Those who live in rural southern Berkshire County, MA are well aware of the difficulties of obtaining high speed internet service. In particular, residents of the town of Alford, MA had assembled the Alford Broadband Committee to address the town's lack of broadband services back in November 2006. Fortunately, after a year of wading through a lake of legal red tape at the town and state levels, Alford had established its wireless high speed service through WiSpring, a local WISP. WiSpring's first tower was erected in Alford and operational in November 2007. Once their second tower in Alford is erected later this spring or early summer, they will be providing their high speed wireless coverage to 80% or more of the town's residents and small businesses.

Why did the town of Alford go through so much effort to get wireless internet service? Mainly because small towns like Alford have been specifically blacklisted by Verizon and Time Warner Cable (a.k.a. Road Runner) to not recieve high speed services. This is because these companies claim that it would be too much of an expense for them to provide high speed wired services to Alford, despite the fact that the town is only about 11 square miles in size, with only 17 miles of public roadways.

Last year I had conducted speed and price tests and had compared WiSpring with some of the other services available, including DSL and Cable. For those of you who remember, I had already established that WiSpring's service provides a connection that is just as responsive as low to mid-level Cable and DSL internet services, which is superb for a wireless-based service.

Recently, my Hughesnet satellite dish perished, after four years of withstanding the harsh northeastern elements on my home's roof. I had relied on my PeoplePC dialup connection until I could get a fairly decent signal from WiSpring's first tower, which is about 2 miles away from my house. I'm currently receiving a good signal from WiSpring's first tower, and should receive a much greater signal from their second tower, which will be much closer to my house when completed. So far, WiSpring has been the fastest internet service that has ever been delivered to my home.

Over the past week or so I have conducted some speed tests, to compare the various kinds of services that are available to Alford residents. Note that I purposely eliminated Cable and DSL service, as well as fiber, because these services will probably never be available to residents of our town, despite the years of false promises delivered to us by the phone and cable companies. Here are my test results...

Some notes about my tests...

Setup and Monthly are the estimated setup and monthly costs of each service, respectively. Service DL is the download speed in KB/sec advertised by the provider, and Actual DL is the real download speed test in KB/sec. Service UL is the upload speed in KB/sec advertised by the provider, and Actual UL is the real upload speed in KB/sec. Ping is a ping test sent to Google, determining how long a 32 byte data packet takes to be reflected back to the sender, a standard test.

The Rating is computed in a spreadsheet that I created. It fairly figures all of the important aspects of each service, including Response, Speed, and Cost, and gives each service a fair score based on these values. The only services that ranked higher than WiSpring in tests were 3 Mbps DSL (which is not available in Alford, and sparsely available throughout Berkshire County) and 5+ Mbps Cable internet (which is also not available in Alford, and is also sparsely available throughout the county). WiSpring actually beats all mid and lower end DSL and Cable internet services.

Note that I have T-1 listed in my results. I tested the town office's T-1 service for these figures. A T-1 is priced way out of the homeowner's pricerange, and is mostly used by schools, mid-sized businesses, and government. I put it in for comparison, because despite its high cost it is actually available to Alford residents that can afford to pay for it. Very few services can beat a T-1 in speed and response, however, price is what kills T-1 service for homeowners.

Note that both satellite services are ranked lower than dialup and T-1 service. For the most part, despite the fact that dish internet is much faster than dial-up where downloading files is concerned, when surfing web pages dish internet only "feels" a few times faster than dial-up, because of its huge packet latency (a.k.a. ping). In addition, dish internet has a very low upload speed, and therefore does not make it very competitive in my "price vs performance" part of my formulas. In summary, despite the high top speed that satellite can deliver, you don't get as much performance for your money when you compare dish even to dial-up.

Also note that this chart is comparing WiSpring's basic service with both WildBlue's and Hughesnet's fastest homeowner services! That's quite a comparison to consider! If you were to compare WiSpring's fastest service with dish internet, dish wouldn't even be a close competitor.

Overall, despite the fact that WiSpring is a bit pricer than dial-up internet, a basic WiSpring service can deliver internet to you much faster than dish internet services, in all tests. Also, WiSpring's fastest business-level service can probably outperform a T-1 service, at a much lower cost than T-1! All in all, thanks to Alford's Broadband Committee, WiSpring is pulling Alford out of the dark ages and launching the town into the future!