Wireless Internet Providers

Anyone out there use a wireless internet provider for their building? Wondering what options are available (specifically in Utah). Neither my FM nor HQ could give me an answer.

Yes. We have one building via Verizon 4G. It was set up and installed by FM.

Imagine sharing your cellphone connection with 100 of your closest friends. It also seems to have a tendency to die, forcing me to reset the modem. I solved that problem by installing a timer to power off/on the modem every day in the early morning hours.

The clerk has reported that he's unable to do his work on Sundays until everyone has left the building. We've tried the "middle" filtering option - it helped, but didn't go far enough. We're now trying the most strict filtering option.

In contrast, it seems our other building on DSL is doing better, even if it is slow.

In short, it's better than no Internet at all - but I'd rank it as the least desirable option.

russellhltn wrote:Yes. We have one building via Verizon 4G. It was set up and installed by FM.

Imagine sharing your cellphone connection with 100 of your closest friends. It also seems to have a tendency to die, forcing me to reset the modem. I solved that problem by installing a timer to power off/on the modem every day in the early morning hours.

The clerk has reported that he's unable to do his work on Sundays until everyone has left the building. We've tried the "middle" filtering option - it helped, but didn't go far enough. We're now trying the most strict filtering option.

In contrast, it seems our other building on DSL is doing better, even if it is slow.

In short, it's better than no Internet at all - but I'd rank it as the least desirable option.

Yikes, that doesn’t sound fun. I was thinking of something like Vivint or Utah Broadband or Rise Broadband, not exactly sure what technology they use. Some of those can provide pretty high speeds.

craiggsmith wrote:Yikes, that doesn’t sound fun. I was thinking of something like Vivint or Utah Broadband or Rise Broadband, not exactly sure what technology they use. Some of those can provide pretty high speeds.

The companies you refer to are Wireless Internet Service Providers, or WISP's. They provide service through a terrestrial link using a dish antenna about the size of a Dish or DirectTV antenna. They are a good step up from using 4G, but not without obstacles to overcome. The first of which is having a building in direct line of sight with one of their transmitting towers. The second may prove impossible in some areas and that's getting approval from the FM folks to have an antenna installed on the building's roof. The hurdles to jump are pretty large and I wouldn't go there unless there are absolutely no other providers for your building.

Just a small suggestion, if your building uses a WISP or Cell Modem, I'd discuss disabling the Wifi with your Stake Presidency. DSL is bad enough, but I couldn't imagine leaving Wifi on for the entire building with either a WISP or Cell modem. WISP might be able to handle it, but they just aren't built to handle more than 20 devices in reality.

Remember, Wifi is not required in the building. The primary function of the building internet is to facilitate the clerks. If they can't do what they need, then other offerings must be reigned in. It's ultimately up to the Stake Presidency, but if there's a problem, I'm sure a decent argument can be made.

Jacobdaviddean wrote:Just a small suggestion, if your building uses a WISP or Cell Modem, I'd discuss disabling the Wifi with your Stake Presidency.

If filtering doesn't work, that's the next step. There's 4 APs. We'll have to discuss if we want to turn some/all of them off.

Jacobdaviddean wrote:I couldn't imagine leaving Wifi on for the entire building with either a WISP or Cell modem.

Due to some stellar planning, our stake center was on a wireless provider for the first few months after it was built. The problem was that there was only one cell tower in the area. We found out fairly quickly that if we disabled the meetinghouse WiFi because we were out of bandwidth, the phones tagged the cell tower instead, and our Internet service itself ran out of bandwidth to supply us.

Here in Saint George the majority of our church buildings are connected through a WISP. (It's a little hard to dig through the lava rock just to get an internet connection.) Some of the downtown buildings have had fiber run to them in recent years but the majority are still wireless. The wireless service actually works fairly well as long as you have enough bandwidth (like anything else). At my building we have a 100mbps x 100mpbs wireless connection but it's a YSA building with 6 wards so that'd be overkill for a regular chapel, but it works really well for wireless.

As far as overall connectivity, our building just got the new Meraki APs and that made a very significant improvement with usability. With the old Cisco APs, once 4 wards were in the building at the same time everything pretty much died even though we had a decent internet connection. Now with the new APs the wireless is still usable even with hundreds of clients. If you don't have the new Meraki APs yet, I imagine you will soon. I was told by our FM that the church is rolling them out in batches and about half the buildings in our group got approved in the first batch.

jamiep39 wrote:Here in Saint George the majority of our church buildings are connected through a WISP. (It's a little hard to dig through the lava rock just to get an internet connection.) Some of the downtown buildings have had fiber run to them in recent years but the majority are still wireless. The wireless service actually works fairly well as long as you have enough bandwidth (like anything else). At my building we have a 100mbps x 100mpbs wireless connection but it's a YSA building with 6 wards so that'd be overkill for a regular chapel, but it works really well for wireless.

As far as overall connectivity, our building just got the new Meraki APs and that made a very significant improvement with usability. With the old Cisco APs, once 4 wards were in the building at the same time everything pretty much died even though we had a decent internet connection. Now with the new APs the wireless is still usable even with hundreds of clients. If you don't have the new Meraki APs yet, I imagine you will soon. I was told by our FM that the church is rolling them out in batches and about half the buildings in our group got approved in the first batch.

Thanks, good to see someone's experience with a WISP.

This building was actually part of the pilot for the Meraki APs because of its low bandwidth. I was told they would give stake's the ability to control who and what and therefore maximize bandwidth, but that never materialized. They did split our wifi into multiple networks but we got too many complaints so abandoned that. Not sure what the overall results were of the pilot otherwise. Our other building only got one to replace the wifi in the router, but that caused more problems than it solved. Hopefully they will replace all to remedy that, as yes, they can handle many more clients than the 1041s could.

Jacobdaviddean wrote:Remember, Wifi is not required in the building. The primary function of the building internet is to facilitate the clerks.

Well, MLS used to work fine via a modem, and I assume that's still an option. The web is required for other clerk tasks but not all of those need to be done on Sundays. But the Church has/is moving all lesson content to the web, so it's becoming pretty important for teaching. All manuals, pictures, and videos in our libraries are being disposed of at the end of the year. As much as we tell people they have to download everything ahead of time, not everything can be downloaded and people are always going to forget something. Or a teacher has something come up and someone has to fill in.

craiggsmith wrote:All manuals, pictures, and videos in our libraries are being disposed of at the end of the year.

Is that a local initiative?

lajackson wrote:

craiggsmith wrote:All manuals, pictures, and videos in our libraries are being disposed of at the end of the year.

Is that a local initiative?

I don't know, I was given the impression it came down from above but I'll have to ask.

To start with, unless you have a large color printer, I can't see how a digital picture replaces a printed one for classroom use.

I can understand discarding all older material that is no longer part of the curriculum, or currently obtainable. But "all" sounds like someone went overboard.

russellhltn wrote:I can understand discarding all older material that is no longer part of the curriculum, or currently obtainable. But "all" sounds like someone went overboard.

I will clarify with a better source, I admit I don't see the reasoning behind getting rid of things such as pictures that are pretty universal.

At any rate, internet access is becoming more important in the curriculum with each passing year.

craiggsmith wrote:At any rate, internet access is becoming more important in the curriculum with each passing year.

I don't think anyone can argue with that.

Mikerowaved wrote:

craiggsmith wrote:At any rate, internet access is becoming more important in the curriculum with each passing year.

I don't think anyone can argue with that.

However, there's a number of buildings where you wouldn't want to rely on a working internet connection during the lesson. And I don't see that changing anytime soon.

We are getting ready to have Hughes Net install a dish for satellite internet at a stake center where DSL, T1, and Cable is not available. Should have speeds up to 25M D and possibly 5 up, which is a great improvement over the 2M down and 2M up we have at present with the old satellite ISP. I'll let you know how it goes, but this is sounding like a good option.

RyanGard1977 wrote:We are getting ready to have Hughes Net install a dish for satellite internet at a stake center where DSL, T1, and Cable is not available. Should have speeds up to 25M D and possibly 5 up, which is a great improvement over the 2M down and 2M up we have at present with the old satellite ISP. I'll let you know how it goes, but this is sounding like a good option.

I had a client who had Hughes satellite Internet. He wanted to use OpenDNS for content filtering, but we found that Hughesnet has restrictions in place which prevented it from functioning. Since the church is now using OpenDNS as a filtering solution, you should check to see if the church's implementation of OpenDNS would be affected.

Google "opendns hughesnet" for more information.

danpass wrote:Since the church is now using OpenDNS as a filtering solution, you should check to see if the church's implementation of OpenDNS would be affected.

We have a branch in the hinterland that uses a Hughes dish. We have had plenty of problems, but the GSC has always been able to work them out so that the branch can keep operating. Although there have been some connection issues, the biggest problem has been loss of service during inclement weather.

lajackson wrote:

danpass wrote:Since the church is now using OpenDNS as a filtering solution, you should check to see if the church's implementation of OpenDNS would be affected.

We have a branch in the hinterland that uses a Hughes dish. We have had plenty of problems, but the GSC has always been able to work them out so that the branch can keep operating. Although there have been some connection issues, the biggest problem has been loss of service during inclement weather.

I wonder if they have they done a filter check since the recent switch to OpenDNS?

danpass wrote:I wonder if they have they done a filter check since the recent switch to OpenDNS?

The filter check fails every audit. The auditor tries to go to gambling dot com, is blocked, and marks the exception and the followup that blocking is working. The FM Group opens and closes a work order, and we do it all again in six months.

lajackson wrote:The filter check fails every audit.

What exactly are they seeing when it fails? Have you looked at this thread?

russellhltn wrote:What exactly are they seeing when it fails? Have you looked at this thread?

Nothing as described in that thread, and nothing that says anything about being blocked. And nothing that says they arrived at the URL they entered.

I will save the screen shot they send me next time.

lajackson wrote:

danpass wrote:I wonder if they have they done a filter check since the recent switch to OpenDNS?

The filter check fails every audit. The auditor tries to go to gambling dot com, is blocked, and marks the exception and the followup that blocking is working. The FM Group opens and closes a work order, and we do it all again in six months.

The impression I got when I was trying to get OpenDNS filtering to work, was that Hughesnet ignored local DNS preferences set in the router as well as computers. So any DNS based content filtering solution would be ineffective with Hughesnet and probably other satellite Internet services. The previous solution the church used was also DNS based.

danpass wrote:The impression I got when I was trying to get OpenDNS filtering to work, was that Hughesnet ignored local DNS preferences set in the router as well as computers. So any DNS based content filtering solution would be ineffective with Hughesnet and probably other satellite Internet services. The previous solution the church used was also DNS based.

Since the church is using OpenDNS, you might want to install dnscrypt. It runs the DNS request over an encrypted connection so a "man in the middle" (like Hughesnet) can't mess with it.

Just be aware that it might slow down the connection. It might be the reason Hughesnet is intercepting the DNS because they're keeping a DNS server local in the receiver. Otherwise, the request has to go over the satellite adding an additional roundtrip delay.

russellhltn wrote:It might be the reason Hughesnet is intercepting the DNS because they're keeping a DNS server local in the receiver. Otherwise, the request has to go over the satellite adding an additional roundtrip delay.

My thought as well.

thank you for the info. we'll see what happens.

So far so good with 1 week on with hughes. There was indeed an issue with the firewall and the family history center was unable to access one of the main sites, but Hughes was able to disable something on their end and access to that site was restored. Been very cloudy this week so we are down to about 15 up vs the 30-40M up but still it's doing pretty good vs the 2M down we had previously.

In this post, lajackson mentioned a branch using Hughesnet which fails the filter check. But yet gambling dot com gets blocked. Do you see similar behavior at your building?

If OpenDNS is doing the blocking, you should see something like this: If not, I wonder if the firewall is configured with a fallback blacklist and blocks sites from that list if the content filter fails.

I haven't tried that yet, will add it to my to do list. Access to the sites is no longer an issue, however the issue we are seeing now is when the FHC is trying to download a large file such as a stored microfiche file from one of the paid sites the church uses, they are encountering issues where the downloads will stall or become painfully slow (even slower than the previous service provider's sometimes 2M download) However- if during the download process we run a speed test from a separate computer (or my own laptop) from another point in the building, be it CAT-5 or wireless, we'll still see decent speeds on that speed test. There has been quite a bit of troubleshooting with hughesnet and the church contractor who is good with networks/technology- but we are not getting anywhere. The facilities manager wants to have a hughes tech come out to prove their equipment, but the contractor doesn't think that'll do much good. We are ordering a new Cisco switch (15+ port) as the old one has a few bad ports (it is a bit old) so he wants to eliminate our equipment at the building as being an issue before risking the $120 service fee of having a hughes tech come out as their customer service tech support feels everything is fine. Uggh. The issue is bad enough that if we can't resolve this soon, the facilities manager may want me to explore having the phone company bring in 2 T1s that maybe we can bind to get 3 meg- and just using that, for the sake of giving the FHC the consistent performance they need. DSL & Cable is not available for this area yet but it does look like we have had 1 T1 here in the past based upon there being a decommissioned T1 card & chassis upstairs on the tellco backboard

RyanGard1977 wrote:however the issue we are seeing now is when the FHC is trying to download a large file such as a stored microfiche file from one of the paid sites the church uses, they are encountering issues where the downloads will stall or become painfully slow (even slower than the previous service provider's sometimes 2M download)

Does it start off ok and then slow down, or is it slow from the get-go? If it slows down, then I suspect that something somewhere along the line is de-prioritizing the traffic to make way for smaller data streams such as screen refreshes.

If it starts slow, then it might be the protocol is affected by the latency. One trick that used to be used (maybe still is), use satellite for download but a landline for upload. That cuts the latency in half.

You might try other speed tests. Perhaps downloads from other sites. ISPs are keenly aware that they're judged by speed tests, so they have tricks to make themselves look better than they really are.

RyanGard1977 wrote:...however the issue we are seeing now is when the FHC is trying to download a large file such as a stored microfiche file from one of the paid sites the church uses, they are encountering issues where the downloads will stall or become painfully slow (even slower than the previous service provider's sometimes 2M download) However- if during the download process we run a speed test from a separate computer (or my own laptop) from another point in the building, be it CAT-5 or wireless, we'll still see decent speeds on that speed test.

Don't know if this is the the same thing, but I had a WISP provider claim 30Mb/s DL speed, but buried in their terms it said this was for the first 10MB of a DL; after that, it slowed to 2Mb/s. Other PC's on the same LAN still had good speeds, except for the one with the large DL. I ended up using a DL manager that could stop and restart a DL where it left off thus resetting the speed, but stopping and restarting each DL multiple times was a pain.

BTW, as of today, DSLReports has received 167 good and 622 bad reviews on HughesNet. ConsumerAffairs has the following breakdown of "Overall Satisfaction Rating" for HughesNet:

6 - *****
3 - ****
5 - ***
8 - **
490 - *

Unfortunately, you just might be fighting a losing battle.

We ended up going back to our old provider- Rise Broadband. (Satellite dish type thing to antenna tower off in the distance) and all the issues we were having ceased. we had a bit of a battle with Hughes with them not wanting to live up to their guarantee and cancellation policy but in the end with some advise from church legal I believe- they were successful in getting hughes to play nice. The FHC is happy and we are happy as well. The speeds seem to have improved from previously 2m down to at times up to 15m down so not too bad. The lag that we were seeing with hughes is not present with rise. Rise is probably not going to be an option for most of you though. I think Hughes will be ok for single residence type use, but for multiple computers at a location trying to access at the same time- that seems to cause the biggest issues.