Chap. 3: First Report Hand-In

After doing some more internet window shopping and using some of what I wrote last week, Here is the report I gave to show what I found and would recommend on what to using for extenders and changing internet providers.

Findings:

Firstly, I will go over the extender. After going over different lists by other sites giving their opinion on what they think is the best extender, I think I found one. It is called the WAVLINK AC1200 Outdoor Weatherproof Wi-Fi Range Extender for $139.99. It is 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 is 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. The same company also makes a $60 dollar model, called N300, but it is less powerful and not as weather resistant. Another one on the cheaper side is the TP-Link EAP225-Outdoor Omada AC1200 Wireless Access Point. It has mostly the same features, up to 1200Mbps in speed, and it is PoE Powered. It also has a supposed range of 656.168 feet.

Our internet service provider is a company called "Data Truck". On the plan we have with them, we currently get 10 Mbps (0.01 GigaBytes per second), but sometimes the service is not as reliable as I would like it. Often, we will get cutouts, slow speeds, or bad connections. These are not 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 report. There were a few options to check out, like HughesNet, a satellite service provider, or CenturyLink.

I checked HughesNet and with their best plan, we would get 44.4 Mbps (0.044 GBps) for $60/month. 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 have said nothing but good things about it. The internet reviews give it between three to five stars. With Data Truck, we paid around $50/month for 10Mbps. With CenturyLink, they say we could get around a more solid connection with speeds of 60Mbps (0.06 GBps) for around the same price with an extra $10 for the modem lease. So, the total would be $59. Even though it is ten dollars cheaper, I think that CenturyLink is the best option for updating and changing providers. Faster and more reliable internet is the way to go and seem like a win-win to me.