Chap. 2: Google can be a researcher's best friend

This post is going to be a bit shorter than the others. Mainly due to what my two tasks were this week:
1 - Research for possible candidates for an outdoor WiFi extender.
2 - Research different Internet providers.

Instead of telling you how long I searched for and the multiple websites that I found, I'll get to the gist of it. Firstly, I'll go over the extender. After going over different lists by other sites giving their opinion on what they think is the best extender, I found one that my parents are interested in. It's called the WAVLINK AC1200 Outdoor Weatherproof WiFi Range Extender for $139.99.

It looks a the head of a mantis, to me.

It's on the pricier side of the lists that I looked at but it got four stars on nearly every review I read and has the same rating on Amazon. It's IP65-rated weatherproof, which means it can survive in almost any sort of extreme weather. It supports Passive PoE (Power over Ethernet) and speeds up to 2.4GHz at 300Mbps, 5GHz at 867Mbps. Many of the reviews claim that the extender can cover 300-350 yards. This is the one I'm trying to convince my parents to go with.

Like I have said in previous posts, our internet service provider is a company called "DataTruck". They have been the properties provider since at least 2011. On the plan we have with them, we currently get 10 Mbps, but sometimes the service isn't as reliable as we like it. Often times, we will get cutouts, slow speeds, or bad connections. These aren't occurrences that you want happening during an important video call or an intense gaming session (that one is mostly for my brothers and me). In fact, an outage happened while writing this part of the post. There were a few options to check out, like Hughesnet, a satellite service provider, or Centurylink. Centurylink is a DSL internet service that has quite a few good reviews for its residential, rural, and business services.

Our neighbors use Centurylink and, according to my parents, have said nothing but good things about it. With DataTruck, we paid around $50/month for 10Mbps. With Centurylink, they say we could get around a more solid connection with 60Mbps for around the same price. Faster and more reliable internet is the way to go and seem like a win-win to me. So, we could be looking at getting a new provider sometime in the near future, if I play my cards right.