Your Internet Might Be Slower

Many LCWA members are noticing the internet is running slower these days…

Your internet might be slower, especially during evening hours. In some places we are seeing from 50% to 75% drops in speed in the evening during prime movie watching hours.

Nearly all of that is due to a huge spike in the number of people online in the LCWA network right now with the Covid-19 crisis. It’s because many, many people are working and studying from home over our network (or watching movies because they are stuck at home), and that it is causing slowdowns. And it’s happening all over the country with all internet service providers.

We are responding as fast as we can

What are we doing about it? Well, we just spent over $30,000 in network upgrades that we are part way through installing now, with tons of volunteer and staff time. Follow this link to read more: What we Are Doing about the Covid-19 Internet Overload

What you Can Do to Help

In the meantime, thank you for making settings in your smart TV’s and other devices to consume lower-resolution movies. See this link for more on that.

And your patience is appreciated!

If You Are Having Issues All Day

While the slowdowns you experience may be due to the backbone challenges, they actually might not be. Don’t assume your internet issues are only this backbone slowdown. If you are seeing a big decrease all day long, it may be due to other things inside your house.

For example, a lot of family members are coming home and working and studying from home, with many, many more devices now connected to your router over Wi-Fi. The result? You may be challenging the capabilities of your router’s Wi-Fi. If things seems slow all day, try plugging your device directly into your router using Ethernet and see if it speeds up. If you don’t think you have working Ethernet, read this article for fixes.

Also, if you have an old router, consider getting our new recommended one.

If you have a large house and now your family is home and tucked into every corner with bad Wi-Fi, consider adding our (only) whole house mesh system that is approved for member self-install. One bad Wi-Fi user in your house can drag down all Wi-Fi users in your house, so try to fix that.

And there may be other issues in your house causing slow internet. Read this article for 16 other causes, many of which you can fix yourself.

Should I Increase my LCWA Service Level?

We have higher LCWA service levels, but don’t get your hopes too high. First of all, our higher 10 Mbps, and 20 Mbps service levels are maximum levels, and you are not likely to see those numbers all the time, maybe not even the majority of the time. Again, during the busy evening hours, we are seeing as much as a 50 to 70% drop from those maximums due to the Covid-19 stay-at-home traffic. But a 50% drop off of 20 Mbps is a lot better than a 50% drop off of 10 Mbps, so it can still help. Use this link if you want to change speed levels.

Discounts?

We actually got this question recently: Will you offer us a discount since we are not getting the full service speeds during this slowdown?

Well, the answer is no. Why not?

• First, like nearly all internet service providers, we have never guaranteed full speeds. Our service levels have always been “up-to” levels.
• Second, LCWA’s operational costs are the same; actually, they are higher now with all the equipment investments we are making.
• Third, we are a non-profit. We don’t profit off our membership fees. It’s not like we can stop paying some group of high-priced executives (there are none, we are mostly volunteer based).
• And, finally, we don’t pay less for our incoming internet feeds during this overload.

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So no, we can’t afford to lower prices. In fact, we are doing all we can to avoid raising them to cover our additional costs during all these upgrades.

Really, the right way to look at this is that we are all in this together, as members of this cooperative network. Step up to volunteer when we put out volunteer requests. If you can’t do that, be patient as our few volunteers do all they can to upgrade and fix things.

You Can Do Even More to Help

Guess what, the underlying cause of the slowdown is you! That’s right, you, the LCWA members, are using way more internet during this crisis than ever before—that’s the issue! So, while we are scrambling to add equipment to increase capacity, you can help by consuming internet more efficiently. How?

First, please take seriously our request to you to lower the resolution of the videos you consume, per that earlier article (many of you are, and thank you!). Hi-Def movies consume a huge amount of our traffic, an unbelievable amount. So please follow the steps in that article.

And think twice before making all your phone calls into video sessions. Is that really needed?

And finally, I hate to say it, but maybe non-internet activities to kill time while stuck at home might feel good right about now. Board games, cooking, hobbies, reading, and so on. This might be a nice wake-up call for how obsessed we are with online games and movies. Just a thought!

All that said, we are working fast to upgrade the entire network, so stay tuned.