Less Low Speed Access

[Eddie Watkins]

I am looking for any kind of connection that will increase my access speed. Currently, on dial-up I can achieve about 26kbps. I checked into the Sprint broadband and do not have good enough signal. The options I am aware of are satellite, both Wild Blue and DirectWay, and AT&T (cingular) says they offer a data service with some of their cell phones which allows the phone to act as a modem essentially creating a one computer WiFi. Does anybody have any experience with any of these or know of others you would recommend. I am retiring next Friday (GLOAT:D !!!) and will loose any broadband connection I have access to. With all the new bells and whistles being added to the web pages 26k conection speed is becoming unacceptable. Part of my new endeavors require web access so I am getting deperate.

Eddie

[Jason Beam]

Can't you get Cable?

Cable around here is #2 as far as speeds go. Plus, it doesn't have nearly the distance limitations that DSL does, so you should have decent performance no mater where you are.

The #1 around here is Fiber ... but that's limited to major areas. You might hunt around for fiber optic service, if it's available. One company here that does it is SureWest.

[Eddie Watkins]

Can't you get Cable?

Cable around here is #2 as far as speeds go. Plus, it doesn't have nearly the distance limitations that DSL does, so you should have decent performance no mater where you are.

The #1 around here is Fiber ... but that's limited to major areas. You might hunt around for fiber optic service, if it's available. One company here that does it is SureWest.
Jason,
I don't have cable. I live in the country and neither are available. I called the cable and phone company and the cable guys have no plans of expanding in our direction and teh phone company said fiber was closer than the last time i checked but had no idea when it would be available.

eddie

[Lee Schierer]

We were able to get high speed service from Verizon in our home. We also live in a rural area so no cable. The installation consisted of filters for all the phones and a modem for the computer.

Also, Direct TV offers high speed service via satellite. You would need a dish and service from them. If you suscribe, give them my name as a referral for you so I get the $50. :D

[Larry Browning]

Looks like satellite may be you only option. However, due to latency of the signal you will not be able to do voip over satellite. If that is acceptable, the that may be the way to go for you.

[Brent Dowell]

Well, I have the Hughesnet satellite service. I recently moved to a rural area, and since I work from home, I needed something better than dial up.

The one thing to remember about Satellite is that it is the 'high speed of last resort'. If you have any other option, (Such as terrestrial wireless), I would go with that. As a matter of fact, after a few months of having satellite, I found out that I now have the option of going terrestrial wireless, and I will be doing that soon.

Does satellite work? Yes. It is much faster than dialup. But it has a much higher latency than dial up. That means that every time you press a key on your keyboard, the signal has to go 22,000 miles to outer space, and then 22,000 miles back to earth, then the response has to go 22,000 miles back to space, and then back down. It's amazing to me that it actually works, but it takes time. you will get ping times of more than a second at times.

If all you use it for is surfing, and email, it's fantastic.

But if you need to work in telnet sessions, or ftp files, make sure you are a very accurate typer.

I can do some Voip type apps. Google talk works fine. My corporate VPN works fine.

The big downside of Satellite is the FAP (Fair Access Policy) of the carriers. They all have a FAP. What this means is that if you use the web for general surfing, you will typically have a pretty satisfying connection.

If you try to do a lot of P2P (peer to peer, think BitTorrent) or a lot of video downloading (YouTube, etc.) you will rapidly hit the fap.

When you hit the FAP, the provider will drop your connection speed down drastically. Some people report it as being unusable.

I've only been Fapped once, and it was slow, but I was still able to do my work.

The amount you can download and the rate at which your account is refreshed varies by carrier and the service plan you sign up for.

I've got a small office plan, so I have a pretty big bucket of bits (500meg) and a pretty good refresh rate. That being said, I don't youtube much or that sort of thing, as that consumes a lot of bandwith.

Basically, think of the FAP as a bucket with a trickle of water coming into it. The trickle is the rate at which your bucket is filled. If you take out half the buckets worth and then go away for a while, the bucket will fill back up.

Hughesnet's policy is now that if you empty your bucket, you will get fapped, and will have a reduced rate for 24 hours. After 24 hours, you get to start over.

When I was looking into satellite, I thought that Hughesnet FAP policy was best for me. If you decide to go satellite, I would suggest checking the vendors FAP policies very carefully.

Whew, All that being said, It does work, and is a good solution if you don't have any other options. You just have to be aware that it will be more expensive and has certain restrictions you do not typically have to worry about with cable or dsl.

[Josiah Bartlett]

You may not be able to get DSL everywhere, but anywhere there is a copper phone line you can get ISDN, which isn't as fast as DSL but is better than dialup. It'll cost you, though.

[Matt Meiser]

Josiah, that isn't even always true. Verizon can't offer me anything other than 26K dialup here. They can't (really the word is won't since they made billions in profits over th last year) even clean up their mess of lines to do better than that with dialup.

We had DirecWay (now Hughesnet) and jumped to Sprint wireless broadband as soon as it was available. I'm much happier now. I used to hit the FAP whenever I needed to download something huge but not during normal use--even watching videos, etc. The latency caused a few things not to work like Yahoo Games. Also unless things have changed in the last 6 months, https is extremely slow since they aren't able to compress the secure data. Like Brent said, it is an ISP of last resort.

We had an OK to low signal for the Sprint system. It worked OK, but I installed an outside antenna and it became much better. Since then Sprint has added another tower and its now great--now faster than the cable modem at our old house (4 years ago.) Its not fast by "modern" cable standards, but very acceptable.

One other option that may be available is a Wireless Internet Service Provder (WISP) If you Google WISP, you'll find some directories or you might check the phone book. This is differnet from the cellular-based wireless services. Most WISPs are small companies from what I've seen and may only cover select areas. One kept promising service here but never got it done.

[Brent Dowell]

Matt,

How does the sprint broadband work? Do they have any type of FAP, or other bandwidth restrictions?

Is it very expensive?

[Matt Meiser]

I couldn't find any download restrictions and I haven't hit any. I get about 530Kbps down and 200 up pretty consistently. Not lightning fast but respectable. The latency is so much better than Direcway was that it is like night and day. Direcway is faster for large downloads though, at least until you hit FAP. Upload (for example uploading images to the Creek) is a lot faster from the time you you start the upload until the page comes back. VPN works very well--many wouldn't with a standard Direcway plan because of the private IP thing and those that did were slow. Using Citrix/Remote Desktop/web-based meeting solutions is like any other broadband where it almost wasn't usable with Direcway. Weather only affects me when there are heavy thunderstorms where heavy rain almost always knocked out Direcway. The cost is almost the same as we were paying for Direcway ($60/mo) but we get a discount because our cell phones are Sprint. Stand-alone is higher. The equipment cost us about $450 by the time we bought a card, special router and the outside antenna. I think it is pretty easy to get a free card now and the antenna might not be necessary. The routers have a PC card slot to accept the cards and the router firmware has to support the card you buy. Be careful on this because at least 6 months ago no one at the Sprint store knew anything and they tried to sell me a card that didn't work in the Linksys router and got beligerent when I wouldn't buy it. Port 80 is blocked, so you can't run a web server, but I set mine up to run on a different port so that I can acces it from outside. I wouldn't want to run a public web site on it and I believe the TOS prohibits running a web server. Mine has so little traffic and on an odd port so I doubt it would raise any eyebrows so I don't worry about it.

If you Google EVDO forums, they have a message board that might give you more information and help troubleshooting any problems. They also have a store which is where I got my antenna, and I believe they also sell the cards and routers.

[glenn bradley]

OK, so you're way out there as far as service areas go, eh? Satellite around here is prohibitivly expensive and the service is nothing compared to various broadband terrestrial services. I only say that because I can get cable. If I couldn't get cable satellite would be my only option and I would be thrilled v.s. dial-up.

Even if your Cellular service is solid the Cellular Digital Packet Data transport may not be an option as it runs at about 19.2k normally.

[Eddie Watkins]

This a lot of good information. It does seem that solutions are getting closer and it just depends on location when they will be available. I'm thinking satellite does appear to be the only solution. I had heard somewhere that part of the AT&T/ SBC merger included a guarantee that igh spped service would be available qnywhere by 2008 but I can't semm to find anything about that. Thanks for the responses. I know this subject comes up often but things appear to be changing often.

Eddie