Like lots of people, I'm looking for faster internet or even internet. One thing I can say for certain that it is not a free market - few sellers and very little useful information.
At our cabin, we use dialup on our phone that costs us about $37/month. Periodically I dig around Frontier's web site to find information. The latest pricing is $50/month additional for "up to 6Mbps". If I had a internet-dependent business this might make sense. But not for 4 to 8 evenings a month.
In Duluth, our phone bill is $58/month, but I can't break it down at the moment. My wife doesn't save the detail pages of our bill. Given that we used to pay $23/month for land line, then we are paying about $35/month for "up to 7Mbps". I just did a CenturyLink speed test that showed 6Mpbs at 12:50 on a Sunday. Other speed tests in evenings have shown 4Mpbs. Trying to determine what higher speeds would cost is a big hassle. See http://advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=787754 for some users experiences with CenturyLink.
When I bought my iPhone, I switched from Verizon to Virgin Mobile because the pricing was more advantageous to me, only $30/month including data. When we visited our daughter at her lake house near Grand Rapids MN, I thought I would be able to use my iPhone to access the web. I was, sort of. I would get a one-bar 3G signal, then without moving I would get a roaming signal, then no service, then searching, then back to one-bar 3G, even standing by an upstairs window. Our daughter's house is 10 miles from Grand Rapids and less than 2 miles from a major highway. Granted that there are many trees, but can waving leafless trees cause that much variation? The second surprise was that we thought with the iPhone and a low-power FM-to-car-radio cable that we would be able to listen to Minnesota Public Radio all the way back to Duluth without changing the dial. No such luck! On the major highway we were on, the cell signal kept coming in and out. Oh, well, at least the Virgin Mobile/Sprint coverage map doesn't claim that that area is covered.
I knew that AT&T had put up a couple of towers in the Brimson area where we have our cabin, but I've heard many complaints that many AT&T's customer are not satisfied. I checked AT&T's coverage map and did discover coverage areas in Brimson; they are a whole bunch of small islands that make no sense. Besides telling me that our cabin address is could not be matched (other web sites can find it), it shows a coverage area that starts just west of where our cabin is and ends less than a mile farther west. That's too iffy to make a decision with.
The lesson is that you have to make a long checklist of all the features you want in a product and then spend hours and hours to find out what portion of those features are available to you at a price you want to pay. Nobody else is going to help you. And of course, after you buy the product, you'll find a new feature you want but your choice doesn't provide – like listening to public radio without switching stations.
