Have you thought about Verizon Wireless Internet?
“What I really want to avoid is paying money for the setup and finding out after a month or so that the service sucks and I’m locked into a 24 month plan that would cost a few hundred dollars to get out of.”
Can you not express exactly that to the rep?
Wireless IE Verizon or Alltel
If Hughes net is like my directv, forget having a signal on a rainy day. If you live in the boonies, it’s still better than nothing tho.
Interesting. I’m moving to the booneys of Kentucky and I have been wondering about this as well. I just assumed I would go Sattelite. I didn’t realize it would be expensive.
WIldBlue is the best of the satellite options, with the least latency. However, a great latency may be 700 milliseconds to a website for the next exchange of communication. With DSL or cable, a good latency might be 40-70 milliseconds.
Satellite would make interactive voice, video, or gaming, quite annoying. However, other web activities won't seem too bad.
The throughput on WildBlue was almost 1.5 MB/sec, which is as much as twice the speed of low-end-DSL. I was very impressed.
But I do a lot of Skype Voice-over-IP stuff, so I'd have a fit with satellite, as it wouldn't be practical with my usage.
You might look into WiMax installs in your area, as that access would be great. Otherwise, Sprint is supposed to have unlimited internet for a reasonable price, which might be 2 Mb/sec burst, with an average of 400-60 Kb/sec. Verizon limits it to 5 GB for the month, so they wouldn't be worth looking into. Sprint would have a latency of up to 130 milliseconds with a PCMCIA modem, which is still very doable with voice and video.
I hope this helps.
Well, this was easy: http://www.wildbluesatellite.net/
My problem solved...worst case scenario anyway...
I suspect you won’t be happy with 2-way sat internet. I had a friend on it for years and he could never get much more than 10k/sec up and up to about 40k down. If it rained or snowed, he was offline.
Is there any method you can improve your current provider? Perhaps put your antennae on a pole or say a 40 foot tower?
You’ll probably have better results in the end.
By the way, VPN would be exceeding slow on such a high-latency connection, with most incarnations of it.
The problem with high latency comes from the need to get frequent acknowledgment packets. Much of the behavior with websites needs very little constant confirmation. Secure connections generally need constant confirmation.
Your no gaming saves you, as satellite latency kills it. Mostly the same for VPN.
Satellite is fine for watching video where you need bandwidth but don’t care about latency. FTP is slow over satellite for multiple files (the up to one second latency hits for each file), so zip into one file, upload/download, then unzip on the destination machine. SSH is hit or miss, ask the provider whether they have certain optimizations that can help SSH performance, demand a demo if they claim it works well.
My sat experience taught me to just get a dedicated POTS line and run at 56K ... yes, it was ‘that’ bad.
One other possible option: microwave. This require line-of-sight, and here in the Midwest, it is usually the top of silos where you orient the receiver toward.
Their latency, as I recall from a former client, was about a third of satellite.
Or you can wait on Obamessiah’s promise of broadband access free for everyone :)
>> I had a local provider install a 900 MHz link. When it works, it works well. So far it seems to work very intermittantly <<
How high is your antenna? Put it on top of a 75’ Rohn tower and you might be OK!
(Unless there’s high hill between you and the nearest repeater station.)
I don’t know the future of this, but I’ve had Clearwire for nearly a year and love it. Not as fast as the fastest DSL, but faster than Satellite, and you can move around.
http://www.rcrwireless.com/article/20081205/WIRELESS/812049987/1096/MVNO/812049987/
I run a wireless ISP. If your 900 wireless is intermittent, get the ISP to fix it. I haven’t generally found much that can’t be overcome eventually with effort and a little trial and error.
Raising the antenna, re aiming, etc, are often the real fixes for 900 intermittency.
for the most part, 900 can fool the installer, by having a stronger “bounce” than direct signal, and the installer will point the antenna at the bounce, which turns out to be dependent on weather, temperature, etc.
If nothing else, it’s also possible to do inexpensive “relay” sites. I can build a 900 relay site for about 700 bucks with the equipment I use, and it works very well.
it was great for large files before hughes instituted its fair access policy and throttled back bandwidth .. anyway anything would beat dial-up but too many medical bills now, so what the hey.
any modern satellite system requires it be installed by fcc licensed tech because of transmitting to satellite.