The wireless we have through a local power company is becoming less and less reliable. Tech support never answers a call. But, it's the only option in this rural area except for dial-up. Not close enough to a fiber optic line to get good service there. So thinking about a satellite service. We have Dish Network for TV, I know they have it. Anybody with good or bad experience with any of them?
This doesn't answer your question, but what is cell coverage like. I'm running my entire office network off of a cellular air card. Right now we're on 3G and just dying for 4G to hit my area.
Don't have 3G here at the house.
I do not have satellite internet service, but I looked hard at it a few years back. Pay close attention to the upstream vs. downstream speeds. If you only receive large files you should be fine but if things haven't changed the upload speeds are very slow so sending large files is a pain.
I had Hughesnet years ago; before DSL made it to our dirt road. Satellite was much better than dial-up, but does not come close to DSL (which is slower than the cable here at my office). With satelite, downloads are pretty fast, uploads are almost as slow as dial-up. There is a "lag" while surfing websites.
If it's your only option (other than dial up), I'd say it is worth it.
Dish TV bundles with Hughesnet.
I've had it for 5yrs and prefer DSL. I am still waiting for the phone company to install DSL on my side of the highway.
It is pretty good and probably the best dish internet service, like you, I do not have any other options for fast internet.
They will do the drop call on you if your downloads have been idle for awhile and sometimes it is slow to get their attention when you want to do an online binge.
If you are a night owl, they have free downloads from 1am to 6am central time. There is a download scheduler they furnish to make use of this policy. You can download a lot of info in 5hrs.
In the last five years, outage has been limited to weather until last week when the power converter went out. That cost $125+ since I did not have the $5 a month protection plan. Invoice has not come in yet.
You need a better view of the sky than for tv service as it requires a very stable and well aimed dish with no obstacle interference.
There are optional data threshold for download and 1 or 2 watt upload capabilities. The upload speed is much less than the download speeds that run from $60/mo to over $200/mo.
The installers are contractors that install many types of dish equipment. Three I have dealt with appear to be very informative and now their jobs well. Only other would not touch my computer to assist in getting the system running. That cost me over 20hrs with multiple rag wearing tech support members that did not know their business and kept referring to a manual. Once transferred to tech support in the states, it took about 90 mins. If the installer does not set up your computer, insist upon another, it is included in the free install.
0.02
We have two satellite dish sets which we use to provide internet access for field crews working in remote sites for a week or more. It's pretty much the same as a sat TV setup except that there are two cables to the modem box instead of one. Our kit includes a signal strength meter which the crew uses in setting up to locate and tune in the satellite on site. Once they're up and running it's approximately 4x the speed of an old style dial up modem.
The only real problem is that we have to buy a block of minutes when we want to use the service. If they aren't used within six months of purchase they expire, so we end up wasting a lot of them.
No cables or DSL on my street, yet.
We use WildBlue. It's cheaper than HughesNet, and from what my neighbors tell me, it's more reliable.
($57 a month)
:rain:
ps: it "Blanks out" when there are severe thunder storms to the SE. (so does the dish TV)
