Coming Soon:
Wales Wireless

You get to the same internet using the same upstream infrastructure regardless of which last-mile service provider you choose. The difference is in where your payment goes, and who answers the phone when you call Support.

The big ISPs offshore their Support teams to foreign call centers where they can pay lower wages, and then pass their profits on to lobbyists, shareholders, and executives. Spectrum’s parent company, Charter Communications, spent $11,420,000 on Federal lobbying in 2022, according to OpenSecrets, and spends a roughly similar amount each year.

Wales Wireless is privately owned by a resident of Wales, MA who shops at local stores and hires local tradesmen, meaning your payments support the local economy and keep your money circulating within your community. And when you call our Support line, you’ll speak with one of your neighbors, not a someone living in a different time zone.

If shopping local is important to you, Wales Wireless is a much better choice than the big ISPs. Plus, we offer more bandwidth at a lower price. We’re good for your head, your heart, and your wallet.

Wales Wireless currently covers the neighborhoods surrounding Lake George, with some coverage along Main Street to the north. Other addresses in town may be able to receive signal as well. If we aren’t able to receive a strong signal at your house on installation day, we won’t be able to offer service, but there will be no charge to you.

If you are outside the current coverage area but interested in receiving service, submit the Sign Up form above, and we’ll let you know when we’re able to offer service in your area. If we know that there is interest in a particular area on the edge our coverage zone, we’ll move that area up the priority list!

In general, the 200 mbps service is suitable for smaller households (1-4), while the 800 mpbs service is ideal for larger households (5+), working from home, and regularly downloading large files.

To calculate your approximate internet needs, consider how many devices may be in use simultaneously on your network, and consider what the data needs of those devices might be, based on what the device is being used for. From the following estimates, add up all of the devices according to their uses to estimate your peak bandwidth needs:
– Zoom call: 10-25 mbps
– Streaming a 4K video: 25 mbps
– Streaming an HD video: 10-15 mbps
– Streaming music: 1-10 mbps
– Online gaming: 10-50 mbps
– Browsing social media: 3-10 mbps
– Reading emails: >1 mbps
– Smart home devices: 1-3 mbps

For example, if you have an Amazon Echo (3 mbps) in a household of 4 people, where you might have mom streaming music on her phone (10 mbps) while checking emails or reading articles (1 mbps), dad making a Zoom call from his computer (25 mbps), brother gaming on his laptop (50 mbps) while streaming music on his phone (10 mbps), and sister scrolling social media on her phone (10 mbps) while running a music stream in the background (10 mbps), your peak usage estimate would be 3 + 10 + 1 + 25 + 50 +10 + 10 +10 = 119 mbps.

When you sign up using the form above, we will schedule an installation date. Installation costs $120 and includes a roof mount, a CPE radio, and a PoE adapter. We’ll install the CPE radio on your roof and run a PoE cable to an adapter in an outlet inside your house. If you need a wired connection for a router or switch, you can connect it to this PoE adapter. Once your equipment is installed and powered on, you’ll pay your first monthly bill, then your internet service will become available. We won’t charge you anything until the installation is complete and data is ready to flow.

The CPE radio included in your installation acts as a 5Ghz Wifi 6 router and can manage your network itself, but you are welcome to use your own router by connecting it to the open port on the PoE adapter.

All of our residential wireless service plans offer 50 Mbps upstream. Wales Wireless does not currently offer symmetrical connections, but these may be offered in the future as business-class service.

For comparison, Spectrum’s residential service offers between 10-35 Mbps upstream.

Call or text our Support number and you’ll speak to the technician who installed your equipment, who will help you troubleshoot any problems.

Range extenders are available for $36, which can be paid upfront or added to your bill as 12 monthly payments of $3. Unlike Spectrum, we’ll automatically take the charge off your bill once you’ve paid for the hardware in full.

The CPE radio included in your installation only supports the 5 GHz band. If you need a 2.4 GHz radio, you can supply your own router, or we offer an 802.11ac router for $60 upfront or $5/month for 12 months, which supports both the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. This router also doubles as a range extender.

We don’t offer mobile phone service yet, but as the business grows, mobile coverage is a relatively easy service to add, which will provide great value while improving overall cellular coverage in the Wales area. We expect prices to be comparable to those offered by Mint Mobile.

We don’t offer cable television, and we don’t plan to. Spectrum charges $40/month for cable, which doesn’t include the hidden fees, like the franchise fee and equipment fees. By cutting the cord, you’ll save enough to subscribe to multiple video streaming services at the ad-free tier and still pay less overall.

The current most-watched streaming service is YouTube, which does not have a monthly cost for ad-supported viewing, and yet it still offers more varied and in-depth content than a thousand cable TV channels. Plus, you can watch on your own schedule, whether you’re catching up on the latest new episode or binging through an old favorite. Cable just can’t offer the same range of content and convenience as internet video streaming, and yet it costs more. In the 21st century, cable just isn’t worth it.

No. In the days before broadband internet, when we connected through a 56k dial-up modem, the amount of data that needed to be sent was often far larger than the amount of available bandwidth, so in those days, videos and music had to be fully downloaded before being played, a process that could take hours. At that time, “speed” was important, because data transfer was slow. But we’re not in the 90’s anymore, and the rollout of broadband internet services ended that paradigm, enabling high-data services like live streaming and on-demand video platforms.

Spectrum’s advertising misleadingly focuses on “speed,” because the cultural inertia of that history makes it a more digestible marketing term than “bandwidth,” which is what actually matters. Corporate marketing departments don’t respect your intelligence enough to give you the technical details, but we do, so here’s how it works:

A single YouTube video uses up to 15 megabits per second of bandwidth at full quality. As long as your connection has enough bandwidth available, the “speed” of the connection is no different from one ISP to another — it’s 15 megabits per second. The 0’s and 1’s will always arrive at roughly the same speed, as long as you have enough capacity to receive them all from YouTube’s servers in real time.

For example, if you have 20 megabits per second (mbps) available, you could theoretically only stream one YouTube video on your network, without experiencing any slowdowns. If someone on your network starts watching a second video, your videos may all start to decrease in quality as your connection bottlenecks, since you are attempting to receive 30 megabits of data per second, when you are only able to receive 20 megabits. YouTube detects this automatically and lowers the quality of your video stream with adaptive encoding, which allows a 1080p video to stream smoothly with as little as 5 mbps, however the quality of the image may get better and/or worse over time.

In cases where the amount of bandwidth used by the service cannot be decreased adaptively, this sort of over-capacity usage would make the network seem “slow,” but the problem is congestion, not speed. For video streaming services that do not use adaptive bitrates, streaming two videos at 15 mbps each on a 20 mbps connection would result in both videos stuttering, since the data rate of the connection (the “band”) does not have the capacity (the “width”) for all of the data to transmit at full speed, resulting in both streams getting roughly 10 mbps of bandwidth each, less than the 15 required for a full-speed connection.

Wales Wireless’s lowest service tier offers twice as much available bandwidth compared to Spectrum’s bottom tier, at a lower cost, and our speeds are just as “blazing fast” as theirs.