Wednesday, January 11, 2023

 $6,000 and change.

What for? 

To have Fidelity run 1,700 feet of aerial line to my property. 

I have no idea where they came up with that number for the lines run on the poles. It's about 500 feet from the pole near the road to the pole at the park.  It's 250 feet to the nearest pole with their line on it.  We're talking 800 feet at most.  

Maybe someday, when the park is "rich" and I am flowing in money, woo hoo!  Not today!  That's just to run the lines, that doesn't even include setting the park up.  

So now, I'm left with waiting on Starlink and hoping it works well - sometime this year is what they say with no date or even month when they expect to have it here - or try one of the sub-companies that's selling internet off the cell towers. Verizon won't give it to me because they are "sold out".  But a sub company will sell it to me through Verizon, lmao. 

Without Fidelity, my options are limited.  I just can't afford 6 grand for hard wired internet right now. I wouldn't even consider it under "normal" circumstances, but if I had "spare money" floating around, I'd do it anyway.  I could take out a loan, but I have 2 going now as it stands and I just don't want to go that route.  I'm kind of screwed.  

I guess I should have asked them if there is a payment plan I could get on.  She just flat out pasted me with over 6 grand that was that.  I suspect they'd want the money first before doing anything.  I wish I could talk to the engineer and come to an understanding of why they think I would need 1,700 feet of line. 

Oh well. I'm just going to try and find whatever alternative I can get.  Try to get something going.  I don't really know what to do right at this particular moment, that was really quite the let down hearing her saying that.  They're the only hard-wired internet around, I don't have any options if I want to use lines to deliver the internet. I suspect using a cell setup will require more than one router-account to get sufficient service to all the sites.

Ok, so calling Fidelity one last time, they want the money upfront. I then called ATT again - they have pedestals throughout the neighborhood but there is no service.  Lol, I know, sounds strange but I've been down this road with them before. And, I finally got a little more detailed info.  "It looks like maybe some people on the road have telephone service, old customers from long ago, but there is no internet service available. It just says coming soon".  Yeah, that's what they told me a year ago, coming soon. 

So what am I doing today? I guess I could go burn the burn pile while attempting to find service from cell towers on my laptop. I'm pretty much tempted to just sit here and look every cell service provider in the area up and see what, if anything, they have available.  I need internet, that's all I can tell ya.  

Well here we go.Verizon is now saying I qualify for Verizon LTE business internet.  Great! Would you like to see the options? yes please! This is why I just call companies back and talk to more people.  You get different information and that is likely due to the people at the first intake that really are just looking at computer screens but not really knowing much.

Regardless, I just got a call. Is this such and such RV park? I called you  yesterday?  No, this is Nature's Design RV Park.  Oh, ok, ok, I'm sorry called the wrong number.  So what makes them so special? Well, they have a lot of reviews and if you are looking at one specific set of reviews, most of them are happy customers. All the rest of the review sites? Hundreds of extremely negative reviews.  I mean, very dissatisfied customers for a variety of reasons.

Back to internet. Starklink is available for business in my area now.  Yay? Not so fast. They want $500 per month.  Unbelievable, this stuff is getting out of hand.  Even if I had the park filled up, $500 per month? I don't even know how well it works.....gag.  They want $2,798.38 due today. Lmao.  

Back to Verizon. They're claiming "300-600" feet. That's a big disparity! Still, I can get most of it covered and right now, I don't have anything but one customer in there. It's $99 for mid-level service. I'll upgrade it when I get more people staying long term in there.  Until then, I have no reason to spend a fortune on it. I can say I have it and that's that.  I will not spend almost 3 grand on Starlink and a ridiculous price of $500 per month for the service. It would be far more cost effective in the long run to pay the 6 grand to Fidelity and have a monthly bill less than half that. Wired service doesn't get interrupted by frequent storms, either. 

Ok lol.  I had to give Swepco - power company - very limited amount of information and I figure they installed thousands of dollars worth of lines, poles and 3 crews of people working on it. I bet that's 10 grand easily.  Verizon? You wouldn't believe the amount of information they want to set up a business account. It's unbelievable.  Plus they wanted me to send it over the internet. I started getting suspicious and wondered if it was a scam?

So, they gave me a business number that did not coincide with the business number listed on their website, right there where I was having the online chat with them.  I called the Verizon and they still wanted all kind of info, some of which I don't even have. Such as a business license. I don't need a business license, I am outside of city limits and Texas doesn't require it.  I'm out in county land and that's just the way they operate. Gag. Okay, I'm getting off of here. I need to go to the Verizon store, I was informed, if I wanted to start a business account and bypass all of this. 

G'day

 Friday late-morning Typical morning when there is no work.  It was, I should say, until the new guy called.  "There's nothing wron...