BEST Off Grid Internet? | Better Than Starlink? | Fixed Wireless Internet REVIEW

I've been using AT&T fixed wireless for about a year now and I'm extremely satisfied by it. I'm about 7 miles away from the tower (completely out of sight even with my drone) with some miner trees in the distance breaking line of sight. Download is typically about 87 Mbps, upload 19 Mbps, and ping varies from 50 to 100 ms. I purchased my plan during a special offer of 500 GB per month for $60 per month. That is now a permanent feature of my plan (lucky me!!). If you do use more data than what's on your plan, they will charge you $15 to double your data amount (just for that month). In my case, that would be an additional 500 GB, but probably in all of your cases, it would be 250 GB. (Just for a frame of reference, if you go over your limited data plan on a Verizon cellular plan, they charge $15 per additional 1 GB... A single GB!! Gee, that's so generous, Verizon.) I'd like to give some extra details about AT&T fixed wireless: Of course, you're signal strength is determined on how far you are from the tower and how many obstacles are in the way. The max range away from the tower you can typically be is about 9 miles. Any further and the signal strength with suffer. A few trees will have minimal effect on the signal. Though, if the tower is far away while also having to go through a thick forest, that can cause a low signal. You cannot get a good signal going straight through a building. Also, walking within 5 feet directly in front of the antenna will decrease the signal, and thus decrease speeds. Your download and upload speed can be significantly effected by how many other people are using fixed wireless on that exact same tower. So if you live in the middle of nowhere, your speeds should be great! Ping is also greatly effected on the antenna's signal strength and the amount of users on the same tower. If any hardware needs to be repaired, there is absolutely no fee to have it fixed or replaced. My antenna was just struck be lightening, which completely fried it. It was replaced, again, for free. I absolutely recommend AT&T fixed wireless! Extremely cheep for the performance and is very reliable. It's comparable to some lower teared fiber optic plans but it's even cheaper. But keep in mind, the more people that are using fixed wireless on the same tower as you are, the slower your speeds will be. So I recommend you DON'T go telling everyone who lives near you to go get fixed wireless. XD I hope this was valuable information!

I’m glad you’re having a good experience with them. I was one of the first to get it in my area too. It was great….until it wasn’t. I literally saw a guy going up the tower. They decided they needed to relieve congestion in a different part of the county and mine and neighbors in this cone area lost signal. It took me close to a year to get disconnected, the whole time getting billed with no service. The techs would come out because that was their job, but knowing they couldn’t fix anything. They confirmed that the tower antennas had been moved and said it was up to engineering to fix it. In the end this is the worst company to deal with if you have a problem that requires past a service call. They will flat out lie because you have no way to report them. Their overseas support will just hang up and delete your trouble ticket. My favorite one was tier 2 saying “even though you have a red light on service and there is no signal, try running a Speedtest. Sometimes it might still work”. Oh boy. We’re dealing with a bright one this time. It’s been out for six months. Good luck though, but I just felt they don’t deserve a shout out. I don’t mean anything in this negative toward you and the channel. I love your channel. They are basically taking advantage of people who have no option and sucking in that free government money from the Connect America fund and knocking out the company’s that could actually bring fiber to the rural communities.

Been using Starlink for two years now, started at $99/mo for 200/40... In those two years price jumped to $110/mo then $120/mo.... but speeds have slowed to 100/18 (approx.) We also are in the middle of the woods in Northern WI, about 4 miles outside of a 200 person village and about 35 miles from the nearest stop light. HOWEVER, a local ISP just did a fiber expansion and pulled fiber to our house for free, and next month they will throw the switch ON to 1GB/1GB symmetrical for $60/month. I love Starlink, but I'm likely pulling the plug on them in a couple months.

I have 3 Starlink systems and all of them run at 150MB or better. The slowest rates might get down to 100mb. Speeds are improving as more satellites are being deployed.

Fixed Wireless is LTE it's exactly the same as what serves your handset on your cell phone the only difference is how many channels are bonded together the specification is known as cat12 16 or 20

As always Tim, you knocked it out of the park. great info and I also use ATT here at my home. Average 47.8 download and 12.2 Upload. Takes me almost no time to upload a video to youtube.

I have at&t fixed wireless too. I live less than a 1/4 of a mile from the tower. Multiple subscribers. Download 12, upload 9 tested a few minutes ago. It usually averages 9 download and 6 upload. I was one of the first to get it and received similar results as you. I saw the speed gradually reduced. I got them to come out and test it and was told that it slowed down due to the number of subscribers. I can still watch YouTube and Netflix so I still subscribe. We've had a few occasions that something has gone wrong at the tower. Pray this doesn't happen on Friday because you'll be lucky have it back by Monday. Fixed wireless customers are not a priority for at&t. It was paid for with a federal grant to bring broadband to rural areas. They got their money and seem uninterested in providing good service or upgrades. I've had fixed wireless for over 3 years and watched service deteriorate steadily. I predict that I'll be cutting trees for Star link before too long.

Fixed wireless is nothing new. I had it from an independent provider for over 10 years at $65 a month with unlimited data. We got VERY reliable 25/5 Mbps. My provider sold out to a local fiber provider that doesn't serve our area with fiber and then shut it down. AT&T and Verizon are the players here but offer no home internet options. We used Visible for a few months and then we discovered we were in a fringe coverage area for T-Mobiles new extended range 5G. I got them to send a "gateway" to test. I was blown away. We are over 4 miles NOT line of sight from a tower. I get consistent 50/8 Mbps speeds. In winter, when the leaves are off the trees, we get closer to 100/15 Mbps speeds. All unlimited data for a fixed $50 a month. No deposits, no installation charge, etc. Occasionally, there is a brief slowing due to a storm or a peak use time but never not useable. T-Mobile is using old 600 mhz tech from UHF television band to get coverage out into rural areas. It penetrates foliage even better than 900 mhz did years ago.

Ive been using att fixed wireless for 3 years now. It started out fantastic with 50 download and 15 to 20 upload. Now everyone that lives around me has it and the towers full. Most days im lucky to get 7 to 9 download and .7 to 3 upload. But its been decent and reliable so i cant complain about it. Ive been on starlinks waitlist for 2 years now, but there is a new light at the end of the tunnel my light company is running fiber with supposed 1 gigabyte download speed. So fingers crossed on that.

Something to say at least from my families and my perspective (our properties) I always set up all internet stuff for everyone in the family. For any of these companies/isps/cellular companies is that ideally you want whatever it is; the antenna, the dish, the whatever... up high and in a clear area. No trees blocking it or anything. Then test around that area or another area even if it's a few acres away (on your own property of course) and test it multiple times. Get a power bank like a jackery setup starlink or whatever and just drive around your property for the best possible signal. Once you find the place with the best signal it doesn't matter if it's way out at the edge of your property that's where the dish/antenna needs to go. I have set up nine systems for me and my family so far. I either build or buy a tower (can be made out of whatever but if made out of wood just realize it will eventually rot). I've been using flag poles with a flat base on top for a while now they work pretty well there are limits to what you can do in terms of height but I'd go as high as you safely can. Attach everything on the ground and then put up the pole. At the base you are going to want to get yourself a battery in a weather proof box and get some solar panels and lay them out running all the necessary cables and what not if you don't have power all the way out there. As more sats are added you may be able to change the position later on, and if you start getting not so good service you should change it. I'm sure your wondering then... "how do I get my router connected if it's half a mile away?" Don't run ethernet... run fiber. People don't realize that you can go on amazon or sometimes even hardware stores and get it ordered in and buy pre-terminated fiber optic direct burial cable for literally $100 for a few hundred meters. You can get even more and run kilometers of it. There are two main kinds of fiber cable single mode and multi-mode. When I first did this setup I ran multi-mode because it was the cheapest and longest I could get at the time without using any specialized equipment to terminate the ends with. However for very very long distances single mode is the go to choice and it's come down in price... AND you can get it pre-terminated on amazon and other stores. I buy cable in bulk from the source (China based/Asia based) just because I can get a ton of it for cheap. I also invested in a thousand dollar single fusion splicer (I do this for a living now for other neighbors who are tired of having horrible internet) I got on amazon. Believe it or not it may seem like a lot but it's really pretty easy to do and will probably only take you a few hours to do even with hand tools (as long as there are no rocks in your path back to your house) I just use a simple spade shovel that goes into the ground about ten inches. I do fifty feet at a time then put the cable in and close up the ground by stepping on either side of it. At least with Starlink, but also likely the other ISP companies/products you will have to turn off the wifi router in the settings but once you get back to your house you plug the fiber into another adapter that goes out to ethernet and then that goes into your router you have at home. There is more to it than all that though... devil in the details and all but with a video tutorial or a few on YouTube I think anyone would be able to do it for around $300 and in four hours depending on a lot of factors of course. Your essentially just weather proofing and plugging things in. You don't have to terminate any fiber or ethernet at all. Anyway this is not advice just my personal experiences. I hope it gives someone some help and a starting off point. As far as speed, latency/ping, and jitter goes my family and I get about 200mbps to 265mbps with 35ms ping, and jitter about 65-150ms I have seen similar or slightly less with my family members they don't have commercial grade more DIY routers like I do but it certainly does the job. Peace!!

One thing you did not mention about Starlink is that it tis still in its infancy stage where less than 40% of the satellites have been launched (of 12,000) with a possible expansion of an additional tripling(to 40,000). This means that the coverage and speeds will improve as they increase the satellite numbers.

Thanks for the great video. I did not know about fixed wireless. When you’re running the speed test on your iPhone know your Wi-Fi is on. So are you going to your Wi-Fi out to the Internet are you using cellular service for the Speedtest that’s my question

That is great Tim...good to know about other internet services. Have a wonderful day and blessings 💞

I've had Starlink for 7 months now and had been nothing but impressed with it...until two weeks ago when the router started going out. Everything I had done wouldn't fix it, the tech support they have is horrible and nobody responds. And for the price of it, I'm fed up. Thank you for this video because I think I have found my answer to my situation. AT&T just put up several towers in my area so I'm optimistic it will be just what I need.

On our farm, no ISP available , as a youtuber and full time job is a Cloud Engineer so high speed is necessary, our choice was Starlink. It’s been outstanding. Yes, if storms get bad we lose connection. But, reliability is great majority of the time. I’m curious if we have this in our area.

Another great video Tim. Interesting. We had to install a tower at the ranch to get a signal from above the trees. A real forest there…

Just had ATT come out yesterday to try the Rural Wireless option...couldn't get a good enough signal to connect even though tower is about 8 miles away. It was actually worse on the roof than down at ground level. So disappointing! Been waiting for Starlink for a year.

G'day Tim. Really good information in this video. I moved us to Starlink, as fixed wireless, another satellite service and 4G mobile are my only options. Australia does not have unlimited mobile data and 4G is sketch anyway here in the bush. * 4g mobile data would cost a fortune and reception is not great. * Fixed wireless offers up to 75 down and 10 up, but it slows down terribly due to congestion (too many users) at peak times and reflections on wet foliage can impact the data being sent. Fixed wireless here depends in line of sight and distance from the tower. * The satellite option costs a small fortune on data here and speeds are ok and latency is average at best. * Starlink gives us an average of 200 download and 20 upload most of the time. Severe clouds and rain can reduce speeds, but it's manageable. Storms can cut it out. We don't get many storms thankfully. Initial cost for hardware was painful and monthly subscription is higher than average. Oh and we are fortunate to have a clear line of sight above the horizon it must face. Having said that, Starlink is up 99% of the time and we have 9 people in this house streaming Netflix etc, gaming and YouTubing constantly and it does not miss a beat. Glad to pay the extra with no affordable option and definitely no cable. Really enjoyed this video mate. Thanks for taking to time to create it and share. All the best. Daz.

Did you know you can distribute your signal via an antenna just like a radio signal via WiFi hotspot. If local people set up hubs of Antenna like pirate radio stations used to we could create our own local networks. 🤔👍😜

I live in the desert and having internet for streaming has been so hard! We went the Starlink route just to find out that it's terrible for streaming! But found a local service similar to what you have that uses direct beams