Internet in Taos
Post date: Oct 17, 2014 10:53:45 AM
In Seattle I am blessed with outrageously fast and relatively inexpensive Internet. I pay about $75/month for 25 Mbps service via cable. I can’t say good things about the service provider, as the equipment they rent me has been terrible, and their marketing policies rot, but the service is fast.
In Taos there are three main providers.
The telephone company (called CenturyLink today) provides $30/month for 7 Mbps with no bundling, per their web site as of today. Of course they have learned from Comcast, so offer short-term bundles at reduced prices. They also don't have my house number, but the neighbors are listed. Not sure how they deliver that, as I thought DSL (Digital Subscriber Line, using plain old telephone twisted pair) didn't go that high. But the neighbors have it.
Kit Carson Electric Coop provides some service via their Telecom division. Kit Carson provides an advanced form of wireless internet (called WiMax) but it doesn’t reach down in the river bottom where we live. $47/month for 1.5 Mbps. Unlike the WiMax provider in Managua, Nicaragua, of the same type of service, here we need a site survey. (In Managua, they have a good coverage map.)
TaosNet provides fixed wireless. Cost for 1.5 Mbps is $50/month. The maximum speed for this service is 12Mbps at a price of $150/month. However, this wireless service is not available down in Valverde Commons because it comes via radio waves.
Comcast. Of course Comcast provides internet in Taos. They installed one of the three ugly communications utilities that mar the view from the drive (along with twisted pair and fiber optic). So I contact Comcast to see what their pricing would be, using their web site. Well, the web site will not verify my street address. So I contact them via chat. After nearly an hour, with me explaining that there is cable at the site, clearly labeled "Comcast", I finally am told to go to the local customer support office in Taos. Amazing that they cannot find the cable that they installed.
Granted, Bing and Google maps show the street, but Mapquest and Yahoo maps do not. Bing and Google and Yahoo show the drive on the satellite, while Mapquest shows nothing there. Yahoo shows the drive and five of the houses, making their satellite photo about three years old. But the USPS, in its ZIP Code search, does not recognize the street name, even though they deliver mail daily. I sent my map to Comcast, but that did not help. (My lot is the red square, partially obscured by the neighbor.)
Kit Carson got a Federal grant to connect fiber optic backbone to houses. Since fiber optic was laid underground to Valverde Commons when the road was laid out, we have every possible means of connection right to our lot: twisted pair (telephone and DSL), coaxial cable (via Comcast), and fiber optic.
I applied to have our optic fiber connected to the Internet. That will give us several possible Internet Service Providers (ISP). But the projected price for Internet from all vendors is way higher than I pay in Seattle for comparable speeds.