Who has Satellite Internet? Do you like it?

[Steeple]

David:

Thanks for the links!

[Xtreeme]

Surreal I feel your pain. I JUST recently got DSl in this area so I too only had dial up and sat to choose from. Lik eyou I found sat. to be more a joke then for real when balancing price/performance. Check with your phone co. We checked online for dsl locations, called verizon all that. NONE but few miles away was Verizon! Uh. Anyhow was talking to my phone service provider and they offered it to us. Just installed at the phone co! So watch for it. When its there it just is and it happens mighty fast. We live in a rural area too. The range from provider on dsl is alot more then is used to be. For 1.5mbps and higher its not to far. For 1mbps better. Can go several miles and get 512mbps perfectly fine...I am as I type this. And lastly their are some that offer 256k dsl that reeeeally goes pretty far. And they can boost it if their is enuff customers to expand. BUT- (always a catch) for that to work it must be digital capable. If you have call waiting the lines are o.k. atleast. But the actual POTS must be right and all that other technical telephone mumbo jumbo.(that somewhat confuses me)Now if not-then check into ISDN. They say anywhere you can get dial up you can get ISDN. Its more then Dial up but half dish with no huge hardware costs. Commitment etc. will be up to isp of course. So check your phone co for dsl and the local ISP's for isdn. Hey 128k for say $30 $35 would be better. Least the upload is 56k. And ping improves over D-up. Thats best you can do compaired to $40 for 512k dsl. I dont think mines capped cause Ive dw UT 2k4 demo. All map packs for it. Other half dw some newer demos. I got the new linux distros. LOL. +alot of MP gaming. If it is it must be atleast 10gig.

[Ritalin Kid]

Surreal - have you ever considered getting ISDN? I know it's old technology but it's still a good compromise, not as fast as Satelitte but faster than dial up plus no worries about cloud cover, thunderstorms, bandwidth limitations, expensive equipment, or contract.

My friend's dad lives out in BFE and Bellsouth ran wire to his house for dual channel 128K DSL. Install was $75, he pays $43.50 a month, and the ISDN modem can be had on EBay for $40-$50.

[sweeper2]

a year old thread...?? Surreal, what do you have now...?

[James T]

I put four 2-way satellite internet connections in for remote stations in Australia. 900ms pings are typical. That plays merry hell with games, the latency is horrible.

Once you get the data moving it's ok but VERY protocol specific, some protocols require handshaking (disasterous) some allow you to send a bunch of requests without having to wait for the reply (works well).

You can VPN into them, Windows 2000 IPSEC into Cisco VPN concentrator, but ... we ended up dropping that feature. We tried DCOM services over the VPN and forget it, 2 minute mouse lock-ups etc. TightVNC works a treat (with stunnel for security), pcAnywhere using cert's works too. One "interesting" little feature was that the satellite provider dropped the address off it's active list if you didn't do anything so keep-alive pings out of the box were a must while we were hosting VNC, etc. Internet explorer also good (and email would have been good).

Satellite is cool where you're remote, otherwise ... I'd never leave my DSL.