Looking for comments from anyone using internet via satellite dish or through their wireless modem (like verizon). About to move to a rural area with few choices and wondered which one to use. I'm a programmer by trade and need fairly zippy access for work.

I have a friend out in Front Royal who has internet thru satellite, and he hates it. He bitches about it being too slow and it drops out alot. He wants to switch back to dial-up, but he's still under contract, which adds to the frustration.

Many people in Front Royal have cable or DSL.. Heck. People on top of the mountains in Haymarket have cable. Do you actually KNOW you can't get high-speed where you're looking? I know there are a lot of places, but you might be surprised.

Schmidt Wrote:
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> About to move to a rural area
> with few choices and wondered which one to use.

the actual name and location of the rural place you are going to would be helpful. also, what exactly do you need "zippy" internet access for? if you are just doing file transfers for your job, it's best to do a "remote desktop" approach.

you could always use several shotgun modems with POTS.  ^_^

another way of going about this is getting website hosting that gives you access to a full virtual server in which case you can use ssh with X11 forwarding to do all the work for you and it just transmits a steady stream of data as you scroll web pages. if you really just need to do file transfers for code and programs and the like, this method would work lovely.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

We're relocating down to the Northern Neck by the water in a small town called Edwardsville. There are obviously dialup choices but there's no way in hell I'm going back :-) There's a wifi company out of Kilmarnock but their reach isn't quite to us yet. It looks like my only choice is to go wireless or satellite.

shotgunning is pie-in-the-sky bandwidthwise and financially impractical, but I give you credit for thinking outside the box. That is a technology that thankfully never caught on.

First of all, the ISP has to support it, and a search I did last year indicated that the few around here that did support shotgunning support MAX two simultaneous connections. Then as gravis said, you need a seperate modem and phone line for each link.

Then there is the fact that Diamond owned the shotgun technology, and I think they stopped selling them years ago. I suppose you get two on ebay easily.

Oh yeah not to mention modems are 90% bullshit and the actual usable portion of the "high speed connection" will probably be very low. The practical speed you will achieve will be faster than a regular v.90 modem alone, but still will not come close to even crappy old isdn... and satellite internet is usually better than (single channel or dual channel) isdn, at the least.

I was just down there a couple of weeks ago in Sharps, VA and there was no cable tv service much less internet. What was surprising, however, was that my sprint phone got 4 bars and EVDO coverage down there. This was right on the water, about 15 miles west of Edwardsville so I dont know if you'll have the same luck, but it's something to consider.

If nothing else, satellite isn't too bad. Downloading large files is pretty snappy. Webpages are less so. The problem is satellite lag. You get roughly a quarter second lag on EVERY request. Webpages are usually made of lots of comparatively small graphics, plugins, etc. So full loading will often take several seconds.

However, it's still way better than dialup. The above-mentioned EVDO option wouldn't be bad either, if it reaches.

Isn't the upload for sattelite done via a phone line? I think that's why my friend was always bitching about it.

It used to be. Probably still is in some case. But I think the better services figured out how to make the satellite do duplex.

im not sure how far you are from everything but you could use some yagi wifi antennas perhaps even as repeaters. if you set them up properly, you could go 5 miles on two repeater hops. ^_^

a yagi antenna is a directional antenna. this is what the whole pringles can stuff was about.

google search for yagi antennas
online store with cheap yagi antennas

i dont know how you could manage to set this all up... but perhaps you could find someone in town that is willing to split a bill or something. i dont know, just a thought.

just wondering... how far from the closest broadband connection? if you do the satellite sollution, you could get a prefetching/spidering program or addon for you browser or something. i dont know if they exist though :P


anagogue Wrote:
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> If nothing else, satellite isn't too bad.
> Downloading large files is pretty snappy. Webpages
> are less so. The problem is satellite lag. You get
> roughly a quarter second lag on EVERY request.

yet another argument to use inline base64 encoded images in webpages.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

if you get such good cell phone coverage, how about of those adapters for a laptop that gets you internet by usign the cell phone network.

KeepOnTruckin Wrote:
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> if you get such good cell phone coverage, how
> about of those adapters for a laptop that gets you
> internet by usign the cell phone network.

EXPENSIVE


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."