I have CenturyLink service, again.  It was down for awhile and it was not 
easy to get service when I had to deal with their call center in the 
Philippines.  They seemed like really nice people and they spoke great 
English, but when they ordered a service for me, it never happened. 
They'd give me a tracking number, but the system would still have no 
record of my order and no record of the tracking number!

Anyway, while I had no CenturyLink, I used the USI Wireless internet 
system.  They charge $10 for one day, which is ridiculous, but they charge 
$18 for a week and $25 for a month, or $20 for monthly recurring.

I had huge problems with lots of disconnects and dropped packets, but I 
was grateful that I could get something while my CenturyLink was down. 
When I first signed up, I chose this WiFi connection...

City of Minneapolis Public WiFi

...opened the web browser, got a username/password for login and ordered a 
week of service.  After a few days, I realized that I had other options 
like these:

usiw_secure
usiw_secure_S06N139T1
USI Wireless
usiw_secure_S01N129T1

I used usiw_secure with the username/password established above, and that 
made things work a *lot* better.  I had been getting highly variable ping 
times to my office machine, lots of dropped packets, lots of stalling of 
VNC connection, but now I was getting 30 ms pings, good consistency, no 
dropped packets, smooth operation of VNC -- everything better.  Now it 
could be some confounder like the time of day, but I'm pretty convinced 
that the usiw_secure just worked tons better.  A speed test showed 1 Mbps 
both up and down.

Another thing -- I tried to figure out where in my home I had the best 
reception.  So I started pinging my office machine, once per second (the 
USI WiFi router didn't respond to ping) and I walked around the house 
looking for patterns.  It seemed best toward the southwest of my house. 
Is there a better way to test signal strength?  Is there a better way to 
improve reception?

Anyway, thought I'd put that out there in case it helps anyone, but I also 
wanted to hear if anyone has any ideas on how to deal better with some of 
these issues.  Thanks.

Mike