The Problem

Rural live has its beauty. You hear the nature, the birds may awake you in the morning, there is no traffic - and no internet traffic. In Austria the rural areas are connected with telephone lines (POTS). These telephone lines are often mounted on the surface and therefore vulnerable to atmospheric disturbances like thunderstorms and so on. As you might thing this influences the quality of an internet connection via ADSL. The performance is poor and with bad weather the internet is often not available. The photo below shows the test scenario. A house in the middle of nature, but ~5 miles away from the next DSL DSLAM box. The best result we can get out of the ADSL connection is about 3MBit download and 0.2 MBit upload:

I think it is needless to say that this is (technically seen) internet, but in fact it is pretty useless if you want to watch films or if you want to do something that needs a little more bandwidth than pure HTTP-browsing.

The solution

Drei Austria GmbH announced this week that the LTE network in my area is ready for use. So I walked into a reseller store and asked for a test equipment. They gave me a WebGate 3 and a test SIM card with the fastest LTE service available ("..with speeds up to 150 MBit download"). I tested it from various locations, but I never got more than 50 MBit download, so i decided to go with the 30MBit contract "HUI Flat 30" which is the smalles unlimited LTE rate.

However - the interesting fact was that in the rural area the download speed is still above 20 MBit download:

It seems that LTE is a real option to the noisy ADSL internet connections in the rural area. So if you have a flakey internet connection due to a poor ADSL connection - go ahead and give the wireless world a chance !

Appendix

The contract HUI 30 states "... with download speeds up to 30 MBit/s and upload sppeds up to 5 MBit/s (if technically possible)". The results at another location are even better than that:

Upload is twice as fast as stated in the contract -> That is customer service how I like it !