I grew up in the armpit of SW Oklahoma. My parents’ Internet was 256 kbps in 2009. Today, they get a blazing 20 Mbps and it goes down all the time. My brother signed up for a satellite internet company that’s a bit more reliable and gives him something like 50 Mbps, but iirc, his data cap is something like 250 GB and then it’s overage charges. And I think he pays $120 a month for that plan.
My wife and I live in the Oklahona City area and get 250 Mbps, and only because that’s all we need. We were running 500 for a while, but we almost never needed that much. We have a 1 TB data cap and pay $50 a month.
We’re going to upgrade to fiber in the next few years. A local company is in our area and offers symmetrical 1 Gbps internet for like $80 a month. But there are upfront costs associated with getting it set up in the house that I don’t want to swing yet. But I’m thinking more about it lately because I’d love to self host something like Nextcloud and get off of Google Drive.
Anyway, yeah, internet in cities is mostly pretty good. Once you’re out in the sticks, well, good luck.
Oh my gosh, former Oklahomie for a while here!
Can. Confirm.
I once lived in the Northeast by Tahlequah, and the options were dial-up, satellite (with that awful data cap and terrible pings), or a couple guys running an ISP that involved pointing a receiver at a radio tower but download speeds were restricted to like 40kbps.
For games I already had, SOME multiplayer was possible, and web browsing was mostly fine.
Example of DL speeds though: Metro 2033 said it would take like 3 or 4 solid days so my long distance GF (now wife!) literally just sent game files to me on a USB drive through the mail. LOL
Sadly they closed up shop, though.
But somehow, when I lived with my grandma who lived in a place called “Hennepin”, they got blessed with DSL. Made zero sense but I didn’t complain!
Even though I had to put a second router in bridge/repeater mode so it’d reach me at the trailer I lived in like 20 yards away from the house! (Trailer didn’t even have plumbing. Winter was “fun.” LOL)
Absolutely wild how cut-off a lot of the country is.
The big stinky desert city I’m in now has its problems, and Cox charges out the nose, but at least we get unlimited fiber out of it.
Starlink might have been great for those folks if it wasn’t headed by such stupid evil…
I bought The Sims 3 when it was new. My bedroom was already like a nautical mile from the access point so download speeds were gonna be crap anyway, but I had to run an extension cord into my closet and disable all power saving options so it could sit in the back of my closet for the better part of the week and download my game. I think it was probably 3½ days all in lmao
My old college buddy has HughesNet and says he hates them, but it’s better than the alternative down there. Which, yeah, was a family-owned telephone company that did some dial-up on the side in the '90s and never saw a need to upgrade their equipment. The only reason it got better was because they sold out to an actual ISP. When I moved to Weatherford to finish my bachelor’s degree in 2012, you were required to have landline service to get internet access. The parent company removed that requirement on Day 1, afaik.
I have physical copies of GTA IV and Skyrim on PC because it was soooooo much faster to install them from DVDs, but God help you if you need to download updates. Back then, a 300 MB download was a commitment.
Cox also rules Oklahoma County and its neighbors, but like I said, we have OEC fiber in our neighborhood. I appreciate them being local. When we bought our house, we had a little cash left over from the sale of our old condo. We thought about going with OEC right after move-in, but it was going to be $800 worth of work and they had us scheduled a month out. We needed internet immediately because it was mid-pandemic and neither me nor my wife had anywhere to go to work for a month. The mortgage don’t pay itself lol
I kinda regret having to stick with Cox. I’m squirreling away some cash here and there so maybe we’ll finally jump ship this summer.
If I could do it again, I’d probably stay in Oklahoma because my wife is an amazing person. She moved here from Mississippi. It frequently sucks being a couple of blue dots here. If I had it my way, we’d sell all but the essentials, load my Hondas on a trailer, and pull them with my wife’s truck all the way to the PNW today. But all her family just moved up here a few years ago and she hasn’t been able to see her parents regularly since 2013. Her sister has kids and she doesn’t want to be unable to be involved in their lives. Can’t fault her for that.
I’d steal those kids and run off to the PNW anyway where they’ll actually get an education, but the cops say that’s kind of illegal or something lol idk ianal jk jk or am i
Good on ya for escaping this place. Maybe one day I will too.
Oh, and my great-grandmother, born in 1923, had dial-up as late as 2017. I still cannot believe anyone was still offering it that late in the game, but there she was lol She had email. She got her first email address when she was in her late 70s, but she never learned to type. What a legend that woman was lmao
It really depends. I know of little towns in rural Idaho that have gigabit fibre to the house simply because the local phone company submitted the request for a federal grant. The money has been there since Obama, but utils need to ask for it, and certain local populations would rather starve than take any sort of handout from the federal government.
Like in the burbs of Tulsa and we get 1gig but its super expensive and I hate it. Cox is the only choice. I would love to get out of this state at least if I can’t get out of the country.
A lot of America is empty so this highly depends on what you mean
In the city the internet is great
I grew up in the armpit of SW Oklahoma. My parents’ Internet was 256 kbps in 2009. Today, they get a blazing 20 Mbps and it goes down all the time. My brother signed up for a satellite internet company that’s a bit more reliable and gives him something like 50 Mbps, but iirc, his data cap is something like 250 GB and then it’s overage charges. And I think he pays $120 a month for that plan.
My wife and I live in the Oklahona City area and get 250 Mbps, and only because that’s all we need. We were running 500 for a while, but we almost never needed that much. We have a 1 TB data cap and pay $50 a month.
We’re going to upgrade to fiber in the next few years. A local company is in our area and offers symmetrical 1 Gbps internet for like $80 a month. But there are upfront costs associated with getting it set up in the house that I don’t want to swing yet. But I’m thinking more about it lately because I’d love to self host something like Nextcloud and get off of Google Drive.
Anyway, yeah, internet in cities is mostly pretty good. Once you’re out in the sticks, well, good luck.
Oh my gosh, former Oklahomie for a while here! Can. Confirm.
I once lived in the Northeast by Tahlequah, and the options were dial-up, satellite (with that awful data cap and terrible pings), or a couple guys running an ISP that involved pointing a receiver at a radio tower but download speeds were restricted to like 40kbps.
For games I already had, SOME multiplayer was possible, and web browsing was mostly fine.
Example of DL speeds though: Metro 2033 said it would take like 3 or 4 solid days so my long distance GF (now wife!) literally just sent game files to me on a USB drive through the mail. LOL
Sadly they closed up shop, though.
But somehow, when I lived with my grandma who lived in a place called “Hennepin”, they got blessed with DSL. Made zero sense but I didn’t complain! Even though I had to put a second router in bridge/repeater mode so it’d reach me at the trailer I lived in like 20 yards away from the house! (Trailer didn’t even have plumbing. Winter was “fun.” LOL)
Absolutely wild how cut-off a lot of the country is.
The big stinky desert city I’m in now has its problems, and Cox charges out the nose, but at least we get unlimited fiber out of it.
Starlink might have been great for those folks if it wasn’t headed by such stupid evil…
I bought The Sims 3 when it was new. My bedroom was already like a nautical mile from the access point so download speeds were gonna be crap anyway, but I had to run an extension cord into my closet and disable all power saving options so it could sit in the back of my closet for the better part of the week and download my game. I think it was probably 3½ days all in lmao
My old college buddy has HughesNet and says he hates them, but it’s better than the alternative down there. Which, yeah, was a family-owned telephone company that did some dial-up on the side in the '90s and never saw a need to upgrade their equipment. The only reason it got better was because they sold out to an actual ISP. When I moved to Weatherford to finish my bachelor’s degree in 2012, you were required to have landline service to get internet access. The parent company removed that requirement on Day 1, afaik.
I have physical copies of GTA IV and Skyrim on PC because it was soooooo much faster to install them from DVDs, but God help you if you need to download updates. Back then, a 300 MB download was a commitment.
Cox also rules Oklahoma County and its neighbors, but like I said, we have OEC fiber in our neighborhood. I appreciate them being local. When we bought our house, we had a little cash left over from the sale of our old condo. We thought about going with OEC right after move-in, but it was going to be $800 worth of work and they had us scheduled a month out. We needed internet immediately because it was mid-pandemic and neither me nor my wife had anywhere to go to work for a month. The mortgage don’t pay itself lol
I kinda regret having to stick with Cox. I’m squirreling away some cash here and there so maybe we’ll finally jump ship this summer.
If I could do it again, I’d probably stay in Oklahoma because my wife is an amazing person. She moved here from Mississippi. It frequently sucks being a couple of blue dots here. If I had it my way, we’d sell all but the essentials, load my Hondas on a trailer, and pull them with my wife’s truck all the way to the PNW today. But all her family just moved up here a few years ago and she hasn’t been able to see her parents regularly since 2013. Her sister has kids and she doesn’t want to be unable to be involved in their lives. Can’t fault her for that.
I’d steal those kids and run off to the PNW anyway where they’ll actually get an education, but the cops say that’s kind of illegal or something lol idk ianal jk jk or am i
Good on ya for escaping this place. Maybe one day I will too.
Oh, and my great-grandmother, born in 1923, had dial-up as late as 2017. I still cannot believe anyone was still offering it that late in the game, but there she was lol She had email. She got her first email address when she was in her late 70s, but she never learned to type. What a legend that woman was lmao
It really depends. I know of little towns in rural Idaho that have gigabit fibre to the house simply because the local phone company submitted the request for a federal grant. The money has been there since Obama, but utils need to ask for it, and certain local populations would rather starve than take any sort of handout from the federal government.
Like in the burbs of Tulsa and we get 1gig but its super expensive and I hate it. Cox is the only choice. I would love to get out of this state at least if I can’t get out of the country.