Mobile Broadband vs. Satellite Internet

[The Dougster]

If you have good cell phone coverage, go the mobile broadband route.

Where we live, we used Wildblue (approx. $50/month) and it was okay. The problem was that we wanted an Internet at the ranch but didn't want dial up... a couple of years ago we went with Sprint and haven't regretted it. We canceled the Wildblue account and simply take the aircard with us when we go to the ranch. Out there, with a metal roof and a heavy rock structure, the speed isn't all that great but certainly better than dial up. The neat thing is that when we travel, we have our laptop and it's not uncommon for my wife to connect to the internet as we travel down the highway. I find this amazing.

We have never come close to the 5G mark but then we do not download movies, etc. Recently we checked into Sprints 4G service and unfortunately, it's not available where the ranch is located. Their 4G service is unlimited.

 

[riptides]

Mobile broadband from the current cell providers has the best chance to be upgraded and refreshed for years to come. The technology is already out there for 4g, and it is just a matter of selection and infrastructure.

 

[EddieWalker]

I fought with satellite for years and hated it. If it rained, it quit working. I've had everything replaced, including the cables, and it still wasn't reliable. I've been on different satelittes, had five different companies come out, and spent untold hours with tech support. It is a flawed system that doesn't have enough power in residential installations to deal with the weather. When you have a problem and call tech support, the first question they ask is about the weather. If you tell the truth and say it's cloudy outside, they'll do a ping test, but pretty much tell you to wait until it clears up. If you lie and tell them it's clear outside, they will work with you to find the problem and arrange a tech to come to your place.

Besides not being reliable, you can't fix it yourself. Everything has to be done by a tech, who might be there in a day, or a week. All the repair parts are remanufactured, and one time the guy came out with four boxes of transmitters, and all of them were junk, so I had to wait another week for more to arrive to find one that worked.

Then there is their warrantee, which is fine, but that transmitter was only good for four months and died at five months. That was the last straw for me, and when I took it all down and tossed it in my burn pile.

I'm with Verizon now and can say that it's allot beter for a variety of reasons. Tech support is in Idaho and not India. I had to call them becaues I have Windows 7, and at the time, the card wasn't recognizing it. They spent hours with me downloading the drivers and installing them so it would get me up and running at the fastest speed possible. We kept tweeking it to get it to go faster and at no time were they in a hurry to get rid of me. I really appreciated that.

I never lose my signal when it's raining or cloudy outside. When I have severe weather, I sometimes lose my satelitte TV signal and I really like to be able to see the radar images of the storms. Tornadoes happen here, and a sever storm can cause allot of damage. While I can't do anything about the weather, I sure like being able to keep track of it.

I can take it with me anywhere I go. That's a HUGE plus!!!!!!!!

It costs the same per month as satelitte, but it's way more reliable.

I'm online every day, and for at least six hours at a time. I'm online all night long while watching TV. When I log on, I get my usage for the month. Since the tenth, when I start over again, I've used 1.1 gigs out of my five that I'm allowed. I've never hit 4 gigs and don't have any problems with a five gig limit. I don't watch movies, but I do watch youtube clips fairly often.

I honestly think that the satelitte companies are going to go out of business. It's just a matter of time. It's almost impossible to find anybody who likes there's, and the list of those who had it and hate it is very large and growing. I can't think of another service with so many unhappy former clients that so readily bad mouth them and share their experiences with others.

Like already mentioned, you get a 30 day free trial with Verizon. It's simple to install and easy to use. If it doesnt' work, take it back and go from there. With Satelitte, you are stuck with it for two years. I think it's a simple choice.

Good luck,
Eddie

 

[buckeyefarmer]

it's all about location, location, location.

BTW, I got the verizon MIFI card for $.01 on amazon, just had to sign up for 2 yr service agreement. I went with verizon because some of the areas I want to use it don't have anything else.
this summer Sprint is coming out with their 4G phone, what will also act as a wireless router for up to 5 devices, so it will be like the MIFI (you can get a 3G sprint MIFI) but also a phone. sprint does have 4G aircards out already and have 4G service out in several cities. Sprint is offering unlimited data also.
verizon is supposed to really start cranking out their LTE 4G later this year.
Satellite internet will die a slow death, like POTS lines, but for some locations, it's the only choice.

 

[rtimgray]

Hi Everybody-

First of all - thanks for all the replies. I did some further looking around and finally called AT&T to see about getting set up. The only reason for picking them over any other provider is that I have an AT&T cell phone and knew that I got decent (usually 3 or 4 bars of 3G) reception at home.

Had a great conversation with the AT&T sales guy, got hooked up with a wireless card and 2 year plan. Wireless card was "free" (after rebate). Had 30 day guarantee.

I go the card on Tuesday (having ordered the equipment on the previous Friday). Set about hooking it up to the laptop. Things went well right up until I actually tried to use the service.

Nothing.

Now, I have never used any wireless service anywhere ever, so I thought that I was doing something wrong. I worked on it, checking configurations, making sure all the drivers were loaded, etc. etc. (exhausting my knowledge of computers does not take very long).

So I called AT&T tech support. I got to talk to a very pleasant lady in Jackson Mississipi - for 2 1/2 hours! It just went on and on. We tried this, we tried that, we rebooted, we uninstalled, we reinstalled, we pinged (no pong, though)....anyway, the conclusion was that the wireless card that was sent to me (a Turbo) was no good. I was told take it to an AT&T corporate store and exchange it (free of charge, of course).

The nearest AT&T corporate store is about 45 minutes from home. Luckily, a project at work sent me close to another store, so I was able to drop by yesterday. The lady at tech support and the sales associate at the store both said "Oh yeah, those Turbos are trouble. You need a lightning." The sales associate went to get a Lightning.

Guess what - didn't have one.

So I ended up with a Velocity. She said that if I'm not happy with it, I can bring it back and exchange it for a Lightning, no problems.

I find the hilarious part of this being that she said she didn't know when they would get more Lightnings. She said it could be today, it could be tomorrow, it could be next week. They get shipments everyday, but don't know what's coming.

Really?

Isn't this a COMMUNICATIONS company? And they don't know what they ship to their stores? Do they have monkeys filling up boxes in a dark room or what?

Anyway, sorry for the side rant.

I took the Velocity card home with the sneaking feeling that I still wouldn't get it to work. I hauled out the laptop, plugged in the card.....Presto, I've got connection - I've got internet!

We played around last night for a couple of hours, and I think I like it. It is not "High speed" if you are used to DSL or cable, but it is soooooo much better than dial up. My wife could download books from Amazon in a couple of minutes (used to take 20-30). We can watch videos now. Can actually get web pages to load up without having to go get a cup of coffee or make a sandwich while you wait. The kids can play their simple online games. After all that use, the meter bar said that we had used up a 30 megs (and the plan allows for 5 gigs/month, so I think that is about 166 megs/day - somebody correct me if I'm wrong).

So to make a long story longer, I also tried it on our older desktop, and it worked there as well, although the speed was not as good. Not sure why, but that's not too big a deal as long as it works on the laptop.

We noticed we could get 4 or 5 bars outside on the porch and speed seemed to increase somewhat. Now that means I've got to finish my porch ceiling project so I can get the swing hung so the wife can set outside and surf.

Sorry for the long review, but I was hoping it might be helpful to somebody else reading the thread. I'm gonna wait a few days and see if I need to exchange the Velocity or a Lightning or not.

Thanks again for all the advice. The cost of the plan seems comparable to Satellite, I don't know that the speed is as good, but the portability is (obviously) so much better.

Take care.

 

[riptides]

...We noticed we could get 4 or 5 bars outside on the porch and speed seemed to increase somewhat. Now that means I've got to finish my porch ceiling project so I can get the swing hung so the wife can set outside and surf.

....

Good for you. More bars = better signal = better performance.

Now go get a EVDO router, place it on the porch, maybe get a booster antenna for it, and share your connection throughout the house - wirelessly.

 

[EddieWalker]

Depending on your system and the software that you have with your card, you might be able to get more speed by upgrading to a newer version. When I went to Verizon, I was very slow at first. The lady at customer support was very helpful in working with me to configure my card to get it to go faster. I can't tell you how it compares to DSL, but compared to my previous satelitte system, it's just as fast. I'm just about instant, but every now and then, there are delays.

Congratulations on your card. I think this is the future for rural internet and because it's so much easier and reliable then satelitte, it will replace those companies in a matter of time.

Eddie

 

[TheRealBuzz]

There will always be locations outside of the coverage of Cable, DSL and even Wireless because those technologies can never offer the ubiquitous coverage of satellite in a profitable way. There will always be satellite data services.

There is nothing wrong with satellite broadband other than the way it is marketed. It is actually very reliable. That's why it is used by so many companies as a backup system. However it is expensive and in terms of performance it's like apples and oranges when compared to other broadband services mainly because of "latency", the delay time between send and receive. Average latency of cable, dsl, etc. is 50 milliseconds. The average latency of satellite is 800 to 1200 ms. This is a result of the distance traveled from ground to orbit to ground and back again. It's is a problem that will plague satellite for a long time because it's just the laws of physics.

What this means for the end user is that the service will not be suitable for interactive applications such as gaming, VoIP, streaming video, etc. All the things that have grown so popular over the last couple of years. Add to that the available capacity, It's basically like prime real estate, it's expensive because there is so little to go around. And so the capacity is cut up into pieces and dished out to everyone a little at a time by limiting how much you can use each day. The "FAP" or Fair Access Policy it's called". FAPs and other forms of capping or traffic shaping are becoming common on many other services as well due to the overwhelming growth in bandwidth demand by home users. Never the less there will always be less capacity on satellite so their FAPs will always appear more restrictive than others. Moving from town on DSL to the country on satellite is just like going from city water to well water. You have to watch your usage now or you may run the well dry and have to wait for it to fill up again.

As I mentioned before the way satellite is market is the real issue. It's is retailed through so many small retailers and not all of them properly explain to the customer the way satellite works. When one does explain it to the consumer it often goes in one ear and out the other. All of this culminates in a situation where consumers are are often disappointed with the performance because they compare it to what others are getting in town for the same price. Broadband is like real estate in reverse. The further from the city center you get the more expensive it gets.

Where satellite does shine is compared to dial-up it is much faster. MP3's that would take 30min on DU often take less than a minute on SAT. Large work files can be downloaded faster, edited, and sent back faster and more reliably. E-mail with picture and other attachment are no problem. And it's always on and doesn't tie up your phone line. Satellite is still a viable solution where no other solution is available and it's value is directly related to it's intended use and requirement.

As you may have guessed.... I install satellite internet systems.

 

[ronjhall]

If you are going to be using the air card to download videos, books and other large files. Your 5 GB will disappear very quick. Keep an eye on your usage to avoid going over the limit.

 

[rtimgray]

If you are going to be using the air card to download videos, books and other large files. Your 5 GB will disappear very quick. Keep an eye on your usage to avoid going over the limit.

Good advice - no doubt.

And, believe you me, we're gonna watch that like a hawk. The program (ACM) has a "fuel guage" for each session as well as the billing period. I'm also going to check on it via my online account as well. Overage charges are 5 cents/meg.

We were a little bit surprised that even after the couple of hours we were on it last night, and the downloading of the books, we only hit 40 megs, and that was a pretty busy two hours (we had to see how fast all of our normal pages loaded).