At least four ways to gain access to the Internet from Fishers Island
With pros and cons
I am interested in Fishers Island utility infrastructure, ...water, electricity, and communications… and when I encounter long-term island residents, I ask a lot of questions. As a consequence, some of the people with whom I have interacted have concluded that I know more about things than I really do, and I get asked often about things such as ‘Internet access.’
So I decided I would just write down what I know about Internet access from the island for whatever that’s worth to anyone who is interested..
So here are at least four ways that I know of to access the Internet from the Island.
Fishers Island Telephone Company’s ‘Evernet’ wired service at two levels…a basic ‘Better’ service at $65/month for 5 MBPS and $102 for the ‘Best’ 25 MBPS service. These rates are for year-round residents. Seasonal rates are higher. In addition to these monthly subscription rates, there are additional charges for the router and for special charges. FITC has been providing reliable Internet services for years. I think it has plans in the future for a fiber optics cable-based Internet access system. Its availability will probably depend upon the installation of a new electricity cable to the mainland that would include a separate fiber optics cable for data.
FITC is now soliciting subscribers to a new fiber-based system to replace its current DSL-based
system...uses the same physical media as your telephone. Fiber optics cable will be strung
using telephone poles to the entry point to a residence. Fiber is faster and more reliable.
However, the speed of the service will still be determined by the speed of the microwave
connection to the Connecticut mainland.
FITC Internet service is currently provided by a microwave link with the mainland, the island terminus is located at the Top of The World on the East End.
The FITC service has many attributes but one is very attractive to many. If the service isn’t working, there is someone to call.
Cellular data service as an element of your cell phone subscription. We all use our cell phones as a means of access to the Internet without thinking much about it. We text. We connect by voice and text and video from home…WIFI calling…we google…wherever we are at the moment. If within range at home or maybe the FI Community Center, our phones automatically connect to the WIFI router. If out of range of a known WIFI signal, our phones connect to the cell tower on which our cell phone service providers have installed antennas and radios even when it's located on the mainland. Your cell phone connects to the tower with the strongest signal. It often will switch as you move about.
Texting and googling functions utilize the data connection that a cell phone makes with the nearest cell tower that is emitting the strongest signal….and as the phone moves around it may drop the signal from one tower and connect to another with a stronger signal.
In turn the cell tower employs ‘backhaul’ that enables the tower antennas and radios to connect via wire or cable or microwave to the nearest Internet Service provider (ISP) access point. From there, cell service and wired internet services like Evernet utilize the same national and international ‘backbone’ communications networks. The Internet protocol (ICP) ..a standard...to which the world adheres…enables interconnection of these various physical networks into a virtual network…The Internet.
I should say that most carriers...cell service providers...Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile ‘collect’ your internet access history and sell it or use it to target ads to you… you may have easily authorized this. Read this article to learn how to withdraw your agreement.
It's possible to go further and use the ‘hotspot’ feature of today’s smart cell phone. In hotspot mode your cell phone acts as a wifi router. If you fire up your laptop or desktop and look at the 
icon, in addition to your regular internet router, you can now see the ‘name’ you have assigned to your cell phone hotspot. So, for example, if you have the FITC EverNet internet services and a wifi router you will have assigned a name to that router. Similarly, you assign a ‘router’ name when you put your cell phone in hotspot mode. See hotspot mode under ‘settings.’ 
FITC internet service and your cell phone use different ‘networks’ to reach your home or your phone. The difference is in the ‘last mile’ connection. The FITC services come to your home by cable...by wire…your cell phone service comes to your phone via wireless channels that are created by the ‘radios’ and antennas in your cell phone and the radios and antennas on the ubiquitous cell phone towers all over the country….in FIshers Island’s case on the Connecticut mainland.
If you’re my age, the word ‘radio’ conjures up big vacuum tubes and ’antenna’... the large TV antennas on a roof. So how do tiny cell phones contain radios and antennas? Well, because today a ‘radio’ today is mostly software run on a special purpose semiconductor chip connected to tiny, shaped wires serving as antennas that are precisely designed to match the frequency of the electromagnetic radiation of which a cell signal consists.
Using your cell phone as a hotspot router runs the battery down rapidly and requires you mostly to keep it plugged in. So you can buy a dedicated hotspot or you can dedicate an older cell phone solely to that purpose and just keep either plugged in to a power source.
For many, a hotspot will prove a perfectly acceptable means of access to the Internet and provide a WIFI signal for others devices in your home...a smart TV, a laptop..a desktop…a playstation. Carriers will limit the amount of data transferred using your phone as a hotspot even though your cell subscription may be classified as ‘unlimited.’ But it’s possible to subscribe to a hotspot separately and get unlimited data in this fashion. This subscription would be in addition to your basic cell phone arrangement.
The cell carriers and many companies… that offer internet service by renting space on the big three carriers towers… offer Hotspot service. I am testing one …‘Nomad’... to determine if it is able to ‘see’ the mainland cell towers. There are many hotspot options available. None are necessarily cheap. I will take advantage of a 7 day trial. (note: I tested the service. It works using the cellular network from the mainland, but it’s expensive….$150/month.)
I have measured the cell signals for T-Mobile over much of the island. My cell service is through Google Fi that 'rents’ capacity on T-Mobile networks.
If you are located on the north coast closest to Connecticut, the cell signal strength outside is often in the 25 MBPS range. A movie will play perfectly well with 5 MBPS speed. For many, however, the outside cell signal strength will not penetrate the residence’s walls to provide satisfactory service. However, it is possible to boost the outside signal and to transmit that boosted signal into the residence and then distribute it throughout the house as a wifi signal using your cell phone or a dedicated hotspot device as a router. However, for most of us using our phone either alone or as a hotspot as the main means of access to the Internet isn’t practical. A very useful phone app… network cell info lite…will provide you with interesting information that may guide you.
The latest models of ‘hotspot’ devices use 5G frequencies and are faster than 4G LTE, but the signal may be weaker coming from the mainland than 4G LTE.
The third means of access for Fishers Island residents is ‘Home Internet’ service provided over cellular wireless networks using antennas and radios on the same towers as voice services. None of the three major cellular service providers officially supply ’Home’ Internet services to the Island. All three I suspect will at some point. T-Mobile offers its eligible subscribers a plan including a router for $50/month that enables speeds of ~100MBPS.
Home Internet services are designed to utilize 5G networks, although 4G networks are utlized often when 5G isn’t yet available. At right is a chart showing the difference in speed of the various ‘generations’ of technology through which the national cellular network has evolved.
Signals of sufficient srrenth and quality from the mainland cellular towers can certainly reach parts of the island now and even weak signals could be boosted to a level that would provide a satisfactory service. But Home Internet from the mainland will probably always face a certain limitation in bandwidth since the Fishers Island market may never support a dedicated on-island 5G tower. Any service provided to FI from a mainland cell tower would share bandwidth with closer, adjacent mainland users.
Recently T-Mobile has authorized ‘home internet’ service that can be moved, that is, it can ‘roam.’ So if you’re intent on testing or using on the island a home internet service, you can simply sign up online for T-Mobile service using an address that T-Mobile currently ‘qualifies’ foe service, arrange to have the router redelivered to Fishers Isalnd and you’re good to go. It is highly likely that the T-Mobile home internet router can connect to a mainland tower from Fishers Island.
If you’re curious why a wireless cell signal strength is ‘signed’ as a minus number or the fact that decibel is an example of the use of logarithms, read this. Also the ‘bars’ on your phone are not terribly useful indications of ‘actual’ signal strength. Each phone manufactuer uses its own algorithm to decide how many bars to show. Two phones of different makes side by side may easily show different number of bars. Bars indicate ‘relative’ signal strength only…that is two bars is better than one bar.
Strong cell signals are measured close to -50 dB and up…-80dB is good also..…weak cell signal maybe -110 dB but still usable. The CellMapper app is a better measurement device than bars.
5G technology utilizes higher frequencies in the magnetic spectrum; therefore more data can be transmitted in a unit of time. In addition, 5G employs directional antennas that can ‘shape’ the signal reducing the energy required to get a ‘good’ signal to its destination. 5G signals don’t travel as far as 4G and don’t penetrate walls as well, requiring the cell towers to be more densely placed. But 5G signals from the mainland do reach the island. Many areas of the island have ‘line of sight’ to towers on the mainland.
Here’s a discussion of what ‘line of sight’ actually means. Cell signals propagate in what is called a ‘Fresnel Zone’...a ellipsoid shape…something like a football…in all three dimensions…so for the best reception, line of sight must include not just having a laser beam, human visual, straight line from cell tower antenna to home Internet antenna but also the radio frequency radiation in this football shape. The electromagnetic waves bounce off the water, for example, and arrive at the receiver antenna out of phase with each other but at the same time reinforcing or canceling or interfering with each other…the antenna and receiver electronics manage to reconstruct the information content. Circuit designers are truly magicians.
Arthur Clarke, a British science fiction writer, wrote the book and movie script for 2001 Space Odyssey…. the Stanley Kubrick movie. Clarke was perhaps the first to envision synchronous satellites. He is often quoted as having written ‘sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’
In addition to antenna design and other technologies, the Internet…a network of networks…provides another means of increasing the quality of its transmissions. It employs ‘packetization’…an idea developed during the 1960s as a means of increasing the likelihood that US communications networks would survive a nuclear attack.. The data that comprises each e-mail, movie, image, book, web site or whatever that you as a user accesses on the Internet is broken into ‘packets’ of about 64KB. Each is numbered sequentially and has all the digits in the packet added together and inserted into its header as a ’hash sum’’. When the packet arrives at the next network, the hash is recomputed and if it doesn’t match, then a request by the software protocol for the packet to be resent is initiated. If, after a number of tries and failures, the packet will be re-sent to an alternative end point until a path of sufficient quality is identified and utilized. So even if a packet eventually arrives at its destination out of sequence because it required a number of resends, the software in the Internet communications control ‘stack’ can reassemble the entire data content in the correct order. Thus the Internet has the property of ‘robustness.’
When Home Internet becomes available on the island, and if Home Internet service interests you, but you are not in a ‘line of sight’ of a tower on the mainland, then you may be able to ‘boost’ the signal with an additional antenna located outside your residence.
Boosting also may improve your regular cell service if, for example, your cell signal is spotty inside. Installing an exterior booster antenna and an inside antenna, you spread the stronger signal more widely within the residence. Here’s a good article by WireCutter, the NYT ‘best of’ service that suggests how to ‘boost’ your wifi signal within your residence. It is possible to boost the wifi signal emitted by the FITC Evernet router also, if you determine that its signal is not reaching some parts of your residence. I think FITC will recommend a mainland firm to help you with that, if you ask.
Here is an example of an exterior cellular booster kit. Home Internet or regular cell signals from the mainland can benefit from external boosting. While ’boosting’ normally refers to signal strength, perhaps a more important consideration is signal to noise ratio also measured in dB but in this case a positive sign is better. The MIMO antennas that comprise this kit ‘boost’ this aspect of overall signal ‘goodness’ by reducing interference from other electromagnetic phenomena.
You may ask yourself what’s the difference beewten a separate ‘hotspot’ router and a Home Internet router….its mainly the electronics…the signal amplifiers and antennas are simply better in the home internet router...but yes hotspots and home internet routers will often use the same towers…
The last means of access to the Internet from on-island is Starlink …an internet access system offered by SpaceX. It is new. It employs an external antenna that is a rectangular-shaped device that connects to satellites in low earth orbit…~300-500 miles. Low earth orbits reduce substantially ‘latency’...the time it takes for a signal to propagate from a satellite hundreds of miles above to you.
Starlinks now employs over 2000 satellites and has plans to add thousands more in the future. Elon Musk and USAID just provided hundreds...maybe thousands … of these Starlink terminals to Ukraine. Each cost retail about $550 for the terminal and $110/month for plus 100 MBPS service. Mariupole, the beleaguered Ukrainian city has been kept ‘online’ by Starlink terminals I read in the reports.
There are probably a dozen subscribers to Starlink already on the island. I am one of them. There is a considerable backlog of orders for Starlink all over the world. But Starlink is not cheap compared to broadband available in cities.
So far so good with Starlink. An obstruction free view of the northern sky is needed, and, again, as with the Home Internet, there’s really no one to call for help. You need to be able to manage or identify someone who can trouble shoot..
Starlink’s reach can also be boosted by wifi ‘extenders.’ It is possible to extend the Starlink WIFI signal from its router up to several miles even and to power the extenders with small solar panels and rechargeable batteries.
As an aside, I have configured Starlink for a village as a potential part of a proposal in response to a USAID RFP for medical aid to an African country. I doubt it will be included or accepted. USAID and other’ international ‘AID’ agencies do not like to fund infrastructure. But except for Starlink itself, all the elements can be ordered at very good prices from China’s Alibaba for delivery to Africa.
But as a thought experiment…it's conceivable that a Starlink-front-ended setup could be configured that would extend WIFI to the entirety of Fishers Island. I am not sure it would make any economic sense to do so, since the island is already ‘wired’ by FITC…but it's an interesting idea. Of course there are other satellite internet providers but far slower in speeds, so I have not included that option in this discussion.
The recently passed ‘Infrastructure bill’ includes a provision for subsidies for Internet access …The Affordability Connectivity Program… It can be applied for online.
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