harp

i stay in a rural location and was getting broadband( slowest speed) for about 5 months, up until a couple of weeks ago,
my phone line is at the end of the exchange and i've been told by aol and bt i'll no longer get it, as the exchange is getting busier with new houses getting connected (Bt engineer told us we were lucky to get it in the first place)

So my question is, does anybody use satellite broadband? and know cost of set up and monthly rental.

i Have a sky dish on the house, it was here when we moved in although i'm not connected to sky, can i use it to connect?

Thanks
Kev

Miles

Main thing to watch out for is latency, ie downloading big files will be ok, online gaming will suffer badly. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet

harp

I don't do the online gaming thing, so no probs there.
But it looks like it's going to cost a lot more for even slower than i had

Criss

Try ISDN or home highway although ive heard they are not installing it any more!

Its not super slow but not super fast! 128k

boxst

Hello

I was playing with lots of different technologies a couple of years ago whilst campaigning to get wireless in my town.

Satellite is okay. It is expensive, and suffers from latency (as mentioned above). So the request for something is slow, but it is delivered quickly.

ISDN is fine, but slow at 64k or 128K, although most ISP's do not do the bonding required to have 2 lines connected (which is what you need for 128K).

If you have a friendly neighbour, you can set up a wireless connection to their house. Possible with an aerial on their roof and on yours. This is perfectly acceptable and cheap these days.

Steve

RussBoy

Hi,

This probably won't help you too much but I live in the mountains in Spain not far from Malaga and because of our rural and remote location we have to use Satellite Broadband. We have a 2Mb connection and it's certainly better than the terrestrial Broadband we had when living in the UK. Problems for us are latency though, but by persuading our provider to up bandwidth quite considerably, we seem to have got around that one too.

Only other issue is IP address recognition (for us - probably won't be an issue for you) - we use satellite before the connection heads underground somewhere in Madrid using Telefonica's backbone then connecting to a Belgian satellite - this means sites like Google serve us in Flemish sometimes and some ecommerce sites don't allow us to order as our IP doesn't reconcile with where we say we are...

Bottom line is, satellite services can be very good and everyone around here uses them and for us it's not at all expensive (£250 install and £25 a month unlimited).

Cheers,


Russ