I recently moved to a new place and was excited when they advertised broadband Internet. As you can tell by my last post, having a speedy Internet connection is important to me, and is a factor when deciding where to live. This is understandable considering that my livelihood is directly related to me being able to be online.

One of the first questions I asked the head of the HOA was who the Internet connection was through. Actually, it wasn't one of the first questions, it WAS the first question, and it was the only question. He told be it was through Utah Broadband. Hmm... Never heard of them. A little research and I was disappointed to find out they were a wireless ISP. Judging by what I knew of Digis and others, I wasn't at all excited about the download speeds I was expecting to get.

To my pleasant surprise, I ran a bandwidth test as soon as I could, and found the connection to be quite adequate. Not as fast as Comcast or any of the local fiber offerings, but fast enough to suit my needs. I went on about my business a happy camper.

Then I actually tried to download something. After a few minutes I noticed my speed drop down to almost nothing. I reset the connection, reboot the router, but still I was stuck at this turtle download pace. A call to Utah Broadband's customer service confirmed what I feared - they traffic shape any connection which uses it's full bandwidth for five minutes.

I asked if I could throttle my bandwidth down to a certain level to avoid being cut off, or if I could close the connection for one minute out of five, or if I could simply pay more to have the restriction removed. No such luck. Apparently the restriction is a network wide policy. What's worse is that I live in an HOA so I have no other options.

I have resorted for now to using my cellphone data connection, which is actually faster than Utah broadband when they throttle me down. But I care enough about it that I will probably start getting involved in the HOA so I can try to get everyone on board to change to another carrier. I can't live in a place with slow Internet for long - either it goes or I go.