Posted: 12/4/2008 6:12:33 PM EDT
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Howdy,
Anyone out there using a "starband" such as Hughesnet for an ISP? I am buying a house ouside of Duluth and there are no high speed providers in the area. All I have read are bad reviews for Satelite but I was wondering if anyone is having good luck with one. Turk |
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My brother has Wild Blue.
It is far better than dialup. He made a comment at thanksgiving this year while using his laptop at my parents (which have a cable modem and can get 6mbs+), he will be taking his laptop over to my parents house for software updates. If your choice is dialup or Satellite, and you have the ability for Sat reception, and you are addicted to the internet, then it will be worth it. My old boss had Satellite many years ago and he would choose it over dialup any day. My only comment will be to make sure you get a competent company to install your dish. It needs to be aimed rather precise for the bi-directional beams to work well. Your average roof monkey Sat installer will typically aim it "close enough" to receive but it will be flaky. As another option, have you looked into ISDN or IDSL? They can be repeated on the telco line, care less about load coils, and can run a long ways out from the Central Office compared to regular aDSL. It costs more than DSL and is 128kb or 144kb, but your latencies will be far lower than satellite. I doubt it would be any more expensive than Satellite, especially if you figure in startup costs. It's old, but it is far better than Dialup. Last, I don't know how far you are from your CO or how far outside Duluth you are, but have you pressed you telco for DSL? One trick is to have all your neighbors call and ask if they qualify (and ask to be put on the list to be notified if it changes). If there is enough interest, they frequently put your area on the list for a remote dslam. (Is your telco qwest, frontier, embarq, or other?). Our full time neighbor by our cabin up north finally qualified a couple months, ago after two years of on/off calls to updates. Other neighbors signing up as well helped justify the telco expense. |
