right, we were able to get online with it but it was very very slow, just over 100 speed compared to about 25 for dial up. I returned the Rogers stick and was able to cancel the contract with a bill of less than $20.

I heard about a deal that Bell had for June that was a one year contract for $10 a month including system access fee for minimum service and a free stick.

This means that over the winter months I will only pay $10 as opposed to Rogers which was a 2 year contract for $37.50 for 12 months of the year.

During the months we use the Bell the price should be about the same as Rogers.

We will be up next week and I am looking forward to trying it out. I will let you know how it works.

By the way, we cancelled our Bell dial-up at 24 a month and went with dialupatcost.ca for unlimited dialup for 10.45 per month. It works as well as Bell dialup…