Posted on 03/12/2013 4:39:51 PM PDT by waterhill
Just got a call from Dish, internet only in my rural area for 50 bucks a month and a 50 buck install fee, no tv (I don't watch that stuff mostly). My Sprint Aircard costs me 75 or better and is unreliable. Thoughts? Not a promo, just flat 50 for the rest of my life. Hmmm... Better than Hughesnet? and the others? Inquiring.....
I’d LOVE to dump Comcast. Their politics really piss me off!
Hope this space fills up with comments.
I’d love to dump Sprint (my Aircard number, it is awful, even with a booster and antenna)!
Dish network, to the best of my knowledge, does not do satellite internet. I looked into it a year ago, and they just piggyback on existing cable connections.
Hughes and Excede both offer true satellite internet. There are tradeoffs compared to cable. First, speed is low. This is caused by really slow ping speed — it can take a full second + for the ping to complete. You can’t game on it because by the time your ping completes you’ve been corpse hunted two or three times over. On pages with many different elements, this adds substantially to load times. The speed is also affected by weather — snow in the winter dropped us down to dial up speeds sometimes. Rain sucks. Even on good days, it’s like DSL x2 or so. Not super fast, but acceptable.
Second, the satellite signal drops out occasionally. Much more often than cable. Again, rain, wind or snow are the usual culprits.
Third, the internet will see your location as the site where the satellite is beaming to, not your house. I see this as a feature and not a bug.
Fourth, that $50/month will typically only get you 10gb of data per month. I run out about 25 days in typically. They drop me down to about 1/2 DSL speed at that point. Don’t try to watch youtube video at that speed.
On the other hand, I’m way out in the sticks, I don’t care that much about speed, my smartphone can handle many internet tasks when the satellite is down, and the price is better than paying them to finish running the cable line the final half mile out to my house. But the minute I have access to cable, I’m dumping the satellite.
I have Time-Warner Cable (Roadrunner) and it is expensive and every 5-10 minutes it seems like it goes through some sort of reset, where I sit and wait 20 seconds for my internet explorer screen to refresh
I dont know if it is the crappy modem that alos provides mediocre phone service or what, but I am done with paying $89 a month for crap
Anyone here have experince with Dish (Internet and TV)? they have a great $19 a month TV deal right now and with internet and TV would pay less than I pay for just internet and phone with time-warner
Not satellite but good for many rural areas.
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/homefusion/hf/main.do
Didn’t have Dish for Internet, but have had Hughes. Wouldn’t do satellite Internet again if that were the only way to get Internet service.
The problem with satellite Internet is that they have a finite amount of bandwidth to sell and, once it’s gone, your speed will start to decrease because they will play the odds and keep selling bandwidth they don’t have. With Hughes, our Internet speed decreased below dialup, even though we were paying for T-1 bandwidth.
We evntually chucked the whole thing and went with an AT&T hotspot since there is no cable service where I live.
i could see how downloads would be fast but uploads by satellite? Let me guess, phone line?
Yep
I have FiOS and I get 19 mbps download and 22 mbps upload - well, some of the time. lol
I have been using satellite internet for years, in large measure because I have no better choice. I was a Wildblue customer and now use Excede, who bought Wildblue.
The difference is that Wildblue and Hughes Net use Ku band satellites and Excede uses Ka band satellites. I have the highest end service with Excede. The performance is an order of magnitude better than my old Ku band service. But, there are times when it sucks due to bandwidth saturation and precipitation attenuation. On balance, Ka band, at least as implemented by Excede, has proven far superior to Ku band.
If they ever get point to point microwave or similar technology in my part of flyover country, I will drop satellite in a heartbeat, but for right now it’s the best thing available. My Verizon iPhone hot spot is what I use when the satellite is down, but it’s a poor substitute as I am in a fringe area.
I have Dish for TV, never tried it for internet. Years back, when the only high speed hopes for my area were still twenty years off-— I got Hughesnet. It was certainly a big improvement over the dial up connection I had before, because I live so far out in the sticks, dial up wouldn’t ever stay connected. I had to buy the satellite dish and the modem, @about 1500.00, and paid 120 a month for internet. Before you sign a contract, find out if they have a “fair use” policy, with limits your download data per day. It’s MISERABLE, when the wind blows your dish out of alignment, you have no internet, when the snow covers your dish, you have no internet, when there is an electrical storm, or even a sunstorm, you have no internet.
Other than that, it’s all just great.
I’ve installed over 400 of these over the years, both residential and commercial, so I’ve got a good idea of how these units perform. Or don’t perform as is more often the case.
Before I go any further, let me cut to the chase: NONE, and I repeat, NONE of the conventional services are going to deliver what they promise. Here are the issues:
1. High latency - ping times usually no better than 500msec and typically much, much worse. As in 1500-1800 msec. This can and does play hell with timing-sensitive software.
2. Usage caps, otherwise known as bandwidth rationing. This goes under the rubric of “Fair Access Policy,” or FAP. That’s going to become one of your favorite cuss words, I assure you.
3. Sketchy reliability. A less than absolutely perfect installation will kill you. Remember - these are TV guys doing the install, not anyone with any real knowledge of networks. Most providers make no claims for reliability. IOW, no SLA or Service Level Agreement.
4. Asymmetric service - download will generally be much ‘faster’ than upload, often by a factor of 3 or 4 to 1.
5. Poor VPN support. A VPN essentially creates a secure ‘tunnel’ through the internet so that an individual can securely access his organizations private network. Here’s the problem with VPNs over most VSAT networks: the games the VSAT ISPs play to make their connections seem faster are basically sabotaged by the nature of a VPN tunnel. VPN packets AND their headers are encrypted and cannot be ‘read’ by the WAN accelerators back at the VSAT ISP Network Operations Center, or NOC. As a result, the connection defaults to the REAL native speed of the link - which will not be much better than dialup.
Now, having said all that, there is only one service of which I am aware that eliminates most - but not all - of these issues. That’s a commercial service provided by an outfit called iDirect. Look ‘em up - http://www.idirect.net . They typically use 1.2 or 2 meter dishes, big 4 watt transmitters and can offer a no-cap service. They also offer service level agreements that pretty much guarantee 99% uptime short of an asteroid strike. The iDirect service is VPN transparent, offers roughly 500-600 msec latency, and more importantly, their service drastically limits what’s called ‘contention ratio’. That’s the number of sites that contend for the shared bandwidth that all of these providers use. Compare iDirect’s 20-to-1 versus the 100-to-1 or much, much more from other services.
I’ve used this service for isolated state government offices and the USGS with great success. Currently I use iDirect to support some of our more remote quarries and plants where you can’t even get cell phone service. It ain’t cheap: about $3K USD for the gear, about a third of that for a competent - and I stress competent - installation, plus the MRC - the monthly recurring charge. That’s comparable to what you’ll pay for T1 service if you could get it.
I realize that this is a lot to throw at you, but it’s what any decent consultant with commercial VSAT experience will tell you. Let me state unequivocally that 99% of the claims made by most satellite ISPs are pure, unadulterated BS. Don’t trust any of ‘em.
22 UP?? Jebus!
Read the fine print.
I have cable Internet and find other forms (satellite/mobile) higher prices and less capacity (speed and download/upload).
Mobile, even those advertising unlimited service, bottleneck when usage exceeds a certain amount — typically 5 gb per month.
I have not seen Dish or DirectTV providing Internet. The times I have checked both, they only offer Internet through a separate provider.
I just checked dish.net. No mention of internet only.
I was suprised to see upload faster than download
I had Wildblue satellite (Now excede) for years and finally the modem gave out. In my area, they want everyone to be on the excede service (which is much faster) but the satellite is much lower in the sky and I live out in the woods so it would have cost me nearly 3k to get all the trees cut down to get a clear signal (and WB would not replace my modem to use the old service). Got the Verizon home fusion service instead and while pretty expensive it is fantastically fast and does not have the latency issues my satellite did.
CS
Found this satellite internet via dish.com:
http://www.dish.com/entertainment/internet-phone/satellite-internet/?WT.svl=advantages
The prices go from $39.99 to $69.99 with 5 gb, 10gb, 15 gb packages. The gb usage can become important, if you do huge downloads or watch many high def movies/videos online.
[My cable internet provides me with 200 gb usage for $54. My typical usage is around 50-75 gb per month, depending on how much I watch Netflix movies.]
Had Hughes ... same issues. Paid for the highest speed and it kept getting slower. I felt I was subsidizing all those beneath me. I had to get up around 3AM to get any work done. Frontier finally hooked us up and for a fraction of the cost.
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