atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information High speed internet

Check around to see if there is a Verizon dealer in your area that will let you try a card. There is one in my area who will install it on your laptop for a day or two. He will also let you try it in the store on his equipment.

This is a little confusing, on one hand you say DSL is not available, but you can spend $900 to get something. DSL?

Anyway, You still have not answered my question.
What I'm wondering is if it's going to cost you $900 to extend the cable, thereby making it available to your neighbors between you and the last current point or if it's going to be $900 just to your house.
The reason I ask is exactly what Bunnie mentioned, sharing the cost.

Contact the local city or county commissioner for your area. There may be something in the franchise agreement that would "motivate" the cable company to install for the regular fee!

I live in a rual area too, and have had this problem as well. I had wireless in the rual area I lived in before moving to this even more rual area. The wireless was great and no FAP (Fair Access Policy). That's the "limit" we're talking about on your bandwidth. Now I can't get wireless, have tried Verizon Aircard, didn't work, had 30 day try it out agreement, so no big deal, I returned the equipment, no charge. So I ordered WildBlue Satellite Internet. Didn't read the fine print. BIG MISTAKE. I'm locked into a 2 year contract. It is painfully slow at times. I have to keep my dial-up as a back-up and use it frequently. If I decide to cancel early, I pay $30.00 per month for the months remaining in the contract period. Tech Support is a joke. Seems like when I need it the most it is down. If you plan on using for video download or other large downloads, you will be FAPed and its 30 days before your unFAPed. I understand all other services are adopting FAP Policies as well. The Bandwidth squeeze is on! Good Luck!

30 days of FAP? Wow. It did change - it got worse. ALOT worse.

Mine was more of a continuous timer system. You'd reach your limit, and if you stopped right then, the timer would slowly start going backwards and your bandwidth would increase again, for the amount of time that you stopped downloading. It wasn't like it was 1:1, you'd have to wait, say 3 minutes to get 1 minute back, but it was real time - not 30 days in solitary.

I remember downloading 3rd party utilities that would warn you as you approched your limit, I think they even autmatically throttled back your PC's bandwidth consumption so as not to exceed whatever your threshold was, wait a bit, loosen the throttle... repeat. You could download a large file (obviously depending on the file size and your FAP limit), over the course of a day or two.

In any event, it sucked.

Sorry for going somewhat off topic.

I moved out in the sticks ~45 miles from San Antonio proper. No cable TV and no DSL. I have had the local electric coops high speed radio based internet for 1 month. I have a 20 foot mast with a Motorola Canopy radio. Guaranteed 768K and max burst speeds of 1536K. This thing is smokin' fast. Best internet service I have ever had.

Customer service is unbelievable...when I reported a trouble 7 days after install I had 5 followup calls.. Customer service acknowledging a tower issue, manager calling to tell me of immediate dispatch, techs calling to say they were in route, head tech giving me a 45 minute fix time and a customer service satisfaction call. No FAP and no limits.

I'll be VoIPing 3 sites together this week through my site and their customer service said if I needed any assistance including a radio upgrade if necessary let them know. That's the way it should be done.

I've fought this battle from one end to the other. I originally went with HughesNet, back then they were DirecWay. Then an 802.11 carrier came into the area and they were good until they oversold the system. I finally had a full T-1 dropped to my house and have had it ever since. We also have the air cards on all our field laptops.

The satellite are my least favorite broadband option, but it is at least broadband. The latency is a little more than I like, and upload speeds are lacking, but if I lived on the top of a mountain and had no other option, I'd use it. One last word of caution; in heavy rains at your location you'll lose signal. In heavy rains over Hughes NOC out east, you'll lose signal.

On the air cards, if you use the USB version you can use it on a desktop as well. You can also use it as a server for the rest of your home network by enabling ICS and back feeding it to a switch, but if you run as much as we do, they'll eventually call you on bandwidth. Also, unless you're in a 3G area which is doubtful you'll probably be disappointed.

Back to Hughes, you'll have to buy your equipment, plus the monthly fees are more than DSL. If it were me, I'd pay the $900. You'll be money ahead in no time and you'll be much happier.

Now I remember, that's who I had - DirecWay.

Yeah Matt. Now they actually have an ethernet hand off from the modem. They're a lot more stable and have better speeds than the older ones. If yours was like mine, the modem handed off to a USB. If you wanted to run a network you had to enable ICS from the "main" computer and back feed the switch out of the LAN card. Then every day or so you'd need to reboot that main computer.

Yep, it was USB. At that time I only had 1 PC, so the network issue never came up.

Man I'm so glad I don't have that service anymore. Fortunately I was able to sign up with SBC to get the dish/DSL bundle... which has now morphed into U-verse.