Satellite internet?

steve remchak · **Posted:** Wed Jun 03, 2009 9:53 pm

my Father lives in the hinterlands of PA and has only dial-up access. he is very frustrated with dial-up. what is the deal with Sat connectivity. is it expensive? does it work? he has Sat TV and likes that.

Gwen Habenicht · **Posted:** Wed Jun 03, 2009 10:15 pm

steve remchak wrote:

my Father lives in the hinterlands of PA and has only dial-up access. he is very frustrated with dial-up. what is the deal with Sat connectivity. is it expensive? does it work? he has Sat TV and likes that.

It’s better than dial up by a very small margin. You can download pictures in a more reasonable amount of time, but it is still slow. No good if you have an on line game player that requires patches, etc. It's also weather sensitive. Very overcast, rain, etc, and you're down for awhile. I used it at work for awhile. There are limits to the amount you can download and if you surpass your quota you get knocked off for 24 hours. One of my employees who lives @ the kennel tried it, but he’s a gamer and it was no good at all for him. We’ve now changed to Sprint USB device and have had much more success. If your father has cell phone access in his area I’d suggest finding the company that provides the best service in the area and go in that direction. I paid $69 a month for Hughes.net and I pay about $60 for Sprint. Sprint is still slower than DSL, but it’s livable. And, it’s unlimited usage.

TomFreeman · **Posted:** Wed Jun 03, 2009 11:19 pm

I don't have experience with sat, but I will throw in my $.02 on wireless broadband over the cell phone network. For casual web browsing, email, and other basic internet use, it's respectably fast. All the major wireless providers have offerings, and many of the smaller providers. I've used Sprint and Verizon.

I've used it in some fairly rural settings, so there's a fairly good chance that it will work where he lives.

steve remchak · **Posted:** Thu Jun 04, 2009 7:24 am

they don't have a cell phone. only one type seems to work up there so i will look into that. thanks for the info.

Richard Casto · **Posted:** Thu Jun 04, 2009 8:00 am

Gwen Baake wrote:

One of my employees who lives @ the kennel tried it, but he’s a gamer and it was no good at all for him.

It absolutely is not good for online gamers. Generally a requirement for decent online play is low latency times. That is the time it takes for your signal to travel to the remote game server. Decent latency from a gamers perspective can be measured in a few tenths of seconds or less. With geostationary sats, you have to deal with the fact that they are over 22 thousand miles in space. With the limits of the speed of light and the distances involved, they insert about a 1/2 second delay into all communications on top of any normal ground based delays.

BriceJohnson · **Joined:** Thu Apr 13, 2006 7:33 am **Posts:** 2230

my parents have it, steady state download is fast. Upload is awful, and latency is annoying. . .

Kevin Harvey · **Posted:** Thu Jun 04, 2009 12:09 pm

I had it for several years when we lived in northern Illinois. At the time, it was my only option for broadband, so we went with it. It works, is not the cheapest thing, and you can do what you want to do. However, if DSL or cable is available, go that route over satellite. I love DTV, but their satellite internet is not nearly as good.

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