Paul’s Tech Makeover: Internet and Mesh Wi-Fi (Premium)

As you may know, we're moving to Pennsylvania next month, and I'm using this change as an excuse to re-evaluate the personal technology we use at home. And hopefully get some of it right for a change.

The most fundamental technology, of course, is the Internet connection. I was led to believe---and was excited by this---that we'd be able to get FIOS service here in Pennsylvania, but that was revealed to be a sad joke: When I checked their site from here, rather than at home, FIOS gleefully told me it "had me covered." And then offered DSL plans with speeds of .5 to 15 Mbps. I can get 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) from FIOS at home.

Yikes.

So I did a bit of shopping around, "bit" being the key word there, since there are so few options. What I arrived at was RCN, because no one ever chooses cable modem these days, they just end up there because there's no better choices. Here in Emmaus, RCN offers a service that is 330 Mbps down ... but only 20 Mbps up. (FIOS is bi-directional, so that 1 Gbps service, like their others, is the same speed upand down.)

Now, I know what many of you are thinking: 330 Mbps down is incredible---which it is---and 20 Mbps isfine. Which it would be if I didn't record video podcasts every single day and need to share the connectivity with others. In truth, it probably will be fine. But I'd give RCN more money, happily, if they just doubled that upload speed.

Speaking of which, the cost: RCN charges a reasonable $59.99 per month for this access, plus I'm paying $10 per month for the cable modem. The total monthly bill, with taxes, is just over $80 per month.

But it's a bit more nuanced than that.

I could buy my own modem, and if I'm going to be using RCN long enough, that may make sense. I will reevaluate that option after we actually move in late August, but for now I'll just stick with their modem.

RCN can also charge you an additional $10 per month for what they call "the router," by which they mean enabling the Wi-Fi features of the cable modem. (I believe the four Ethernet ports on the back of that modem all work.) But as you may recall, I purchased a Google Wifi mesh network with three access points, and will be using that instead. So I declined the router option.

I'm not sure how well I've described our moving situation, but it bears on this story.

So the short version goes like this: We're buying a family home in Pennsylvania, but we can't actually move until late August because we had previously scheduled a home swap for the first two weeks in August in our current home with a family from Spain. This actually works out well for the seller---Sharon, the mother of three of my sisters---because she's been in the home for 25 years and has lots of stuff there. So she's been able to go through all that stuff even after moving into a nearby townhouse. (It's right around the corner.)

Back in Dedham, we cleaned up our house, painted it, redid some of the landscaping, and performed other relat...