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seilerbird
Guest
I find it hard to believe anyone would be using WiFi today when a Verizon air card is $50 per month and it is usually many times faster and more reliable than just about any WiFi connection.
Ned said:Hm, maybe there's a new business opportunity
seilerbird said:I find it hard to believe anyone would be using WiFi today when a Verizon air card is $50 per month and it is usually many times faster and more reliable than just about any WiFi connection.
Fiber optic, I wish. We have a choice of Hughesnet satellite, Verizon Wireless or 24k baud dialup. I used to use Hughesnet but they had such a strangle on usage, a plan that would provide me with the data download I needed was waaay out of my budget. Obviously, 24k baud dialup is totally unacceptable. So, that leaves me with Verizon Wireless and I don't have good line-of-sight for that. Right now I have a directional antenna mounted on a 20' pole with a cradle booster for my MiFi. Mostly it is okay, but I would switch to solid DSL in a heartbeat if and when CenturyLink ever gets it piped down to me.skyking4ar2 said:Copper cable and fiber optic still form the bulk of the infrastructure and will for a while is primarily why. Rural America is not 100% covered by cellular signal yet.
That was not my 5 year experience with Hughesnet. I maintain 3 computers and a Windows Home Server. My DW does a lot of on-line research and I do a lot of whatever. Neither of us are Youtube fans or gamers or anything requiring a lot of bandwidth. Still, I had to constantly monitor our usage to prevent getting FAP'd (500MB/day) and the service was often deteriorated or interrupted even with my 2 watt radio and .98 meter dish. 1 Mbps was a dream seldom fullfilled (more like 300Kbps). It may be they have improved their service with the newer KA band satellite, but with the extremely lousy customer service they had, I'm not very interested in going back. My Verizon Wireless plan is a grandfathered unlimited plan (for now anyway). I often hit 8-9GB in a month (all while I'm at the wheel and not having to schedule night hours for non-FAP time). The only thing I miss about Hughesnet is the ability to access my server remotely.Ned said:There isn't a wireless data plan that can give me the data capacity that we have with HughesNet. For a 30 day month, we can download 375MB a day, or 11.250GB plus another ~2GB each night during the 5 FAP free hours, or an additional 60GB/month. All at 1Mbps speeds and $80/month. The $80/month cellular plan would only give us 10GB. Of course, we don't use that much data every month but last month we did download 11GB and upload ~1.5GB. And uploads are not counted toward our 375MB/day transfer limit.
Do you have Ku or Ka band?Ned said:I get consistent download tests of 1Mbps on testmy.net. Rarely below 900kbps and often higher. The simple solution to poor performance is to change satellites, but you need to have your service through a VAR like Motosat to do that. HughesNet won't do that for you. I've been in places without cellular service (Death Valley for one), but never without satellite. We do stay out from under the trees
blueblood said:I have 50 responses at this point and one question and one comment. First I see Hughes listed by only 3 responders. I recognize the small sample size issue but still found it surprising as not all that long ago forums were heavy on use of Hughes. Second, I have several surveys where a number is required by the question e.g. how many e-mails a day and the answer comes in the form of a date e.g. 1/2/2011. Can't figure out why. Any thoughts?
Ned said:Good guess, Lou. It's Google Docs, not Excel, but the same principle holds.
Just Lou said:The 1/2/2011 is probably due to how you have the cell formatting defined in MS-XL for that cell. The respondent probably wanted to indicate 1 or 2 per day, by typing 1/2 and XL filled in the field as a date 1/2/2011. Just my guess.