Rural Internet Service

[Northwoods]

Well, we just finished moving out of the rental and into the house we'll really in 15-30 years.  Its far enough out of town that our internet service options are limited.  There's a Wild Blue dish (Direct TV's sat. internet) already on the side of the house.  One neighbor uses Hughes Net.  He said a couple others used Clear Wire, but we tried that and couldn't find a good enough signal from our house.  Wave broadband doesn't service our area.  Nor does Comcast or any other cable provider.  DSL is not available either. 

So, anyone on here have experience with Wild Blue or Hughes Net, or any other rural internet service options that would care to comment on the quality of the services?

[Jim147]

I'm on the end of the DSL in my area. I haven't tried the current version of Hughes Net but when I had the chance before DSL came here I stayed with dialup. I never could do all the things I do now. If I wanted to download a large file I would start it and go to bed.

If I was any farther away from the box my phone company does offer an omni-directional signal off their wireless towers.  I don't know if that might be an option in your area.

jim

[Brad Johnson]

Mom and Dad have Hughes Net.  While not the chrome-plated speed machine Hughes Net touts on their commercials, it's still a giant step above dial up.  Upload speeds can be a little slow, and they have this nasty habit of throttling down the connection after a certain amount of data in a particular session. (At least they used to.  It may not be the case now).

Rain fade is a PITA, but being in north Texas that's not much of a problem.  Youtube vids come through with only an very occasional buffering stoppage.  All in all it's MUCH better than dial-up, just understand there's usually a noticeable lag between clicking a selection on the web page and something actually happening on the screen.

Brad

[Boomhauer]

particular session. (At least they used to.  It may not be the case now).

They still do that. You have a limited early AM "no limit" period. Read Marko Kloos's experiences with Hughesnet at his MunchkinWrangler blog.

[Sergeant Bob]

Have you checked into wireless internet? I live ten miles out of town and get 1.5 meg service up and down.
Used to game quite well at 768K. Can't do that very well on satellite.

[BrokenPaw]

just understand there's usually a noticeable lag between clicking a selection on the web page and something actually happening on the screen.

This is worth repeating.  Bandwidth isn't the real killer for satellite-based internet services, latency is.  There's a noticeable lag while the signal crawls out to the geostationary bird and back.  This isn't so bad for large transfers, like youtube videos, because with properly-configured routers on both ends of the connection, only the beginning of the download is affected. 

Where latency will get you is on highly-transactional traffic, like web pages with lots of little elements; each one of those elements has to be asked for, and each request has to traverse the full satellite hop lag either once or twice (depending on the nature of the service).  A 1500msec lag may not sound like much, but when each of 20 elements on a page incurs that lag, you're up to 30 seconds of delay introduced solely by the hop lag.  Modern browsers tend to request multiple things at once, but they still only do so much in parallel, and so lag will still get you.

Online real-time gaming is essentially a non-starter on a satlink; you'll be shot to death waiting for responses from the server.

[gunsmith]

I'm using Hughes Net, it is ok but can be slow at times, out in the middle of nowhere I'm told by my neighbors  that it is the best you can get, by neighbor I mean 4 or 5 miles away.

[cfabe]

Check around for a local wireless internet provider. This is not satellite or cellular data card, but a wireless connection to a tower in the area. Usually smaller companies who may not advertise much. Ask neighbors with funny flat square, mesh dish, or yagi antennas on their houses.

[Northwoods]

Check around for a local wireless internet provider. This is not satellite or cellular data card, but a wireless connection to a tower in the area. Usually smaller companies who may not advertise much. Ask neighbors with funny flat square, mesh dish, or yagi antennas on their houses.

That would be Clear Wire or Wave Broadband.  Wave doesn't serve my neighborhood, and while some neighbors have Clear wire, for whatever reason we can't get a good enough signal at our house.

It looks we'll be doing Wild Blue.  Set up is set for Saturday.  Be nice as the neighbor's unsecured wireless is so spotty to connect to from my house that it's taken 10 minutes to get this to post.

[cfabe]

If your neighbor can get service, and you can even see their wifi router, you could easily set up a link to their house to share it for less than installing WildBlue will cost. If their provider will allow it, of course.

[Ben]

Are there any kind of booster antennas available for Clearwire like there are for 3G? I went through this at my parents' place, where I go a lot but still need to have some Internet access. This is just me, but I skipped the whole satellite thing and hung onto their 18k phone connection until a 3G antenna finally went up near them.

I just couldn't justify the expense of satellite which at the time I looked into it, still require a landline connection. Of course I would have only used it part time. Using it fulltime could justify it for you. Otherwise if 3G or 4G ever pop up where you are, IMO that's the way to go in a rural situation (i.e., no cable or DSL), since you also have the option of taking it with you when you travel somewhere, etc.

[AJ Dual]

Another problem with satellite internet is that the dial-up outbound connection causes you to have a split IP session, one IP for the satellite inbound, and another for the dial-up outbound, which certain websites view as an attack or scam activity.

You may find you can't log into your bank or credit card website etc.  And other things/websites may work intermittently or not at all.

Many/most web services that need to track session state do so through cookies or long random URL strings these days, the prevalance of LAT and NAT and the IPV4 scheme running out of addresses pretty much mandated it, even if it wasn't a better practice anyway. However having two IP's be a problem can still come up, where some router does not like your split session and it just won't work.

[stevelyn]

Don't use it myself, but HughesNet is pretty popular in rural Alaska where people living in the bush outside of villages are completely off the grid.

[Tallpine]

the neighbor's unsecured wireless is so spotty to connect to from my house that it's taken 10 minutes to get this to post.

Well, then your neighbor needs to upgrade his/her wireless system so that it works better for you 

[Grandpa Shooter]

We have Wild Blue in town and out on the property.  It is not fast, but it does the job for me.  The only time we had trouble was when Lady Shooter was on all the time playing on line games.  If you suck up too much of the available service in your area they shut you down and you can't get back on until your usage averages out to what they have allowed.  In our case it would have kept us shut down for 6 weeks.

I used up our one free pass to get back on.  They said that if we did that again the rate per month would double.  It hasn't happened since.

Of course now we are sucking up Tallpine's service.