On Thu, 17 Jan 2013, Wayne Johnson wrote: > I had USI Wireless for a while. The secure connection is the way to > go. The public connections are for their limited free access. I'm glad to hear a confirmation of what I thought I was seeing. Their web pages didn't tell me to drop the public and switch to the secure after paying, but they should have told me. It would have saved a lot of trouble. > I used a laptop and monitored the signal strength to find the best > location. Never found anything strong enough to keep a good connection. How do you monitor signal strength? Does that just mean looking at the icon to see how many bars or wave lines you have? Or is there a way to get numbers? > After I dropped their service, they called and highly recommended their > $49 professional installation to solve my signal strength problem. > According to others I talked to, this included mounting an external > antenna etc. Those other users highly recommended their installation. I'll bet it provides a consistent service, but I wonder how fast it is. Do you know anything about that? Is it always 1 Mbps both ways? > By the time USIW called, I had already switched to Comcast Business > Class broadband and have had 0 problems. Much better that USIW or Qwest > DSL. YMMV. I dropped Century last month because they had failed to reconnect the wire to my house after a truck had taken it down, and I was pretty fed up with their bad service. But, when I called Comcast, I wasn't at all happy with the guy I talked to and their price was higher for the bandwidth promised. With CenturyLink I'm promised 40 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up, a speakeasy.net speed test (Chicago) is showing 39.3 Mbps down and 15.7 Mbps up with an ethernet connection to the router. They want $30/mo first 6 months, then $75/mo as a normal price, no contract. I don't think Comcast could match that or better it. What did you find? They finally did get a guy out here last night, and he went to the trouble of raising the wire high enough in the alley that a truck will probably never take it down. So I think I'm going to be happy now. Best, Mike