If you’re moving to a rural homestead life from the city, a lot of things change all at once. This is ideal when it comes to the pace of life, clean air, and an overall reduction of stress and noise. The one major downside that tends to come up is a lack of internet options outside of urban centers. While you can get internet most places, large swaths of the country are still on outdated connections and some places have no internet providers at all. While this is fine for some homesteaders out there, most of us come to fulfill our homesteading dreams through remote work and telecommuting – a lot of which is impossible without a fast internet connection.
So what is someone who needs internet but wants to live a more rural life to do? Do you pass up on great homesteads just because you can’t stay connected with the rest of the world?
The real answer is no, you don’t have to pass up great country living options to get good internet, but you do have to have a plan and do some extra leg work to get most of your internet from outer space. The rest requires a carefully planned connection and a modern mobile phone.
Satellite Internet – Often The Only Country Option
We were not, and still are not huge satellite internet fans. If you have other high speed options, a dish is sub-optimal for a lot of reasons, but if you don’t have other options it is a perfectly fine compromise for your general internet browsing.
We’re not going to pretend that satellite internet is perfect, it’s can have all sorts of problems ranging from normal connection issues, to weather related outages, to data caps. On top of this satellite speeds are much lower than what you would expect with cable or fiber internet connections – typically ranging from 15 mbps – 25 mbps.
With many people coming to rely on faster and faster internet connections, and the state of the world pushing more people to work from home, a slow connection can not only waste your time, but can also imperil your job.
As an example, we previously relied on gigabyte speeds for our internet connection. In our household both of us work full time remote and spend 6-8 hours a day in meetings and conference calls and that’s not including the homestead work and our extra circulars like this site. This is what affords us the ability to have a homestead lifestyle. Without good internet speeds, both our jobs and this website would not be possible.
That being said, satellite is a suitable stop gap for that as long you know what you’re getting into.
What Satellite Internet is Good For
Satellite internet is not for everything. The latency on it is the worst issue and will actively prevent you from using it for modern video conferencing.
What it is good for is connecting you to Slack, email, your google docs, and other general internet activities. For these things satellite is going to be the workhorse of your household.
On the other hand you need to watch your usage. Don’t download big files or plan on watching any streaming video on it as you will quickly run into data caps.
Mobile Connections – The Home Solution for Work
Where satellite suffers mobile phones excel. You may be surprised to find out that you can connect just fine to most video calls on your mobile phone in most places. Any place with a 4G connection can typically cover you for video conferences, and for meetings where you just need to talk through things, dialing in is a more than suitable option.
Mobile devices are the work horses for our meetings. we spend a majority of our work day connected to these phones. And the good news is that it works. The bad news is that there are still data caps that come with this.
Internet Costs More In The Country
This is a sad truth, but internet just costs more in the country. When people have fewer options the prices go up. Data caps are nonsense and there is no reason that they exist in rural areas other than to line a companies pockets, so you’ll likely have to call both your satellite and phone providers and get the biggest data cap packages that you can.
It’s always worth it to get the larger package because overages are typically at exorbitant rates, sometimes more than double what you would pay normally.
These costs are high and easily one of the highest bill you’ll pay if you need to work remote from the country.
We’d like to say that most new homesteaders could avoid this and live a simpler life with fewer connections, but unfortunately life is exceedingly more expensive than it has been in the past. The median home price in the US topped over $374,900 in 2021, up 416% since 1980!
Because of this internet is not only necessary for work, but work that requires internet has become a necessary option for many younger individuals looking to fund a lifestyle that isn’t crowded into major urban centers. Remote employers are also often reluctant to pay for internet or phone bills incurred by their employees and the IRS has tightened the rules around what qualifies as a home office for tax deduction purposes. It’s an unfortunate squeeze that makes homestead life harder to obtain for many people.
How to Obtain Home Internet in the Country
The most important thing you can do is search for internet providers before you buy your homestead. Often you can coordinate this easily in advance, but you should know that not everywhere will have what you need. Some houses were crossed off our list early on because they didn’t have cell service and others because they didn’t have satellite coverage. This isn’t always a deal breaker, but knowing it in advance will save you a ton of time and spare you the headache.
Once you find companies that can provide you service, compare them. Often their marketing is misleading or deceitful so check out other reviews for the companies and make sure you read the fine print. The data caps are not obvious so you typically have to get on the phone and ask someone every possible detailed question you can think of.
From there you need to plan and budget. It’s an expense so think of it that way. Mark off your estimated spending and figure out what you’re going to give up to make it work. You’ll watch less online video for sure, but you don’t have to go without internet luxuries entirely. Once you know what data you need for your day to day necessities you can figure out exactly how much is left over for the other things you want to do.
Getting a Better Connection Later
The thing that a lot of people don’t think about is that you can often convince a company to run high speed internet to your homes if you can get all your neighbors to ask for it too. This often involves talking to everyone on your street, or even in your community, and making a lot of phone calls.
If you’re in a small enough town, sometimes you can even convince the town to come together and get high speed internet setup for everyone. This is much harder than it sounds and local government can be a terrible pain to deal with, especially when your elected leaders have a more rural “no technology” mindset, but if you can get a large enough group of people to ask for it you can usually get an internet provider to run cables even in very rural areas.
If you do go the route of getting Municipal Broadband you will want to work to make sure that speeds are adequate and written into any documents approved by the local government. Some places get municipal broadband only to see a tax hike and terrible service because no one though to check that reliable speeds and access were guaranteed in the final approvals.
One of the largest hurdles you could face in getting broadband out to your community will be the straw man argument that it is pulling taxes away from other things that they could be used for, but not only is that not how taxes work, municipal broadband makes a town more valuable, attracts higher paying jobs, and improves property values which tend to both increase tax revenue and local prosperity. Always be cautious of anyone claiming that making improvements to peoples lives is too expensive, they usually just mean they’re not willing to invest in people.
If You Need Internet You Need Internet
While we would love to say that everyone can do without the internet it’s untrue and unrealistic. It is a truly crazy thing to think that anyone would opt to not have the amazing connective power of the internet at their fingertips as it provides so much outsized value. Even if the internet is poorly utilized on a individual level, over time access will continue to be a gold standard necessity for most people. Country living or not, you shouldn’t have to have to sacrifice a more connected life.