So I’m living in the country again, which is nice for everything except for internet access. I first tried the old Portable internet service that Rogers and Bell started up in 2007 but have since mostly abandoned in favor of the 3G USB sticks. A week of that was enough to tell me that it’s gone downhill greatly since I last tried it three years ago - broken connections, extremely slow speeds, etc. Forget that. The 3G sticks themselves are worthless where I am, only working in certain parts of the house and never remaining stable. Even if they did work well, they and the various hubs and the new 4G service they are trying to sell are useless because of the tiny monthly data cap. I think the highest you can get is 10 gigs a month. Forget that.
So I’m left with Xplornet. This company has a mixed reputation online but it worked fine for me for the three years I had it. I just signed up with them, but did so reluctantly after being told that they’ve basically been forced to implement monthly data caps as a result of the ongoing battles in Canada between Rogers/Bell and the small ISPs. This is where the big companies are effectively trying to force the other providers into adopting their business models (and thus removing their main selling point). Instead of the unlimited service I had before I’ll be stuck at 30 gigs a month, and it’ll cost more too. I can make do with that, but I’ll have to keep a close eye on it.
I hope some day this country can break the hold that Rogers and Bell have over internet access, but we haven’t reached that point yet.