It appears that the Lake Anna area is receiving attention for High Speed Wireless Internet stemming from this news release. Consider calling Virginia Broadband 1-877-299-8222 (VABB) and getting the latest information and availability for your location. I understand that they now have a tower online in Spotsylvania off of Route 208 with additional capability expected in the coming months. Is anyone getting service yet? How is it?

Got a post card advertisement in the mail from VABB today. Looks like they are beginning to advertize. A tower coverage radius appears to be 4.5 miles. They are placing towers at REC substations. Another tower at the Kentucky Springs/Carrs Bridge intersection substation in the next 90 days. Under discussions for one near the dam. Anyone know any more information. Looks like I have another 90 day wait before I can jump. Hope it will be worth it.

Has anyone used this service and can recommend it?

I have talked with one customer that is satisfied. Had some day 1 problems but appears happy with the service. VABB advises that they are not getting the expected range from the Spotsylvania tower on Rt208. They are going to investiate and maybe change the antennas. Carrs Bridge and Kentucky Springs tower is next in line somewhere in the next 30-90 days. Sounds like Buckner area will be the next after that. Thats all I know today.

Talked with VABB yesterday re wireless tower at Kentucky Springs & Carrs Bridge Rd in Louisa County. They anticipate installation by 15 Sept and first customers off of that tower within 2 weeks later. They call that tower the Elk Creek tower.

According to the CV dated 14 Sept 2006 Page C-5, CVALINK and Standard Broadband have merged and created Rural Broadband Networks (RBBN), a high speed wireless Internet service that reaches area of Louisa, Mineral, and Lake Anna. Another company with more emphasis on wireless. Yea!! Check out www.rbbn.net.

Bad news, the Elk Creek tower has been placed on hold status pending an engineering resolution to clearing the tree line with the antenna. I cannot get a feeling if this is a short or long term hold. They told me to call back in two weeks. Stay tuned. As I have seen little to no activity there, I now believe we may be looking at next year before they get something up and running. I hope I am wrong.

VABB has announced the substation at Carrs Bridge and Kentucky Springs is not a viable site to use. They have dropped all plans for this site and are now looking around for a new site. So we are probably looking at early next year before we will see any coverage for the lower end of the lake.

I just bought a house on Lake Anna and with my work was fretting over my options for high speed. The only coverage I found that was possible was Hugesnet. However, Verizon has a wireless satellite card for laptops and I have found that it works quite well. I am able to log on remotely via a vpn from my home using this service. It isn't quite as fast as cable but pretty close.

I spoke to vabb yesterday about service to both waters, down off Carr's bridge road. They explained that they are waiting for the technology infrastructrure study to be completed July 1st for Lousia County being preformed by cityscape. Once this is done, they are planning to install coverage for the remainder of lake anna in louisa county over the next 4 month's till complete.

what is the latest on hi speed internet va broadband ? how does it compare to hughes net

I don't think much has changed in the last year. Hughes and wildblue satellite services are both used around the lake. VABB.com supports some of the middle of the lake from a tower at the Power substation on Rt208 in spotsy. The north end of the lake has some broadband operation but not sure future state. Standardbroadband.com and cvalink were to merge and form rbbn.net but I cannot detect the current state of that. Louisa activity is still on hold pending their requirements review of telecommunication sites. So right now only satellite. That's better than dialup but if you are trying gaming or secure communications back to your work location, it will be slow and maybe unusuable to your satisfaction. I am on the lower part of the lake and still waiting for something other than satellite.

I hate Hughesnet (delay and data cap) and VABB is too expensive. iWisp services my neighborhood but it hardly works half the time. We're left to a verizon mifi device that has a data cap.

I'm an iWisp customer. Their service is uneven and it is hard to get their attention sometimes. I believe this is growing pains.

They have recently added new towers which should improve both reception and throughput. I am seeing some improvement in streaming video.

Their main advantage over the rest of the providers is price. $40 a month and *no* cap on data usage. Some other providers really limit how much you can use the service.

In the coming weeks iWisp should be a lot more reliable with higher throughput.

A year and a half has gone by and the available speed has increased greatly. I used to barely be able to watch videos, but now I get more than enough speed to watch any videos I want... when it is working. They had a streak of some months when the service was generally available, but the last few months it has been *very* uneven. Videos pause from time to time and are slow to start. Sometimes my email times out and email is one of those things that work over *dialup*!!!

I suspect when it gets like this it is because there is an equipment problem and they are not capitalized well enough to be able to get good equipment or to repair what they have. So service is very uneven. That said, if you need more than limited Internet access, there just isn't an affordable alternative. The cell phone companies limit how much data you can use without overage charges and the other wireless operator (used to be Va Broadband) has a cell like business model. Satellite is the pits, I don't know anyone who is happy with that.

I don't know when the central Virginia area will have decent high speed internet, but iWisp, even with all it's reliability problems, is the closest any provider gets.