Rural Internet Access

[dtwilliamson]

I live too far out. I can't get cable. I can get 26kbs on a great day. Gets frustrating for me. We have T-3 lines at work. Hard for me to go from that to my dial-up at home, so I rarely get on at home. Guess I'm spoiled. Not gonna pay for satellite either so I'll keep things just the way they are.

Dan

[danno1800]

Too far out for cable. Had to settle for ISDN from Verizon. $75/month

[This message has been edited by danno1800 (edited September 29, 2004).]

[JohnBeeMan]

How did you get the $70 ISDN rate from Verizon? I just talked to them today and they quoted me a $240 per month rate from unlimited ISDN residential service. They said the lower rates were for business accounts. I tried for over 2 hours to get the business department on the phone - finally they took info and said someone would call me - by Monday. They also said to switch to a business account I would need a business license - I am not selling that much honey.

[Lew Best]

Hi guys

Just curious if anyone has any "new updated info" or new advice on this topic. Hoping to get my "country place" soon; will lose my cable net connection when I move. Hope satellite system will be feasible; worth paying a few extra bux a month to get it if it works well (as in "noticeably better" than dial-up).

Thanks!

Lew

[Michael Bush]

I had no luck with the sattelite and the DirecPC was terrible to even get my service canceled let alone resolve my problems. I would NOT recommend them. Dialup is more reliable by a long shot. How fast is a connection that doesn't work at all?

[Lew Best]

Thanks Michael

Sure going to hurt losing broadband but worth it to get rid of "big brother the city" bugging me all the time over superfulous nonsense!

Lew

[Jim Fischer]

Pretty darn rural, Lew.
I agree with Michael. The commercial satellite
data offerings are terrible. I'd rather use
a satellite phone plugged into my Palm Pilot
(which works surprisingly well, moreso when
one is far far from any form of civilization).

You may want to check out multilink PPP,
better-known as "dial-up bonding" support from
a local, rural, locally-owned and run ISP.
(Forget about any of the big boys doing this.)

This allows one two establish two dial-up
connections over two phone lines, and
bundle them into a single logical channel.

It has been around since 1994
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1717.html
But the current RFC for "bonding" is RFC 1990
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1990.html

Be careful, though. Most implementations
are intended to support multiple users on
a LAN, and no single session gets more than
it would on a single-line "56Kbps" connection.
Make sure that you are getting something you
can actually >>use<<.

I've configured multilink ppp on Ascend Maxes,
Livingston Portmasters, and Cisco 52xx boxes,
but I've not seen this as a "must have" issue
ever since DSL and cablemodems started to
become more common. Perhaps it is still a
demand item in areas beyond the reach of
cable, ISDN, ADSL, and wireless.

[Lew Best]

Thanx Jim

You're talking way over my head; far above my technical understanding. I haven't checked on DSL but it may be a slight possibility as the place I'm hoping for is only 1.8 miles from the city limits.

Lew

[Steve_in_NC]

I still have my one-way satellite with Cape Lookout Internet Service www.clis.com. They are a reseller of ISAT satellite service. This company (ISAT) went bankrupt and was purchased by Synergistic Communications.

Costs are:
Satellite Equipment: $150.00
Installation: $150.00
Monthly Service: $39.95

I did not originally purchase from them and installed the equipment myself. It has some technical issues and you should be a self-fixer and computer literate but it is working. I just ran the bandwidth tester again
http://www.pcpitstop.com/internet/bandwidth.asp
and got a speed of 435 Kbps at 2:00 AM. It is NOT this fast during the day (150 Kbps) but much better that dialup.

There is no month to month committment which is nice. The rural electric cooperative here is investigating Wild Blue
www.wildblue.com
which has not yet been lauched. I hope that it is more seamless than the service that I have.

It is possible that the problems with the (ISAT)service have been associated with the bankruptcy issue. It was stable for a long time and then had some problems which required set up changes to keep going.

Now it seems to be working well again.

They have a reasonable use policy which takes into account the total megabyte download in the last 5 days. You are throttled down to 64 Kbps if you download 500 or more megabytes in a 5 day period. 64 Kbps is 3 times faster than the 20 Kbps connection I get with a modem.

[indypartridge]

My local electric co-op is running a pilot program offering "Broadband over Power Lines". http://www.sciremc.com/bpl_services.php
I'm not in the test area, but I have a friend who is. He says there's some glitches, but if they can get those worked out he'll be very happy. And,
at $29.95 a month, the price is certainly competitive.

[Lew Best]

Thanks guys

Went to the wildblue site & put in the zip code & it says expected service 2nd quarter of 2005. Maybe I won't lose my broadband (at least for very long). [img]smile.gif[/img]

Lew

[Ross]

I now have wireless WAN from a local provider. It is about a 15 mile radius about the tower. This is not satelite and does not suffer from the transmission delays of satelite. Speeds are running 800KB download and 400-500 upload. It's $40 a month and I did pay an installation fee. So far it has been very good but not perfect. I live about a mile from my employer, a major defense contractor. Periodically, late at night I loose my signal. I'm pretty sure it's due to the testing of the systems we build. We test late at night for a reason.

[beegee]

In my area of Lenoir County(eastern NC)cable is not available. DSL from Sprint(the only provider)is not available. The only thing I can get is dial-up and it runs at 31.2 kbps to 48 kbps, mostly at 46.6. There is a company that will provide high-speed at $49.00 per month if you can get 50 people within a 3-mile radius to subscribe. they put a dish on a cell-phone tower and hard-wire the service to your house. I still haven't been able to recruit 50 people who want to pay $49.00/mo. I just changed dial-up ISP's today because of the inability of my former ISP to allow me to even dial in today. they were having some sort of problem which they could not identify. My frustration-level finally peaked....