Gotcha. I’d say just keep in mind the $25 price bump in year 2. As long as it’s stable, it would beat the snot out of the DSL. I’d hope any growing pains with Fidium would be worked out by the time your area is live. As long as someone doesn’t get the ol’ fat fingers in your Fiber Distribtion Hub or the Ash St central office, it should be rock solid (barring acts of nature, pole hits, fiber cuts, and the large list of other stuff that can takes connections down).

And if you’re in a multi tenant building, just get your landlord on board (if applicable). Fidium will have to run a new drop, and then a fiber jumper to your desired location. They usually run the jumper on the outside and straight in via an ~1/2” hole, unless there’s conduit/interior path established that doesn’t require fishing and/or has a pull string.

And I know I don’t get why FirstLight let’s their FTTX network rot in L/A, in regards to residential service. Oxford Networks was gung-ho on it for a while, and decided to stop selling it to hyper focus on business even before FirstLight bought them out.

yeah you couldnt pay me to get spectrum. I had a friend who worked for them, and after the shit he told me there is absolutely no chance I would ever get service from them. He had service from them for free as part of his work and changed carrier because of reliability problems.

i'll def keep them in mind thanks. unfortunately they dont cover my area yet.

That was our experience with Fair Point as well. I’ve heard nothing but praise about Fidium, so it was surprising. Following the steps on the website brought it back but we’ll talk to customer service about it too

part of the appeal to changing service was to get more than 50/50 as the roommate games. 250/250 would work too. but for a difference of only $10 the 1GB package sounded better. and i'm fine with paperless billing and auto pay.

my cell signal is fine i've got Verizon, the issue is that I do a lot of remote desktop support, and I dont know if its reliable enough to use on any sort of regular basis for my daily tasks. In a pinch I'm sure I could use it to communicate, i just dont know about remote sessions and latency.

That is precicely why i'm investigating FirstLight told me they will NOT renew the service if I cancel it. My first plan was to see if I could upgrade bandwidth but they said no unless I switched to a business account but the pricing for that is about 6x as much as I currently pay for only a slight increase on the amount of bandwidth

FirstLight is rolling out FTTH in some locations in Maine, but they have no intentions of covering my area with that any time soon.

yikes, this is the feedback I was worried about. that sounds a lot like my Fairpoint experience.

i've so far not needed to hot spot my connection. but as i do a lot of remote desktop work as part of my WFH duties, it might do in a pinch, but its not great for long term use.

Yes, it's starting to sprawl. Even with the pandemic boom, the net inflow of migration was very modest though. It's significant because it stopped the years long trend of negative population growth. The south was the main benefactor of migration.

Ugh. I have a medical condition. Can only work part time bringing home about the same. And I can't get MainCare or foodstamps. Guess I'm missing the drug addiction.

Once you read the article , it goes into the drug addiction part. It’s just not regular homeless people they are also addicts. Most of the time they also commit crimes to fund their addiction. Nonetheless , what they need is help , rehab and counseling . Let’s stop playing victim here .

We’ve had Fidium for 8 days and it has gone out twice so far.

We were able to get some nice undeveloped land early in the pandemic. Seriously thinking about going back and taking another look some of the large 100acre, clearcut, "ugly" and inconveniently located parcels of land that we looked at that were relatively cheap. Seems like in 10-15 years from now the demand for such land might be vastly higher than now...

If you don't have GoNetSpeed service where you live and don't have it by the time Fidium gets around to you, Fidium is the next best thing. Good rates, though we went with GNS because we couldn't find anything positive said about Fidium from Google searches.

If you have 60/5 now, you’d be set with even the 50/50 ($35) or 250/250 ($60). It has much lower latency than DSL (if routing is good) which will make a big difference for video conferencing and more. Just keep in mind that it’s intro pricing that goes up $20-25, after the first year. The pricing also assumes that you enroll in paperless billing, and auto payment. You can opt out of each if desired, for $2.50 apiece. I pay about $37.50 for my 50/50, as I opted out of auto payment.

If I worked from home, didn’t have a good cell signal for a data backup, and it was critical to be connected, I’d say just go 50/50 and keep the DSL around. You may also want to consider the slight possibility that you can’t reorder that DSL service if you cancel it. That would depend on FirstLight’s policies, and I don’t think Consolidated is starting to block access to copper from Competitive Local Exchange Carriers, at this point. I’m assuming that FirstLight is renting a Consolidated copper line, or two, to provide your DSL service, but I could be wrong.

I’ve had mine since October, and no complaints in that short time frame.

So far, so good. As far as reliability, the last big storm I knew some folks nearby that had Spectrum outages but our Fidium connection kept working like a champ.

Perhaps, one point is Jesus supposedly saying that we would always have the poor. I bet this has been perverted in many people's minds that there is no point to trying to solve the problems of poverty because, well, Jesus said we would always have that problem. And perverting what Paul wrote, saying that if someone is not willing to work then "let him not eat." Christianity telling us how to mistreat the poor.

Former Christian here, so liberating to be free of a mindset that insists that we can never solve the problems of the poor.

And where did we as a human race get the idea that it is OK for us to allow people to go without food, without shelter, without medical help,without water, without adequate safety or without simple dignity and decency? Why do we think it is not an immediate emergency to feed and shelter children and people in need?

Why do we think that problem of poverty and homelessness is the problem only of those caught up in it?

Rte 4 from Farmington to Rangeley or the opposite rte 17 from Rangeley to Rumford. Although you should look into the road conditions lol.

Anyone can end up poor. Anyone can end up an addict. Even you.

Get off your high horse.

Oh Jesus.

Does anyone say bonbye anymore or was that a very localized thing to the Lewiston Auburn area? I'm old 60+....

I work from home with 4G sometimes, no problem

Been there. Done that. Most injured workers I’ve seen that became addicts started taking more than prescribed from the start. Been on painkillers myself. Shit happens but you do have to deal with the life you made for yourself. People like me? What’s that mean?

Junkies can fuck off. Yes

Lol. Not hard to not be a fuck up