Your Internet Connection and Your Home
by Karla R. Cook

Most of us are aware that the Internet has gone from a kind of library of electronically accessible information to an all-encompassing medium. It has quickly become indispensable to our jobs, our leisure habits, and social lives. And many things we used to do on the Internet at home have become portable, thanks to the explosion of new electronic devices: cell phones, iPods, Blackberries, GPS navigators, e-Books, the new iPad, among others. Information is transmitted to these devices through many kinds of connections, both wired and wireless. One of the most recent is MIFI, a mobile “Wi-Fi” hotspot that connects to the Verizon mobile wireless network like a cell phone but works like a “Wi-Fi” modem. Using that kind of connection can turn your car into an on-road office. The essential Internet connection for most of us, however, remains the one at home or home office—and what kind of connection we have will largely determine whether or not we’re able to get that extra mile out of home computer usage we’re looking for.

Obviously, deciding which Internet service to get depends primarily on what you want to do on the Internet and how much money you are willing or able to spend. Will you mostly exchange simple e-mails with your business associates, friends and family; or send photos and graphics quickly to clients; or keep in touch with people on Facebook; or play video games with friends on X-Box Live; or “stream” movies (that is, download data from a host website into a temporary “buffer”) on your computer? How well you’ll be able to use the Internet for what you want depends first on which Internet Service Provider (ISP for short) you use.

The basic choice for most serious Internet users in Northern Dutchess and the surrounding areas is between providers of DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) and cable modem service. DSL is provided customers through a “filter” on your phone line that allows the higher frequencies to be used for the Internet while the lower frequencies can be used at the same time for phone calls. Many in our area subscribe to the service from Frontier Communications, the local phone company, which offers High-Speed Internet-only service at up to3 Mbps (megabytes per second) starting at $49.99. People on a tighter budget can subscribe to Frontier’s “light” Internet DSL service for $10 less, with one-fourth the maximum speed (up to 768K)—still considerably faster than dial-up service, which tops out at 56K.

One satisfied Frontier DSL customer is Lorraine Humphrey, a former high-school teacher who tutors students and volunteers at a local church. She uses the Internet mostly for church e-mails and communicating with friends and family. Dr. George Verrilli’s medical office staff in Rhinebeck also uses Frontier for routine business communication and finds the service satisfactory.

DSL providers usually claim that its speeds are fast enough for streaming and playing video games on X-Box Live, but in truth, a faster Internet connection always provides a better streaming and gaming experience. For that, you probably want a cable modem, available in the Northern Dutchess area from Time Warner Cable if cable service is available in your neighborhood. Time Warner’s service is hooked up to a fiber optic network and provides at least three times faster speeds than DSL. Its standard cable modem, Roadrunner, with download speeds up to 10 Mbps, provides ample speed for Internet gaming systems and is competitively priced. For a monthly surcharge you can get Roadrunner Turbo service at download speeds up to 15 Mbps, and Time Warner’s Wideband Internet, with download speeds up to 50 Mbps, should be available in Northern Dutchess this March. (Note: Truly high-speed broadband service from telephone companies, such as Verizon’s “Fiber-to-the-home” FIOS system is not presently available in Northern Duchess.)

For an extra $5 a month, you can add a wireless or “Wi-Fi” connection to your service, allowing a computer and other Wi-Fi enabled devices to be used throughout the house; this is great for laptop users. Wi-Fi also is available to DSL customers.

Laura Bostian of Red Hook, who works for IBM from home most of the week using the Internet, and also maintains a webpage and a Facebook presence as an independent representative of the organic food company, Wildtree, is a big fan of Roadrunner. It “supplies all my Internet needs,” she says. A 17-year-old Red Hook High School student also loves the Time Warner cable modem his mother, a free-lance writer and photographer, installed for faster uploading of photos to clients. He games on X-Box Live with his friends, social networks, instant messages, and streams videos, movies and music. Asked if he would “kill” his parents if the family ever went back to dial-up, he replied, “Yeah, because you can’t do anything with dial-up.”

Where DSL or cable modem service isn’t available, satellite broadband service usually is. Tom Holsapple, whose HHouse Productions in Rhinecliff installs satellite Internet service, says the most stable system is HughesNet. HughesNet service offers service beginning at a download speed 1/3 as fast as DSL for a slightly higher monthly fee, plus charges for either buying or renting the equipment. A former user of HughesNet says that the service is good for people who just want to check e-mail or social network, but the daily caps on the amount of data transmitted and received was not practical for him. A user of a competitor, Wild Blue, describes its most basic package as “like a really good dial-up.”

Another option in the area for filling in where DSL or cable modem service isn’t available is Webjogger’s “fixed wireless” High-Speed Internet—although its slightly higher prices mean that it is used primarily by businesses needing even faster speeds than DSL or cable along with the capacity to transmit huge amounts of data securely. Webjogger is a local provider based in Tivoli. Its most basic account, offering upload speeds beginning at 2 Mbps, costs $79.95 monthly. A modem in your office or home is hooked up to an antenna that sends the signal to Webjogger’s base repeater, using microwave radio cell towers entirely owned by Webjogger. Customers on Webjogger’s earth-to-earth network enjoy faster speeds than those who use phone lines or fiber optic networks or orbiting satellites (which can be disrupted by inclement weather)—provided you are in “line of site” range of the network (no mountain blocks the transmission path between your office and the nearest tower). Webjogger serves high-speed clients in Red Hook, Tivoli, Rhinebeck, Kingston, Saugerties, Woodstock, Port Ewen and Esopus. Dr. Verrilli, who also owns East Gate Motors and the Chocolate Factory office complex in Red Hook, says he likes the service because it is wireless and the best available. “I have other systems at home and at the medical office and they cannot compare quite to this and the service is very personal.” Many of his tenants at the Chocolate Factory also use Webjogger, he said.

Several health providers in Kingston, including Health Alliance of the Hudson Valley (Benedictine and Kingston Hospitals in Kingston), use Webjogger for speed and because it provides a private communications “tunnel” that is encrypted, fast, secure and reliable. Gilbert Hetherwick from Grouse House Productions & Studio, a small, high quality, recording studio in the “woods” between Saugerties and Woodstock, says he uses the Internet to “tweak” track masters from live concerts or radio to sound their best, sending uncompressed digital music files that are several times larger than an MP3 file back and forth through the Internet. Because there is no cable where Gilbert’s studio is located, he bought a HughesNet modem and dish and had it installed, not realizing there is a daily cap on the amount of data that can be transmitted or received. When he reached the data limit he had no more Internet service for the day—not even e-mail. When neighbors told Gilbert to try Webjogger, he switched. The speed is excellent, the service never goes down, and sending huge files is not an issue.

If you are really on a tight budget, there is always dial-up service. As Webjogger Vice-President Adam Greene says, “Many of our customers are still on dial-up.” Dial-up, ranging from between $10 and $20 a month, offers 56K speed through a regular phone line and is available from several providers, including Webjogger, AOL, and Peoplepc.com. Important things to remember: Dial-up service is too slow to stream videos or play X-Box Live games; it takes a long time to download and upload big text files and photos; and if you do not dial into a local toll-free number, will run up your phone bill. A Red Hook free-lance writer had Peoplepc.com almost two years before switching to Roadrunner because she was tired of being disconnected every two hours, spending an entire afternoon uploading photos to her editor, struggling to understand the customer service representatives in a “foreign” call center, and business contacts and relatives grumbling that the land line was busy. Many dial-up providers offer “accelerator service” with their more expensive plans—a feature that compresses the data before sending or receiving it over the dialup connection. According to Adam Greene, this service enhancement increases the effective speed of the connection by up to five times.

“I love my cable modem,” the freelance writer says. Besides using her Internet connection for research and e-mail communication, she shops on-line, keeps in touch with distant friends and relatives, and subscribes to Netflix.com to stream movies. “Our son opened up an account in my name on Netflix.com that we share,” she said, “and it is a bargain.” For some $9 a month, the family can instantly stream movies and television shows and get DVDs delivered physically to their mailbox. “My husband works two jobs and usually works seven days a week and I work full-time weekdays in Kingston, and produce a newsletter for my church besides freelancing. We have little time to watch television and our budget is tight, so we don’t subscribe to cable or satellite. We make do with the programming from Albany we get off the air with our roof-top antenna and converter box—you know, the ones the federal government subsidized with coupons during the analog to digital television conversion.” When he can’t get a game on television, her husband listens to sportscasts on the radio.

In line with a growing trend among teenagers and young professionals, her son views the “Watch Instantly programming”—movies, television shows, etc.—on his own television with X-Box Live when he takes a break from gaming. The X-Box, hooked up to the television with the standard cable that come with the console, functions as a “media extender,” communicating through the Internet wireless connection with Netflix.com without a computer. For the family television, the freelancer invested $33 in a digital-to-analog television converter from a little-known company called Svideo.com; then hooked up her laptop to her television using three cables: a VGA (Video Graphics Array) cable linking the laptop to the converter box; an RCA composite video cable connecting the converter box to her aging analog television via the videocassette recorder and radio frequency modulator box; a mini-jack/RCA audio cable from her computer headphone jack to the living room stereo receiver inputs. “Sure, it sounds like the old board game “Mouse Trap,” she said. “I could buy a new flat-screen television that can connect both the video and sound from my laptop with one HMDI cable, but this is a lot cheaper, and although the quality isn’t true High Definition, it is close to standard DVD quality, and that is good enough for me,” she says. She also streams from pbs.org, hulu.com or youtube.com, but likes the programming from Netflix.com best. “The video and sound quality is usually better and there are no commercials.” (Note: A High-Definition Multimedia Interface or HMDI cable is a compact audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed digital data.)

She observed that many friends and relatives have cable or satellite television just for the kids to watch because they are too busy working, and her son grumbles about going without, but, “between his laptop and the cable modem, his X-Box, his DVD player, iPod, cell phone, shelf-system stereo, homework, the off-air television channels, and his part-time job, not to mention his social life, he keeps busy. He certainly isn’t deprived.”

The future will continue to see a blurring of the narrow lines between television, radio, recorded media, phones, computers and Internet-enabled devices that allow one to connect to the World Wide Web without a computer. The only thing we know for sure is that types of Internet connections will continue to evolve as newer technology is made available every month.