Posted: 7/18/2006 10:24:17 PM EDT
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My grandmother lives in an area of Florida where the phone company does not want to provide DSL service. Cable internet is not available as well... What about satelite access? Do these services work well? Anybody tried Wild Blue or another provider? |
Is WIMAX an 802.11 solution? I have no idea... Told Grandma that I would look into a solution for her...satelite seems like the only option. She lives in Hernando county, Florida. My Grandmother is high tech.... gotta have her internet 
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| We use DirecWay at work. It downloads fairly fast, 1.5-2mb/sec usually. Upload is about 128-256k on average. The kicker is the latency, its great for internet surfing, but crap for gaming. If I had no other options (bitchin fast cable at home) I'd use direcway, it works well. |
Ugh....even more expensive than Wild Blue... Any WIMAX providers in the Hernando County, FL area? Granny doesn't do gaming...she needs the fast connection for work and to download pictures of the great grand kids... |
Satelite doesn't work well - very laggy, prone to outages, slow speeds... That's the one problem with being out in the boonies.... |
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We have Wildblue now, because satelite is the only alternative to dialup. It's slow, but not as slow as dialup. We lose the signal a couple times per day, for about 10 minutes, but that's better than being kicked off line constantly when on dialup. Wildblue is still running a special, at least around here, where the $179 installation is free. All you pay is $300 for equipment, and $50 per month. Storms do block the signal, but our electricity usually goes out too so it's a non-issue. It's still worth it to live where we do. I love it here. |
Unless you are in a big city like Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville, Gainesville etc. Granny is SOL. Tell her to keep calling the phone company like I do to try & get DSL. Otherwise Wild Blue is the only option at this point. She can do like I do and go by the local Library and use the WiFi on a laptop when she has graphics intensive stuff to down load. Hell, my dial up is so bad I didn't even have a dial tone this morning  ETA: You can check granny's zipcode here and see if there are any wireless solutions for her fl-wireless.com/default.asp |
| Wild Blue here west of Richmond... Overall I'm pleased with it as my only other choice was dial up... If I had a choice it would be cable or DSL but you do sacrifice some things to live out in the country. I don't think you'll be sorry with Wild Blue and I doubt your grandmother is an online gamer so latency shouldn't be a problem for her. It does go out from a bad storm but it has to be pretty bad for that to happen. |
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WildBlue! is the best commercial satellite Internet service, and it also costs less than the competition (and I work for DirecTV/DirecWay). The two big problems with it are: - latency - bandwidth throttling The sat has a limited amount of bandwidth that all users have to share, and it can't be expanded (unlike land lines, where you just run additional cabling). So, if you start using "excessive" amounts of bandwidth, you will be throttled down under your TOS. If you continue to do this on a regular basis, you'll have your account closed. You won't have a problem using the web or emailing or anything, but if you're trying to run a peer-to-peer file-sharing app or something, you'll get throttled quick. It *is* the best solution if you can't get a wired or WiMax solution. -Troy |