That’s fine as long as Wildblue didn’t oversell the *(@#& beam. And didn’t extend the latency on the *(#&$ gateway. And knock 25% off your *(@#&$ limit without warning and no price deduction.
I had WB for two years. They were great for the first couple of months; then they got greedy. My service tanked and since WB is marketed as a fixed wireless internet option for residences, there is no way on God’s green earth you’re going to stay under a measly 7.5GB cap a month when you have teenagers.
Satellite is not, I repeat, NOT broadband. The latency is too long, long enough to cause SSL sites to time out and make banking impossible. I could’ve put up with $70 internet bills. My speed was 1mb (on a good day) but I was OK with it. The straw that broke this camel’s back was the nuisance of having to play FAP cop.
I’m just 30 miles west of Ann Arbor and use a grandfathered Alltel (TRUE unlimited) aircard for our internet. They were fantastic...and then VZW took over. Frontier is scheduled to deploy DSL any day now — Michigan company Turnkey ran the final checks on the DSLAM last week and all is a go — but the deployment was scheduled BEFORE the Obamimation took office.
I understand we’ll never see cable, let alone FIOS. There are areas where wimax and LTE could be deployed reasonably. But some providers (:koffAT&TComcastCoxkoff:) are convinced we ruralites don’t want internet. No; we just assume it’s not available which is mostly true.
I had a big huge fight with WB when we were on satellite and got cut off completely for two weeks(!) I asked WHY in the WORLD we couldn’t get as much bandwidth as we wanted and were willing to pay for. After a lot of hemming and hawing the rep told me the Fed Gov limits how much they can sell to any individual user and that it MANDATES cutoff after violating the satellite Internet Terms of Service. I did NOT prompt her to blame the gov’t.