Technical Trouble with Frontier Internet

In a recent post, I wrote about the possibility of taking Govern America on the road. I was able to work out many of the technical details, but connectivity with the phones became a problem. I am still working out that issue. For now, I have given up on it as I have other pressing things to deal with, but I am sure I will revisit it some time in the future.

Suffice it to say, I did one show from a nearby park, streaming it live on the Govern America Radio streams, but it was pre-recorded for the purposes of our regular audience. In other words, anyone who happened to be on the streams at the time got to hear the show live as we did it, problems and all, while regular Saturday live listeners heard the finished product, minus the technical snafus.

I posted some photos of my technical setup in the van, along with some detailed explanation of how I did everything, in the show notes for May 12, 2018 — the sole broadcast that I did from the park, for anyone who is interested.

In the meantime, I spent much of this past Thursday, working to run new cat 5 cable from the utility pole to my home studio in order to, hopefully, improve the quality of Internet connectivity. My main motivation for needing a remote studio was the fact that the Internet has become unbearably lousy through Frontier as of late. I had complained to them and the repairman told me that he suspected that it was my wiring. He wanted to charge me $150 to run all new cat 5 cable. I highly doubted that it was a problem with my wiring, but I went ahead and bought 500 feet of the cable and spent the day running it from the pole to the studio. At first, it seemed to improve things, but that didn’t last. I am now back to where I started with no Internet service. I could have paid him $150 and would have been no further ahead — just as I originally had suspected. This has become very frustrating. While I was able to do one show from the home studio, we are now stuck with completely unusable Internet “service” from Frontier. If this continues, I will have to cancel them. I’m not sure what that will mean for the show, but there’s no point in paying for Internet “service” when I can’t actually use it. Why do I feel, more and more, like we’re reverting to a third world country?