THE BEST INTERNET OPTIONS FOR GAMING IN RURAL AREAS

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As a rural area living, World of Warcraft playing, raid healing priest, finding a solid internet connection is something I feel like I know a little bit about. We've lived in our current house for more than ten years, and in that time we've been through as many internet companies, all who promise gameable speeds and latency, few of whom actually delivered. Hopefully my trial and error can save you some time and frustration. I'll also be covering four specific companies that I believe everyone reading this will have easy access to. Here's what I know about finding the best internet for rural areas for gaming. (read more)

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RURAL INTERNET OPTIONS FOR GAMING
SATELLITE

I'm going to break this down into three categories, satellite, radio, and SIM card. I'm eliminating any form of wired internet simply because if you had access to wired services, you wouldn't be looking around for rural internet options for gaming. We actually have wired internet services a half mile from our house on two sides, but neither company has extended their lines and many calls to both Verizon and AT&T have assured me that, yes, they do service "close" to us, but no, they will not be coming to us. One company says it's because there aren't enough houses to warrant the effort (the houses average a few acres of property per house), and the other company says they don't want to run the wire across a small creek. Either way, it means we're out of luck for wired services. 

When we first moved out here, we went with a Satellite service that we bundled with our DirectTV. You've probably heard of Hughes Net. I'm not going to give this section a lot of time or energy because there isn't much to say. Of the three options I laid out, Hughes Net was the worst, hands down. They had high latency, slow speeds, and very low data caps. And while World of Warcraft doesn't take up a ton of data, the latency was an issue, making the game pretty much unplayable, and definitely keeping me from holding a spot in a raid. I recall one fight in Zul Gurub where we beat Hakkar and my game kept playing the fight for a full two minutes after the rest of the raid was out of combat. I don't even know how I lived through that fight, let alone how my tank lived. It was a matter of mashing buttons, praying, and hoping that my toon wasn't doing anything that would give anyone else any clue as to how bad my connection really was.

Maybe satellite has gotten better since then, but I wouldn't try it again. It's too much set up, too much money, and too much of a commitment, even with an excellent return policy. If I have to drill holes in my house/roof, I'm going to give it a hard pass. 

MY TIME IS PRECIOUS, SO I USE ZYGOR AS A LEVELING GUIDE. MORE TIME LEVELING, LESS TIME TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHERE I LEFT OFF.

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THE BEST INTERNET FOR RURAL GAMING
RADIO

Radio internet companies are going to be companies near you that supply your service from one of their radios connected to a tall tower in your area. This is likely going to be a cell tower and will function in the same way, only (in theory) without the choke point that comes when a bunch of people use their cell phones at once. 

The downside to using radio to try and get fast rural internet for gaming is that the radio internet company is the one deciding how many users they hook to one radio. 

As an example, let's say a radio internet company has 1G of data at its disposal. They hook up 10 people who all use 100mb of data at any given time. (This is a lot of data, but I'm trying to simplify). If those 10 people all use their 100mb of data (like if they're all home at night watching Netflix or whatever) and the radio internet company signs an 11th person who also uses 100mb of data, all of the sudden that company has exceeded it's 1G of available data, and everyone's internet gets throttled down.

When you're calling around to local radio internet companies, ask them how much data they have available, and whether or not they have room for more customers. Ask what the company believes the average use per customer is. If they're only allowing each customer 5 or 10mb of data, chances are you are going to have basically useless internet, possibly good during the day, but terrible at night when people are home. Heck, in the age of COVID, it might even be useless during the day.

If the radio internet company you are looking at has plenty of data on their own plan, it's now time to figure out whether or not you can get a strong signal at your house. Have them come out and do a site survey, ask them what the signal is, ask them in plain terms whether or not they believe that signal is strong enough to meet your needs. They will absolutely come out and hook you up with a sub par signal, hoping you won't really care, or that you won't notice. We used three separate radio internet companies and had the same issue with all three. Our house was simply located in the exact wrong place. There were trees in the way, we couldn't get line of sight enough to supply a good connection, and the internet companies knew that, but hooked us up anyway. 

If the company is good, it won't oversell its data, you'll get very low latency (sub 20) and the speeds and latency won't change in the evenings when everyone is vying for use. 

I've had many companies hook us up during the day, show off their 20mb download speeds (which is absolutely great out where we are), only to have that speed plummet to .17 (yes, that decimal point is intentional) at 8 in the evening, while the latency shoots up to 300+ as their network gets clogged with users. 

A few months in, after having them out numerous time to fix an issue they couldn't fix, they'd take their equipment down and be on their way. 

If you don't have good line of sight, don't do it, it's not going to work and you're wasting your money. Make sure you have a company that is going to give you a trial period so you can put it through its paces at night, because that's when you REALLY get an idea of the speeds and latency.

Still, we ended up with radio internet, and I'll talk more about that below, but for now let's move on to the internet type I believe you will have easiest access to, SIM Card service.

STUCK ON BENEDICTION? IT'S NOT AS COMPLICATED AS YOU MIGHT THINK.

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THE BEST WIRELESS INTERNET FOR GAMING
​SIM CARDS

We'd been living in our house for almost seven years when I heard about the possibility of cellular internet for rural areas. It made a lot of sense since I was already in the habit of hot spotting to my phone whenever I logged in for a raid. The speeds were always good (30mb download or so) and the latency was great (definitely sub 20).  So when I got in touch with a company called Cyberonic and they told me how their service worked, I was intrigued. ​

The idea here is that if you can get a solid cell signal at your house, you can use internet that is based on a SIM card. We have AT&T for our cellular service, and we always get good speeds on our phones (if we turn off WiFi) so I figured it was worth a shot. 

US cellular internet for gaming isn't a new thing, Cyberonic has been around for awhile, so I signed up and had them send me their equipment. 

A side note here is that gaming on fixed wireless internet is the easiest of all the options as far as set up. You don't have to hook anything to your house or roof, you don't have a ton of bulky equipment to mail back if things don't work, and you aren't turning your house into a lightning rod by installing a metal pole so you can get better line of site to a radio tower. 

In a nutshell, if you can get good cell service, you can use wireless internet for gaming. 

So, Cyberonic sent their equipment which included a router, a SIM card (that had already been installed) and a booster antenna that you could attach to your roof if you weren't getting a good signal.  I feel the need to note that the booster antenna didn't seem to do much. It did boost the signal, letting us go from one bar to three bars, but it didn't increase the speeds. If you've got a good router, you likely have no need for a booster antenna, it's most likely just going to be cosmetic.

Set up with Cyberonic was easy. We plugged the router into the wall and we were done. The speeds were fantastic, at two in the afternoon I was getting more than 20mb download speeds! 

And then the evening came. 

I have two kids, myself, and my husband. We can all be counted on to be doing something online around 8 at night. My kids are homeschooled and always have been (before COVID made it a more widespread phenomenon) and do their school work online during the day, so thankfully that wasn't an issue (yet), but at night, it's entertainment, videos, Rumble, gaming, etc. 

The speeds were so bad that our internet was basically useless. I would hot spot to my phone to play WoW, the kids would sit and try to watch whatever, but it would buffer so much that they'd give up, and my husband would hot spot into his phone if he had to do any work from home at night. 

And it was expensive, $140 a month for garbage internet. 

I called Cyberonic and told them what was going on. They explained that there was nothing they could do, the cell providers (in this case AT&T) give priority to certain devices and all others get deprioritized. Our cell WiFi was great, but the home internet on the same tower was terrible. 

It was a lesson learned with fixed wireless internet for rural areas, those SIM cards are not going to have priority unless you find a company who has it set up so that they do.

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WHAT NETWORK DOES OTR MOBILE USE?
WIRELESS INTERNET GAMING LAG

The next SIM service we tried was OTR Mobile. I was prepared when I called them, making sure to lay out what it was that we needed, asking them about priority, latency, etc. They assured me that since the map said I had good coverage from T-Mobile in my area, I would get good coverage and low latency from them.  This was known as the OTR Mobile Pink Plan. You'll see this with a lot of fixed wireless internet providers. Pink = TMobile, Blue = AT&T. 

The upside was that it was sort of easy to talk to someone via customer service. They had an online chat ability. You would have to wait in a digital queue, but eventually you'd get a helpful representative. (Note that the chat line is also how you sign up, and that wait is MUCH shorter than the line you wait in if you need help once you've made the purchase). OTR also offered a two week trial, which was important for me. I had already had a half dozen terrible internet providers and had no wish to pay full price if it wasn't going to work. 

They did the same as Cyberonic, sending out a router and SIM card. I plugged it in and the speeds were great, wow! Then night time came and the speeds went way down, again. Not only did the speed plummet, but the latency was also an issue. Even during the day it was very high, around 200-300, making it unusable at night. I did try to talk to customer service about the problems I was having, but ultimately they told me that the T-Mobile towers just weren't ideal in my area and there was nothing they could do as they didn't have any AT&T SIM cards available. 

This is important. If you know that you only get good service with AT&T, don't try to get a fixed wireless plan from a T-Mobile tower, it won't work out.

We sent the OTR Mobile stuff back and got a refund, no problem. 

UNIVERSAL YUMS IS OUR FAVORITE MONTHLY SNACK BOX FROM ALL AROUND THE WORLD

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FIXED WIRELESS INTERNET FOR GAMING
IS GOTW3 GOOD FOR GAMING?

Our next attempt at fixed wireless internet for gaming was GotW3. This service was different than the others in that it was not unlimited. They capped your service at 300mb per month, which we thought would be pretty much okay since we seemed to average about 10mb per day. I figured I could do without watch shows a couple of nights a month to make sure we stayed within that allowable data limit. 

Two of my neighbors had the same service and were getting around 30mb down, which was better than anything we'd ever had, and the price was right, around $120 a month, typical of what we'd already been paying. 

I signed up, and once again they sent their router and SIM card, only this company told us the router was ours to keep, no need to send it back if we decided to cancel. The downside to this was that there was no trial period, so if it didn't work, oh well...

Thankfully the service did work, and it worked really well. We still had some lag spikes and a bit of slowness in the evening, but we were all able to do our things, no problem. That lasted for about three months, and then GotW3 had to change something, they had AT&T create an APN (I really don't know what all of this means) just for them, and they had to migrate the service of their existing customers. 

For a lot of their customers (like myself and one of my neighbors) it meant that our internet got throttled down to almost nothing for an entire month. Searches for "GotW3 Internet Outage" and "GotW3 Internet not working" basically autofilled themselves on Google, the issue was so prevalent. Customer service was terrible, it was all but impossible to get a call back, and I ended up calling the new customer number, getting ahold of someone there very easily, and then telling them my issue so I could try to get some assistance. 

Six weeks of that and I was totally done. Whatever went on with their APN and AT&T meant it messed up their system for me permanently, despite them sending me a new SIM card, a new router, and having me go in and make a bunch of changes in the router itself. 

My neighbor still has the service, but his speeds have greatly decreased since the APN change, which tells me that they were being prioritized one way, but are now being prioritized another way.

With SIM internet service it really is all about the priority and the load on your local towers.

MY HAIR IS NATURALLY CURLY, AND IT CAN BE TOUGH TO TAME. HERE'S HOW I DO IT.

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BEST WIRELESS INTERNET FOR GAMING
SHOULD YOU BUY WIRELESS INTERNET ON EBAY?

I'm including this section even though I wasn't the person in question. Slow internet is a way of life in our area and my neighbors have all tried different things. We share our knowledge when we find something good (or bad) to help each other out.

One neighbor purchased wireless internet off of eBay. The seller listed the service as belonging to a tablet that was "never going to be used". Supposedly you'd get unlimited, unthrottled, no cap data for just $20 a month! The seller would provide you with the IMEI number of the tablet, you would provide your own SIM Card (easily purchased on Amazon) and they would send you the steps to hook up the service. 

They made it plain in the listing (which my neighbor sent to me and I will link to here) that the service could be cancelled without notice, so don't buy it if you weren't willing to take that risk. My neighbor bought the service, the seller sent over exact instructions for hooking up the SIM card, and my neighbor got it all set up. 

It was something like $20 for the SIM card, $50 to set up the service with AT&T, so $70 total. The service worked great for them for about a week, and then, out of the blue, it stopped and they got a notice on their AT&T account that the service had been suspended. 

Now, they started a NEW AT&T account to do this, so definitely don't do it on an existing account because if your account gets suspended, you will lose all of your cell plans, gone. 

What happens in cases like these is that AT&T runs scans on the SIM cards in use, matching those cards to the IMEI numbers on file. When your SIM card number doesn't match the IMEI number on file they shut off the service and suspend the account. You've just spent $70 for a week's worth of internet.

I definitely do not recommend this route.

DOES PONY O WORK FOR THICK CURLS? HERE'S MY UNBIASED OPINION.

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RURAL INTERNET OPTIONS FOR GAMING
​RV-4G

Our final attempt at finding rural high speed internet for gaming was going through a company called RV-4G. I will say that this was the best customer service/overall experience I had with any of these fixed wireless companies. They are different in that they only supply the internet service, it's not a bundle type of deal. 

They *can* supply the SIM card and router, but if you've already got an unlocked router on hand, you don't have to spend that extra money. I would recommend getting your own router if you decide to try any of these fixed wireless internet companies, just because what you purchase is likely going to be a lot better than what they provide. It'll give you better coverage and you can just swap out SIM cards until you find a service that works for you. 

I would recommend something like this Netgear Nighthawk. We saw this particular router recommended time and again by the SIM card internet companies we researched. It is a hot spot that's compact enough for you to take it anywhere, but it also has an Ethernet cable port so you can easily attach it to a mesh network to extend the service all over your house.

We purchased a prepaid SIM card through AT&T (we just picked on up at the store) to have on hand for whenever the service got really slow or when we were between services, and having this router made it easy to pop the card in with no downtime, especially important when my kids were needing to get their school work done and our service had taken a dive.

RV-4G had great customer service and explained everything to me. They were easy to get in touch with when I had questions, and they would have been the company we stuck with had we not found a better alternative locally. Their speeds were not exactly fast, and we did see throttling at night, but they were the most reliable of the companies we'd used. 

You have to also understand that you need higher speeds than what you think you do. Having a 20mb download during the day when no one is using any data is very different than having 20mb download at night when everyone is doing something. Couple that with throttled speeds at night as your local towers take on all that extra usage, and you just can't do the same things in the evenings. 

That said, RV-4G was the best compromise of speed, service, and the ability to get help when needed. If our new internet doesn't work out, we'll be going back to them, no questions asked.

HOW MANY ZG COINS DOES IT TAKE TO LEVEL FROM 58-60? I TRIED IT OUT.

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THE BEST INTERNET FOR RURAL AREAS FOR GAMING
LOCAL-RADIO-QUALITY SELLER

In the end, we did what we should have done when we moved out here ten years ago. We knew that we had line of sight problems, we knew we had big trees in the way (and we knew we weren't cutting them down), but we weren't ready to make any big changes.

However, after ten years and thousands of dollars spent on garbage internet, we bit the bullet and installed a tower, rather, we installed a 46 foot tall telephone pole beside our house. 

A new internet company came to our town about six months ago and advertised high speeds, low latency, and good customer service. I got in touch with them right away, but when they came out to do the site survey they told me what all the other local internet companies SHOULD HAVE told me. There were trees in the way, we couldn't get high enough clearance to see over them, and the signal would be too weak to get good service. 

I talked on and off with that company for a few months, discarding a few ideas along the way. We didn't want a 15 foot metal pole on our house, we didn't want to spend the money to install a ROHN (a tall, metal structure to mount the radio on), and without those things we just couldn't get good service. 

So when the guy called and told me that they'd purchased some telephone polls for their more rural customers, and that he thought that might work for us, we decided to make it happen. He set it all up, arranging for the contractor to come out and install the pole, climbed up, got a GREAT signal, ran the wire down, trenched it to the house, etc. 

Yes, we have a telephone pole in the yard, but....we have great internet. It actually hit 73mb download while I did the test, but I didn't catch the screenshot in time. 

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It does slow down at night some, when my kids and husband and I are all online, but the only reason I know that is because I run speed tests like a fiend, waiting for it to bog down like all the others. The provider swears it won't happen, and he was very clear about how many people he would put on each tower and how much data he has at his disposal, but after years of terrible internet and bloated promises, my faith isn't quite there yet. 

Still, I don't regret the decision. We have the pole now, we are invested in a company that is invested in our community (and therefore has a real desire to give us good service) and if for some reason this provider doesn't work out, we'll have great line of sight to anyone near us that provides radio internet. We've also offered to share our pole with out closest neighbors, should they ever have happen to them what happened to us while using GotW3. I figure it's the least we can do for making them stare at this thing for the rest of their lives. 

They suggested we paint it red and white, like a giant candy cane. We definitely do things a little differently out in the country. :) 

I'M ENJOYING AUDIBLE PLUS, CHECK OUT "THE PARASITIC MIND" BY GAD SAAD.

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RURAL INTERNET OPTIONS FOR GAMING
LOCAL RADIO - IF YOU'VE GOT IT
​FIXED WIRELESS IF NOT

I hope this post has helped you out, but by all means feel free to ask questions if you have any. Finding the right internet for our area has take a long time, and I wish we'd just pulled the trigger years ago to get good line of sight to a local radio provider. 

We are in an especially bad place as far as line of sight, so I am hopeful that some of you who live in more accessible areas will be able to get good LOS to a local provider, or, barring that, will be able to get good service with a fixed wireless provider on local towers that don't get a ton of traffic in the evenings. 

Also, because I always get asked about this, if you've got another nod for a great rural internet service provider, let me know. I'll add it to the post if you'll take a few minutes and tell me a bit about the provider, the set up, and the customer service.

Thanks!
​Ty

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