Getting internet working in our new home

We just moved to a new home a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, Verizon FiOS is not available in the new neighborhood. The next town over is just getting wired now, but that’s there, not here. Rumors of local political problems between the town government and Verizon tells me that although FiOS might be available in 6 months, it’s also possible that it won’t be here for 6 years or 60 years. Needless to say, transferring the FiOS service from our old house was not an option. Verizon’s only internet offering for this location is DSL, which isn’t sufficient for my needs (telecommuting, including VoIP through our corporate VPN.)

For TV service, we subscribed to Dish Network. Mostly because the previous owners used it and the dish was already on the roof. That installed quickly and after three weeks I’m quite happy with it. But that’s for TV only. Dish does offer satellite internet service, but the latency inherent in a geostationary satellite link (over half-second round-trip packet times) makes it useless for interactive services like remote-logins and VoIP. Since both my wife and I require interactive services (distance learning, telecommuting, FaceTime, etc.) satellite internet is a no-go.

Which leaves Comcast internet as the only possibility for high bandwidth and low latency. We subscribed to their 25Mbps internet-only service. Due to the fact that we were involved with moving and closing on two houses (buying the new home and selling the old one), I was in no state of mind to research and buy a modem, I elected to rent Comcast’s modem, at least for the first few months, just to keep it simple.