I’ve been hanging out of a couple of Internet forums frequented by cell-phone nerds hoping to find out whether broadband Internet service is available on the new Alltel tower on Mission Road east of Danbury.
I think I have a reliable answer now from an Alltel field technician. The answer is that, at present, the new tower supports only regular cell phone service. It seems Alltel is still making decisions about where to expand its Internet broadband service in 2008.
This type of service, by the way, is called EVDO broadband, and it supports Internet connections at about the same speeds as DSL. Where available, it costs about $60 a month. To use the service, one buys a wireless PCMCIA card and inserts it into a laptop.
There also are wireless routers than can take the EVDO signal and share it onto a WiFi network.
I certainly hope Alltel provides Internet broadband in rural Stokes before much longer. It’s expensive, but it’s less expensive than satellite Internet, and, given that cell phone towers are now common in rural areas, it’s probably the best way of delivering broadband Internet to more remote rural areas.
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