High Speed Internet, like Fios (Windham, Peterborough: car registration, house prices, buy)

[Lin19687]

Is that existent in Southern NH ? Say from Peterborough straight to the coast and straight down to MA line?
I am talking FAST, not dial up, not Tin can on the roof Dish.


Yeah I am Spoiled with Fios and might try a telecommuting job- other wise a Hospital or Dr Office job I can do.



I am looking for SMALL town, Farm land, Bad schools because I don't want to pay for their system, no big drug issues. Don't need big shopping area, just a grocery with in a 1/2 hr is fine with me.




Sorry 2 questions in 1 post.


Oh and can someone explain the Car register stuff to me? Do you all pay like $200 a year to register because there is no other tax on cars? Or is that only in big cities and it is like $50 in small towns?

[KCZ]

Certain towns in SW NH have fiber-optic cable installed under the Fast Roads grant. Comcast provides internet service in many towns. The only reliable way to know if you can obtain decent internet service in any given residence is if that residence already has it. Do not rely on a utility company's coverage map.

Annual car registrations can be expensive. The actual state registration is ~$60, plus another ~$10 in paperwork fees and $8 for new plates, but you pay another large fee (AKA excise tax) to your town on a sliding scale. It's currently $18 per thousand based on MSRP of the car when new, then drops by $3 per thousand each year afterward and levels off in year 6. For example, a 2 year old car whose MSRP was $20K is charged $15 x 20, plus all the above fees. A new $40K SUV is going to be ~$1000, a 15 year old Ford Escort will be ~$140. You register the car at your town/city clerk's office, within 60 days when you move here and in your birth month annually thereafter.

A new driver's license is $50 if you have a valid license in another state.

The state website has a lot of info for new residents.
https://www.nh.gov/safety/divisions/...dent/index.htm
https://www.nh.gov/residents/index.htm

[Nonesuch]

Originally Posted by Lin19687

Is that existent in Southern NH ? Say from Peterborough straight to the coast and straight down to MA line? I am talking FAST, not dial up, not Tin can on the roof Dish.
Yeah I am Spoiled with Fios and might try a telecommuting job- otherwise a Hospital or Dr Office job I can do.

I'm in a small town, like many S.NH towns, Comcast sells "Performance Pro Internet" here. it's rated at 150Mbps download (I get 180Mbps on fast.com speed test), more than sufficient for telecommuting while watching Netflix in 4K.

When the power is out for more than a day, the cable service goes dark and I'm stuck with with LTE data at about 4Mbps. Another two days and the local tower runs out of backup power and the only option left is "Tin can on the roof Dish" (or put on my parka and the tire chains, and go find a Starbucks in the city).

[KCZ]

I have that same Comcast plan, and when it works, it's very fast. However, the signal drops so frequently that mere web-surfing is frustrating and I can't imagine relying on it for my job. Like we've said above, look before you leap. Ask the current homeowners if they have any issues, how frequently they call Comcast about a problem, and whether that problem gets resolved.

[Nonesuch]

Originally Posted by KCZ

I have that same Comcast plan, and when it works, it's very fast. However, the signal drops so frequently that mere web-surfing is frustrating and I can't imagine relying on it for my job. Like we've said above, look before you leap. Ask the current homeowners if they have any issues, how frequently they call Comcast about a problem, and whether that problem gets resolved.

I started with Fairpoint (now Consolidated Communications) on DSL, and I had all those problems, and more.

I track ping times and outages, since moving to Compcast I very rarely have any sort of unplanned drops (unrelated to a winter power outage). Maybe once every few months Comcast will take a 5-minute maintenance window around midnight to reboot a router, but that's about it.

So yes, YMMV, do your homework. Or wait for the new low-latency (20ms) Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites to come online in a year or two. SpaceX is saying they're almost ready to start selling consumer services in the Northern US and Canada.

[WoodyWW]

I have Comcast, & I've been swearing at it all morning b/c the internet is as slow as molasses.

And--you want to move to a town with Bad schools? I don't, & I've never had kids. Did you ever think that maybe Bad schools (or good) are a major reflection of what kind of town it is? How desirable, & also for resale. Do you also want bad roads, poor police dept., etc.? Hey, go for it.

[bigbear99]

Most of the rural towns in the Monadnock region don't have cable, or only have it in their core. Even in Peterborough, many outlying homes don't have cable.

DSL is an option for some people. My home in Dublin gets 20/1.5 service with OK reliability. I just need to reboot the modem router every few days. But I'm relatively close to the town center, and close enough to the phone hub. Another 1/2 mile or so, service speed would be much slower. I knew I could get service before we bought because I called to check.

So do your homework before you buy, and recognize that each residence is different, as is each town.

[Nonesuch]

Originally Posted by bigbear99

Most of the rural towns in the Monadnock region don't have cable, or only have it in their core. Even in Peterborough, many outlying homes don't have cable.

The area OP mentioned ( Peterborough straight to the coast and straight down to MA lin) is a huge swath of S.NH, and cable availability increases drastically as you move east -- I was looking at houses in rural Lyndeborough and they all had fast cable.

Originally Posted by bigbear99

So do your homework before you buy, and recognize that each residence is different, as is each town.

Agreed -- each residence is different, and if a house doesn't currently have fast reliable wired Internet, don't assume it can be added.

Personally, I'm really looking forward to the advent of multiple new low earth orbit satellite services, they should be a real game changer for rural Internet. As soon as they start offering service I'm going to push my employer to pay for my satellite install and service, to confirm IPSEC VPN is actually usable on the new low-latency links.

[Lin19687]

Thank you all !

Here if one house has internet on a street then the street is wired so it wouldn't be an issue. So that is much different up there.
I will be reading about the Low Earth OSS as I didn't even know it was that close to fruition


On the part of the Bad schools..... When you get a town, no matter what state, and they schools are good then people move to them, taxes go up and so do the prices of homes. As I have read on here about Windham I think? This is my last forever home, I already pay good taxes for a good schools and now you can't even touch the house prices because all the builders buy the smaller houses and make McMansions I just want quiet.




KCZ, thank you for that. I was on the Registry site but while the major city showed high $$ the smaller towns did not. I was confused about how that all works. Thank you. I guess it is just like our Excise tax then. I thought it used to be cheaper to Reg a car up there as years ago people here had NH plates and said it was cheaper. Maybe it was registered up on the Canadian boarder lol.

[KCZ]

Originally Posted by Lin19687

Here if one house has internet on a street then the street is wired so it wouldn't be an issue. So that is much different up there.

NEVER ASSUME.


That's what I thought when I moved here. It took ONE YEAR for Comcast to run a line from one end of my street to my driveway (approx 150 yards) and then to my house for television and internet service, and ONE YEAR for Verizon to run a line from the pole at the end of my driveway to my house for phone service. Because there's minimal cell coverage here, I had to drive every morning to the closest spot where I could get cell service just to check my Email and phone messages, and I spent a lot of money on DVD's.


NEVER ASSUME.