Back from Hilo…

I returned from Hilo on Monday evening after a lovely five night stay. No it wasn’t completely a vacation, but I was able to relax a bit and do some riding. Here’s a shot of my bike and Mauna Kea in the background. The camera makes the volcano pretty small but it dominates the landscape if you are actually there…

Of course riding wasn’t the only thing I did. My mom has been using dial-up internet for years. I finally couldn’t take it anymore and decided that for Christmas I’d upgrade her to something better.
She was okay with the idea when I brought it up but she absolutely didn’t want it on a bill she paid which meant that adding DSL to her phone line or adding the service to her basic cable was out.
The Big Island can be a bit spotty when it comes to broadband. Spotty is actually erring on the generous side. I was in Puna doing some volunteer business over the weekend and could barely get my Sprint HTC EVO to pick up a signal, phone or broadband, at all. In fact it works almost every place at my mom’s but the laundry room where it doesn’t work at all.
Still Mobi PCS has their Hele service and their service map shows that it should work. Okay, it was a pretty good price, $30 a month or so, about what you’d expect. I decided to go for it.
I signed up for the two year plan so I could get the equipment subsidized. I chose their MiFi setup as it seemed to be the most flexible.

I took it all home (to mom’s) with some trepidation but felt somewhat comfortable because of the seven day return policy. I kept my fingers crossed.
Against all my expectations it worked quite well from the get go…almost. I should mention that because she hadn’t really updated her software over a dial-up line I spent quite a bit of time updating virus definitions as well as all those XP updates. Then her AOL wouldn’t work…sigh. I’m not an AOL user myself, but it seems to work for her so I wanted to be sure she had access. Updating to the newest version took care of it and….
Voila! At the end up of all the installation and updating I had enough time print my boarding pass and hele to the airport.
Tomorrow, Thanksgiving, I’ll find out from mom just how well it works.
Aloha!