We were supposed to start early with #RuralBroadband installations, but it turned out that a public #library 20 km away lost its connection. This was not my business, but my technician knew about the problem, knew the place, knew how to fix it. We also knew that people responsible for fixing it wouldn't get there earlier than late next week. We lost an hour and a half, drove extra 40 kilometres, and had to tell one customer that they'd have to wait for their Netflix until Monday. But the library is back online.
Sometimes our clients run for their chainsaws on hearing that trees are blocking the signal. They want to cut everything down to get their cat pictures and porn faster. I hate trees (in those situations), but I hate cutting them down even more. So I usually tell them that we don't know which tree is blocking the signal. Or point to trees on their neighbour's plots, where they can't do anything about them.
The last one today was easy. No thinking, just hard physical work, so our brain's didn't have to use all the 10% of neurons and 20% of body's energy. Clear path to the BTS. Just a few mosquitoes, and they don't bite IP packets at the frequency we use.
Our first attempt was a 30 metre mast.
It worked fine (by the standards back then) from October until June when the trees leafed out. WiMAX.
Then nothing.
We had to wait 15 years until another tower grew in line-of-sight of a spot 30 metres from the house, where we have a 3 metre pole. LTE.
@Eric0Lawton 30 metres is a lot. When I knew I was moving into a forest Internet was top priority. There were no local last mile providers here, so I had to become one. It was really hard in the first years.
A lot, but not enough.
What's annoying is that people 5 km in any direction have the option of fibre, but they won't run it along our road because there are too few houses to be economically viable.
@Eric0Lawton Today someone called about Fixed Wireless Access ina pretty remote location. I know we can get them a reliable connection, but they mentioned some work done on the road about 10 years ago and they thought it was fibre. I found that fibre's operator. Publicly funded years ago. No problem with connecting, but it costs ten times as much as from other operators (who, of course, don't have fibre there). So we'll have a new FWA client and the fibre will lie there and rot.
@Eric0Lawton Running that fibre years ago was not economically viable, but it's public money, so who cares.
Then we got to work here. Trees. We hate trees. People buy a house surrounded by trees and then want stable Internet. We usually have two suggestions. Could they please move the house a bit, some three or flour hundred metres to the left? Or build a 20 metre mast. And then we get to work with what we have.