Staying for the week at an AirBnB in Rochester, MN. This is what I just found out I'm stuck with.
Staying for the week at an AirBnB in Rochester, MN. This is what I just found out I'm stuck with.
How is this even possible in 2024? I realize Rochester isn't exactly a major metropolis, but we're in the middle of town! It's not like they're relying on Hughesnet or something.
Also, it's not that they're cheaping out on us either. The owners live upstairs. This is a duplex.
Hope you enjoy reading these comments in 3-5 days
Ok I have an amount of experience with basically everything going on here so here's what you should do:
First, find the listing and see if they have WiFi listed as an amenity. If they do great, you can complain to Airbnb as a last resort. If they don't you can't, which honestly probably isn't going to change much unless they are turds.
Second, do a few speed tests around the house, especially next to the other duplex unit. On the Airbnb app, send a screenshot of them and say something to the effect of "hey we noticed the Internet is slow, are you having issues too?"
Either they never checked if the downstairs WiFi and there's no signal, or there's a problem with the Internet and they need to call the company. Both are pretty viable. Does your phone say 75% signal or -75db? -75db is not great, but 75% should be ok. If you get faster speeds near the other unit it's likely their WiFi.
The other option is they have issues too. Fixed wireless can run into issues when things change like radar frequencies. They can call the company and get it fixed pretty quick. Even if they aren't paying for the faster speeds the ping shouldn't be anywhere near 600ms. Like, I lived with wireless internet for a long while and it's slow or shouldn't be that painfully slow.
Don't just suffer through, often people don't mention this kind of stuff and if the hosts aren't on top of their tech they don't know it's an issue. There was an issue with the Wi-Fi firmware on a unit I do work for and the guests only mentioned it at the end of their month long stay. They should be willing to work with you especially if they advertise wifi but honestly probably even if they don't. Like, just don't be an ass about it and they'll probably be pretty accommodating.
Definitely 75%. The WiFi signal is undeniably strong.
I told my mother to talk to AirBnB about it, but that's all I can do. It's not on my dime and I didn't make the reservation so I haven't even see the listing. She said she would, but we'll have to see.
If the signal is decent I'd bet there's a problem upstairs too.
Going through Airbnb support really isn't worth it and will take forever. Just message the hosts directly. If you have an Airbnb account you can be added as a guest on the trip by her and message them yourself if she doesn't want to deal with it.
They might cap the guest wifi speed also
You're in the wrong Rochester!
I am so jealous. Those assholes will not run it to my apartment. Landlord tried. The entire neighborhood behind and next to us has it. I am just done and fed up with Spectrum. Maybe I should call and bitch.
threaten to pirate
Come to rural Canada. Our internet is slower, but at least it's three times more expensive.
You got that going for you, which is nice.
They also have to deal with Wendigos. Not sure if slow internet or a horror beyond human imagine is scarier
Not anymore though. 10 years ago, sure, but now you’re forced to either bundle it with phone and cable for a reasonable price(for internet, you’re still buying 2 other things you might not need) or buy the minimum of 60mbps at a premium. And this is in a town of 500 people half an hour away from the nearest city. 15 years ago there was straight up no internet there.
This is your ISP's pricing list:
https://www.radiolinkinternet.com/Plans.html
$55
15mbps down / 5mbps up
$65
22mbps down / 7mbps up
$85
30mbps down / 10mbps up
Call
-other speeds up to 1000mbps Wireless are available-
They're a rural fixed wireless provider. I don't understand why they would try to serve the middle of the town.
I would personally consider getting a refund, but the hotels there aren't that much better for speeds. The city /does/ have good internet access available, i don't understand why nobody purchases it :(
Holy highway robbery.
It is and it isn't, those are pretty standard fixed wireless rates. It's largely used in pretty rural areas where you wouldn't be able to get fiber or cable or often even DSL. They compete against things like hughesnet that's more expensive and has something like a 15gb data cap. Or starlink for $150 a month and $500 of equipment and the weight on your soul of giving Elon money.
They often run wireless backhauls for tens of miles across multiple towers so bandwidth is pretty limited and setup and maintenance is somewhat specialized. Like yeah if you can get cable or fiber do that it's way better. But when there's no other option is not that bad all things considered.
I don't get it either. I am doing a little better tethering my notebook to my phone using the local data, although I don't think it's 5G. Unfortunately, I have an iPhone and a Linux notebook and I can't seem to figure out a way to get the notebook to connect to the iPhone via WiFi. I can only use it tethered via USB. Which means that if I want to go into another room and not lose internet, I need to carry them both around. Annoying, but at least the internet is faster. I should have thought of it earlier.
This is bizarre, I looked and Rochester Minnesota has multiple high speed providers, including two that offer fiber.
And the isp you have is a wireless isp that doesn't even list Rochester as within its coverage area, they're intended to serve more rural areas west of the city. On their map it gets close to but not quite in Rochester, but maybe they're still able to access it (slowly) since it's a wireless provider.
I'm guessing this is a whoever owns your Airbnb problem rather than a Rochester Minnesota problem. I don't understand why they would be paying for this rather than use any of the readily available high speed options there.
I just saw the "radio link internet" there
If your internet is beamed in over some radio signal somewhere then yeah, I get why it's so shitty. Wait until it starts raining!
They do that in my rural area with ham radios on each end.
meanwhile random residential internet speeds in tokyo beating out every consumer connection available in my area (and country I assume):
I have 250Mbit/s in a really old building within a small to medium size town in Germany
one of local Ukrainian isps offered to run fiber (symmetrical 100) to the middle of nowhere. like literally, the nearest store is a couple if kilometers away, it's the last building along a road literally surrounded by a huge field, in a village with like 10 people still living in it.
(i don't need constant internet connection there tho as I'm only there occasionally, 4g is more than enough)
I have 16/4 mbit in the middle of berlin :|.
Here, too, in just a few weeks (at the moment I still have the 100mbit contract). And we are more or less out in the country, the next field is maybe 50m from our doorstep.
here in sweden you generally can't even get anything lower than 100mbps
It'd be faster to mail the TCP packets via USPS
Or carrier pigeon.
My solution to crappy internet while traveling (not a solution to the present moment):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09N72FMH5
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XXBQPZLMy phone provider (GoogleFi) allows you to get a free data-only SIM for your account. I put that into the ZTE USB dongle thing, and plug that into the mini router. That router can be powered by a USB battery bank, or your phone's USB-C charger, or a wall plug. It then gives you your own OpenWRT router you can use wirelessly, or via a CAT-5. I have unlimited data, so I don't get charged extra. I have the router setup with Wireguard into my house as well, so I can get adblocking through the router as well. It's all very compact/portable. I just used it on a road trip, plugged into my car's USB port, and my son streamed Netflix on his tablet.
I have also used that USB dongle directly into my Linux laptop, and it was plug-and-play as well (bypassing the need for the router).
edit: basically it's an over-engineered dedicated hotspot, but I'm a geek and like to over-do things
They have the Spitz out now. I live rural and actually have this as my whole home modem.
I have a pfsense modem between it and my network for routing/vlan but its great! I have the modem paired with the waveform antenna on a 40ft tower. I love that it tells me connection speed to the tower similar to how your WiFi network adapter will tell you the speed between it and the WiFi access point. It will say like 200M. So I know I can get up to 200M but because of prioritization+usage on the tower my actual speeds are 80mbps during Netflix hours but closer to 200m when I first wake up.
Tldr: glinet makes some solid hardware and software. (I know openwrt did most of the heavy lifting. But its well polished. )
How bad is this to use? 5 Mbps isn't awful to use but that ping concerns me, high pings in my experience are worse than slow speeds in a lot of cases (gaming, browsing, chat etc.)
The upload is likely more of an issue. I was stuck with an annoying ASDL setup for a while. Download wasn't bad, but upload was extremely low. It also had no form of traffic shaping. As soon as one of our phones decided to back up our photos, the TCP return packets started getting lagged out. Basically webpages wouldn't load/timeout while anything was trying to upload.
Long pings are annoying. Insufficient upload can break a lot of 'modern' websites.
A ping of 100+ is slightly noticable (not counting gaming here), 200+ is very noticeable, 500+ becomes close to very annoying / unworkable for most cases. A 600 ping will be hard to even load pages. Streaming might might work, but a high ping like that usually comes with a high packet loss too, so I wouldn't hold my breath for Netflix even...
Crazily bad. Like even Lemmy.world takes a good 5 seconds to refresh.
That’s what you get for going to America’s second best Rochester.
That being said, people don’t normally go there for good reasons. Hope you’re healthy
I am not, I am sorry to say. It's a very long story which I've retold way too many times on Lemmy. Let's just say that I have no idea what I'll do if this doesn't work out.
My office is at about 1 mbs with RTO. I feel your pain friend
Ouch. I am sorry.
Ya. Most vacation rentals will have Internet like this. They don't want you pirating or downloading potentially illegal materials.
It's enough to watch Netflix and Google shit and that's about it.
Is that enough to watch Netflix? I didn't bother trying.
I dunno, 3 megabits works out to about 0.375 megabytes per second. So its slow.
That seems like a limiter has been applied. Probably on the router. I dont think there are internet providers out there still offering adsl speeds like this. You would need around 5Mbps to watch HD on netflix.
Might be worth finding the actual router and getting the log in details from the sticker on the bottom/back and logging in to see if you can disable it.
Sometimes it is. Depends on what Netflix is doing. But you're right, I usually just use my own hotspot when traveling.
Yeah, video is heavy, so that's kind of surprising if so. I guess I can kind of stream a video over Tor, which is testing at 2 down right now, although usually only in low resolution.
Compression is amazing.
Your average landlord isn’t going to even be thinking or caring about “piracy”. They only care about their bottom line.
you'll be fine. I played WoW in the early 2000s with these Internet speeds.
The ISP I work for provides residential gigabit fiber to Rochester, so I know it's definitely not a problem of availability
On the one hand, this is normally fine at an Airbnb because you should be on vacation and thus out and doing stuff.
On the other hand, you're in Rochester, MN, and I'd imagine the main reason people would get an AirBNB there is to be near family who are inpatient, so the hosts should be catering to that...
Agreed, but my mother is a nutcase.
Wow, that's almost as fast as my phone's hotspot!!
if the listing advertised "high-speed internet" or anything with the wording "high-speed", then i'd call AirBNB and complain until i either got a partial refund or a rebooking elsewhere. Rate 1-star and post as many complaints as possible on as many social media outlets as possible with the full name of the AirBnB host. Name and Shame.
Basically, be as big a nightmare as possible (without getting kicked out) until either it gets fixed or until you get enough money back to make you feel better.
edit:
The owners live upstairs.
i wouldn't let them sleep a wink until that's 50Mb/s+ both up and down. should be at least 100Mb/s, but 50Mb/s is manageable.
They're fucking you while on vacation, and i would make their live a LIVING HELL. being cheap has consequences...
Or, hear me out, they could just be a polite human and ask about the issue before jumping to conclusions? It could be a simple case of them restarting the network to fix it. Throwing a tantrum over this without any other information or communication is just pathetic, why would that be your gut reaction?
Yeah, not doing that. In fact, if I don't have to see or talk to them the entire time I'm here, I'll be happy about that part of this trip. I didn't particularly want to stay in an AirBnB in the first place, but I'm not the one paying. I would have honestly been fine with a Motel 6 or whatever.
I'm here with my mother (also mildly infuriating) who chose it and is paying for it, so I'll have to talk to her about it, thanks.
50 up is pretty much the max I've seen most plans. Most ISPs just don't allocate Jack for it.
Re you're edit: I'm not here on vacation, I'm here to go to the Mayo clinic. But they close up at 3, so it would be nice to come back to decent wifi. Thankfully, I realized I can just use my phone as a hotspot. The only problem is my iPhone and my Mint Linux notebook won't play nice, so I have to tether one to the other via USB to get it to work rather than via the WiFi connection. No idea why, but it won't get to the authentication part when I connect to the WiFi. But that's better than what I had before.
to me, that makes it even more egregious. i'd send them a bill for your data plan, and i'd also browbeat them for putting someone critically ill, who is visiting the mayo clinic, until they got the issue fixed immediately.
some people think they can take advantage of people like you and your mother, and i'd make sure they never did that again, not to anyone, ever.
i'd get on the phone with AirBnB and be such a unimaginable nightmare, that they'd do anything just to shut me up.
i've been extremely successful at this.
edit: i once had a similar issue at a crappy hotel with bad internet service. i called their corporate office and threatened a federal lawsuit and had a lawyer buddy of mine throw some legalese at them (an obvious bluff). had them shook. 5 minutes later, the "we can't do anything" magically turned into "oh, we fixed the problem" and my internet speed was magically fixed.
sometimes, you just havae to out-asshole the asshoels to get what you paid for.
"How does your network availability compare with your expectations"
the access point is probably upstairs and blocked by several objects
Perhaps they could be using a VLan?
Looks like my 4G LTE speeds I get on my phone at work
If indeed the service is provided by "Radio Link Internet" as listed in your screenshot, the owner can likely fix the speed to "better" with a single phone call RIGHT NOW with the $30 more per month subscription fee to the $85 30mbps down / 10mbps up instead of what they're probably on the $55 service plan.
Judging from the info on your screenshot this looks like this is a WISP. Meaning if you go outside the building there is likely a small tower with an antenna on it that is aimed parallel to the ground. In the days of ISDN, these were amazingly better. In the days of fiber or even Starlink these are pretty abysmal.
Pretty sure that's against the Geneva Convention.
I'm nearby rochester and used to have radiolink. Honestly you're lucky it works. Never had a worse experience with an isp before
These are the speeds the ISP advertises:
https://www.radiolinkinternet.com/Plans.html
I don't know much about WISP but I suspect speed will vary based on distance and line of site to towers and how congested they are.
Most of the WISP systems I work with max out at 30 Mbps, but it's also older tech. In Rochester though there really are better options so that's kinda insane that any one would be using that, it isn't typicalky cheaper than cable at the very least.
When I worked for a WISP, we guaranteed speeds up to 100 Mbps up and down. Most of the tests done after installation were about the same as what I get at home on cable from Xfinity (only terrestrial option here). If they weren't, it usually meant we fucked up and probably knocked the dish out of alignment while tightening it. However, at some point we lost hundreds of users because a building was constructed right in front of the tower facing all those customers and the big guys in engineering were scrambling to move the tower to the new building which was taller than the one we had our equipment on.
Mother Mayo won't let the people living here have nice things. All infrastructure funding must go to the hospital so they can stay one the top medical centers in the world, while the city around them crumbles. Everything goes to the Destination Medical Center.
I’m guessing the problem is that the access point in some terrible location or on another floor. When signal first through Sheetrock it loses half its signal strength or 15/16 loss of going through concrete
The problem is more likely the wireless internet provider.
I both love and hate that app because it has shown me how absolutely abysmal cellular speeds are at "peak" hours (which recently has expanded to most of the waking hours). Some days the test can't even progress because the towers (I'm guessing) are so congested with other people trying to enjoy their lunch break. On the other hand, I love seeing the 5G-UW pop up on the phone and getting 2gb download speeds. I don't see it often enough.
I would do my impression of a dialup modem but can't convey those sounds.
Is this the ISP saying "you may experience speeds up to" and then gives you this?
Can you plug in? May be better.
QoS maybe?