Satellite Internet Pricing

[John Weber]

Anyone have any idea what satellite internet service cost and a good provider.

Thanks – John

[Boyd Gathwright]

.... Expensive John, Something like $1500.00 and than there's the monthly charge . Try to go with cable. You'll will be further ahead .

.... Good luck.

Boyd
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Anyone have any idea what satellite internet service cost and a good provider.

Thanks – John

[Tim Morton]

Even if satelite is your only option to get broadband, I think i would stay away from it. Its expensive and about as reliable as (insert michael jackson joke here).

[Ken Garlock]

John, check out Wild Blue . They are just coming on line, and prices start at $49.95/month.

Regarding reliability, I see no reason why it should not be just as reliable as satellite TV.

[Jeremy Gibson]

As a user of satallite internet, let me contribute my 2 cents.

Where I live it is satallite or dial-up. I work from a home office and didn't want the slow response of dial-up as I sit in front of my computer all day. What I got three years ago was a 36" dish from Starband that is separate from the 18" dish for TV. There is an adapter that would fit on the Starband dish to make it do double-duty, but since I already had the TV dish I got better signal strength by keeping them separate.

With Starband I have two-way satallite communication. The download speed (from space to me) is about 400-500Kps, which is a bit slower than DSL (or was 3 yrs ago). The upload speed (from me to space) is about 50Kps, or comparable to dial-up.

There are two things that affect these speeds, the signal strength to the satallite and the weather. I got a signal strength of 8.0 (out of 10), which is pretty good according to the installer. As for weather, there are two locations that weather may affect your signal (strength or any signal at all). These are at your location and the providers location where the satallite connects to the rest of the Internet. I once had clear skies in Colorado, but a big thunderstorm in Atlanta cut my service for a few hours. This is NOT a guaranteed connection, but I can live with weather outages since they are still few and far between.

You may also hear about latency and VPN's not being supported, but my experience tells me this a legal protection statement. I connect to my corporate intranet through a VPN all day, every day without any issues. This is fine for email, web browsing, and instant messaging. What satallite is not good for is voice over IP or internet voice conferencing like Skype.

The big question is usually price. I spent about $700 to purchase the dish and modem-type box, and that included the installation (professional installation is required). I now own this equipment and can take it with me to a new house should I move. Then it's only the re-installation cost. I spend $49/month for the service. This gives me 5 email accounts, some web page space, and 24/7 access to the Internet.

I agree with the others that if you can get DSL, cable, or even some other local wireless solution you may be better off. But if you are like me and it's satallite or dial-up, I would recommend the satallite.

[Stefan Antwarg]

Because I also live in a dial-up only area, I get pissed off and check out the satalite internet sites a couple times a year. But I never sign up because it is just too expensive. If the speed were comparable to cable, I might give it slightly more thought. But for now, I gotta deal with dial-up.

Stefan

[Matt Meiser]

We have had Direcway for about 15 months. Initial cost was $599 and monthly cost was is $59.99. There is a 15 month comittment. If you have any other option besides dialup, take it. If not, Direcway is better than dialup. The drawbacks I've run into are as follows:

- There is significant lag between making a request and getting a response. - This means realtime applications don't work well, if at all. For example, Yahoo games doesn't work.
- Secure communication is very slow. Any HTTPS connection is as slow, or slower than dialup.
- You don't have a public IP address, unless you pay $89/mo. This means things like VPN don't work.
- Its no where near as fast as cable or DSL. Don't believe them when they tell you otherwise. Theoretically it could be, but in practice you are downloading a lot of small files and the lag kills the theoretical speed.
- There are download limits. I cannot download very large files without hitting the limit. When you hit the limit, they cut your speed WAY back.
- Like satellite TV, weather is an issue, only more so. We haven't lost the DirecTV signal that I know of, but regularly loose the Direcway signal in bad weather. We have two separate dishes mounthed within 15 feet or so of each other. One day over the winter I stayed home and worked from home due to snow and ice. We didn't have Internet all day because of ice buildup on the dish.

An ISP in the next town is working on installing wireless access in our area, installing an antenna on the grain elevators in town. As soon as they are up and running and have verified that we have sufficient signal we are dropping Direcway and going with that. At that time, I'll be selling my Direcway equipment. At some point Verizon will have to acknowledge that my area exists (or sell us) and "wire" our are with fiber.

I'm not sure exactly where you are in Eastern Indiana, but if you are close to Centerville, there is a wireless ISP there. It is owned by a friend of mine, Scott Reed. His URL is http://www.nwwnet.net/NewWays/default.html.

[Scott Loven]

John, check out Wild Blue . They are just coming on line, and prices start at $49.95/month.

Regarding reliability, I see no reason why it should not be just as reliable as satellite TV.

I am getting mine (Wild blue) installed today, I will let you know how it works out.
$299 for install and hardware. $49.95 per month for up to 500k down link speed and 240?k uplink speed. You can pay for faster speeds. I am now getting 19k on dial-up so will be happy with anything I get.
Scott