Posted on 05/28/2005 11:58:37 PM PDT by HAL9000
Six years in the making and at a cost of nearly $500 million, a satellite Internet service for rural America now has an official launch date.Denver-based WildBlue Communications announced plans Thursday to roll out its high-speed Internet service on June 2, with Strasburg as the company's first market.
A Strasburg couple with two teenage sons, a Dell computer and 26-inch satellite dish has signed on as WildBlue's first subscriber.
Theresa Tuttle says it's "simply awesome" that her family will soon be able to surf the information highway as quickly as any city slicker with a DSL line. Husband Dave works for the Adams County Highway Department, but she runs a family portrait and photography business out of their home.
"I've lived here all my life," she said. "We have tumbleweeds and dirt, no Kmart or King Soopers, and I have no complaints as far as that goes. But with the digital world and where we're headed, getting on the Internet just isn't fast enough."
Cable service isn't an option for the Tuttles, whose nearest neighbor in the community of 2,400 is two miles away. The broadband movement also has sidestepped their local phone company, forcing the Tuttles to make do in cyberspace with a slow-moving, standard dial-up.
WildBlue says its $50-a-month service will offer homes and small businesses an Internet connection via satellite that is 30 times faster than standard dial-up.
The company, backed by John Malone's Liberty Media, is targeting a national rural market that includes 25 million to 30 million homes and small businesses. In Colorado alone, WildBlue estimates 1.5 million homes and businesses don't have access to DSL or cable.
WildBlue Chief Executive Tom Moore said Strasburg, roughly 30 miles east of Denver, is representative of the nation's rural communities in search of a viable, affordable broadband Internet model. Homes and neighborhoods are spread far apart, ruling out the arrival of broadband cable and DSL in the foreseeable future.
The town's Main Street straddles the border of Adams and Arapahoe counties. Wheat fields surround family-owned farms and a growing number of tiny subdivisions.
"We're after those 25 million homes that can't get anything," Moore said. "If it wasn't for a company like WildBlue, families like the Tuttles would be on dial-up for a long time to come."
According to one research group - the Center for the Study of Rural America - only 5 percent of communities with fewer than 10,000 residents have broadband access.
EchoStar Communications, the Douglas County satellite-TV provider, is testing Internet services, and larger rival DirecTV has a small Internet-by-satellite program. Yet as of last year, satellite accounted for less than 2 percent of all high-speed connections in the country.
WildBlue promotes itself as the only company founded specifically for satellite Internet. Its state-of-the-art satellite launched last summer is leased from Canada-based Telesat, another large WildBlue shareholder.
Another major shareholder, National Rural Telecom Co-op, has been contracted to market the service. In addition to WildBlue's basic $50-a-month service fee, the NRTC will charge subscribers a one-time $300 fee to cover installation and equipment.
Moore said he doesn't expect WildBlue's national rollout in June and July will require a bigger work force than the company's current 130 employees. The number of subscribers the company hopes to sign up in its first year is confidential.
"How long it takes us to get there, we don't spend a lot of time talking about. But we think the potential market is huge," he said.
DSL won't work at distances greater than 18,000 feet from the switching office. That's 18,000 of wire length not as the crow flies. It's not an option for rural areas.
Wake me up when these high-speed "services" get down to $15 per month. Otherwise, I'll stick with dial-up.
Have you checked to see if any of the microwave based systems are available?
Cable and DSL are already cheaper than adding an additional phone line + dial up internet service, and they are much faster. They can easily be added to a LAN so that multiple users at a home or business can access the internet simultaneouly.
It wouldn't be a maybe if you had it. I just checked my download speed by downloading a 4mb spyware checker from download.com. 476kbs was my download speed. That and I typically have sub 50ms pings for the online games I play.
Yep that is right.
Second phone line was $35 a month plus all the taxes added to it (really adds up to about $45 a month). 2 56k dial-up accounts @ $15 a piece = $75 a month.
1 DSL account 1.5/384 @ $60 a month. Plus I run 4 PC's though it.
Yes, that would be correct.
I was in another country some years ago and had a number of journo friends. Their reporting was politically slanted but I let it slide, until we had a series of confrontational events which gained global attention.
Suddenly the stories went from merely slanted to outright exaggeration, deliberate misreporting, and ... yes ... outright lying.
I pretty much stopped hanging out with them after that.
BTW, God bless, and stay low/safe over there. There are a *lot* of us who support what you're doing, even though you're not hearing it from the media. You already knew that, since you're here at FR, but it doesn't hurt for one more of us to say it.
DirecPC has been around for about 10 years. I did my first install in the spring of 1995. DirecPC required you to connect via land line. All your uploads went via modem, while the downloads were routed back over satellite
DirecWay has only been with us for a few years. It's the consumer version of the VSAT service and offers satellite uploads as well as downloads.
I worked for an electronics company when DirecPC was first launched and we distributed DirecPC. I spent a lot of time on the bleeding edge of this launch and at one point used to get customer support calls sent to me when the DirecPC support folks didn't know the answer.
Things have changed. See post 53. No need for a land line anymore.
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