Satellite -vs- dialup (ISDN)

[SnowRidge]

OK, well that's too bad, Richard. Just remember to use your POTS number on all your DSL inquiries for accurate results.

We were amazed when we got DSL out here, ten miles to town and mostly all farms. It turns out that Bell South had to agree to expand their rural DSL presence in order for the merger with AT&T to be approved. It looks like they may have done "just enough" to get the approval. There are still a bunch of holes with no DSL service. It's a shame.

The SLIC is less than half a mile away, so we get full speed with no problems, and it has been 100% reliable so far, a couple of months into it.

 

[MotorSeven]

Richard, as far as paying extra for an em address i would not bother. There are too many free em accounts out there & you won't loose your address every time you swich service providers. I have had a Hotmail account for around 4-5 years or so & did not even sign up or ever log into the Wildblue em.

RD

 

[texbaylea]

This is a little off topic. I need to compute distance to my cell tower using lat. & long. Can anyone give me a formula or a link?

Vernon

 

[Skerby]

Richard, i haven't read all the replies but here's my 2 cents anyway.
I had wildblue over dish network.. it was horrible.. i could not play xbox live over it. it fell like dial up at cable modem prices... totally unacceptable experience. i cancelled it and got out of the early cancellation fee of $300 or so... took a lot of argument to get that from dish though.. anyway, i found a company that has high speed wirless which is pretty good.. reminds me a lot of my old cable modem when i lived in NJ.
satellite speeds are fast but LAG is horrible.. that is to say that your requests are delayed for like 5 seconds before it is processed, this will be your satellite experience. i'd stay with dial up before going to wildblue if i had no other choice. also, look at the wireless phone cards and cost, they're fast.. check out their cost..

 

[SnowRidge]

This is a little off topic. I need to compute distance to my cell tower using lat. & long. Can anyone give me a formula or a link?

Vernon

I used to know how to do that, but it's not coming back to me. However, you can let Google Earth do it for you, which is what I do these days. Just placemark the two locations and then let the program tell you how far apart they are.

You can use the lat/longs in the placemark fields, if you like.

 

[zkurtb]

It's been a long thread, but on the original topic from the original post...We don't have DSL service as an option and I did quite a bit of research. What I came up with is satellite is the choice of last resort, and should be avoided unless there is absolutely no other choice. All the online satellite user forums have nothing but complaints about WildBlue, Hughes, all of them.

Other options:
If you have cell phone service then probably you can get "broadband" over the cell network. I hear it works pretty good.
Wireless - we had microwave ISP as an option. It's what we went with and are very happy with it.