Not sure how many of you had to deal with this... oddly enough the problem exists in Miami Beach. More specifically, I live near South Beach. We have AT&T as the only service provider and old school above ground electrical wires. Normally upload speed caps at about 3mb, which is pretty good, however during thunderstorms (and we're in the tropics so this occurs pretty often) it drops to about 600-800kbs. I'm just wondering what are local fixes you guys have encountered to dealing with the monopoly ISP issues. Lobbyists are pushing towards lower highway tolls (as sometimes it goes to european prices of $20 for a toll) and the corruption is massive that first off, not many residents stay long term so the ISP issue doesn't ever become "known."

So far I have tried (with the unlimited metroPCS data) hotspotting my internet during a storm and it seems to work, but it's not good enough for competitive gaming (about 200ping during overwatch matches)

In my sig you can see what are some of the effects of these thunderstorms are, even with ethernet connection. Maybe the router isn't properly built for EMF? What do you guys think, or know of relative experiences.

You want a better connection move to a better region for it. Just one of the trades offs for living in a rural area.
Sadly theres no other option cause your not going to install the lines on your dollar I assume and its not worth it for the ISP's either to install em.

conundrum is that it isn't a rural area, it's a city, a quick google shows population of 91k in 2014 via census.gov.

yeah I was thinking about that latter bit. Heard on NPR that some city was without internet access completely and they were petitioning to have gov. subsidy to build a service tower so that their "kids can catch up to the other kids in their school for internet." But they acknowledged how their city was already struggling economically, and I was wondering "why don't they just make the town deserted and merge with a neighboring town that has internet?"
I know some rural areas are forced to drive a couple miles (usually cross-state, since they live on the border of their state) to an internet cafe and pay $$$ to use the internet.