What enipla said. I think my equipment cost was $500, although some guys offer a lower price if you agree to sign up for a hundred years or so. 
Thanks guys. Maybe that’s what we’ll end up doing, as more and more sites keep adding more and more stuff and it takes longer and longer to open a page.
The local places were having a $199 setup special (regular $299) for WildBlue.
I did have an Internet connection last night while the storms were raging here in WI. Now if only I could download some bread and milk! Nothing triggers a craving quite like being out of something and not being able to go get some.
I was going to start a thread this morning to ask about Sprint Mobile Broadband and the like?
Would that be an option or is their coverage also limited?
What about speed?
I didn’t mention. I’m on Hughes.net.
But I have heard good things about WildBlue. The weather problems may not be as bad as you would expect. We get a LOT of snow where I live, and all I have to do is brush off the dish once a week or so. Or maybe a couple of times during the day in a storm. Not that big of a deal. I have a 20’ x 3/4" copper pipe with a standard car snow brush duct taped to the end of it.
You’re in Alabama, so I suspect you won’t have snow problems. 
For others, if you live in snow country, make sure your dish is somewhat accessible.
On a lower budget, several years ago someone in a small town near here started providing high speed access to the area by putting a cluster of line of sight tranceivers made for office communications (they were housed in long white cylinders; I think that they were made by Cisco) and offered affordable high speed access for anyone who could see the antenna.
Right. It works out well because people in rural areas are themselves slower and really just don’t need all that information served up that fast.
Charter Communications provides 10Mb/sec down, 768Kb up for residential customers in my rural area, but I am incredibly lucky. Most of this county is on dialup, and rural dialup, due to the long lines, rarely gets anything close to the theoretical maximum of 56Kb. Before I connected to Charter, I could count on 19Kb, but that’s about all. SBC (phone company) will guarantee 14Kb, so they told me I was getting more than I deserved and I should be eternally grateful. I told them to stick it.
Which shows how backwards phone companies can be when they still think they have a monopoly. They are shedding customers right and left around here, as Charter now offers full phone service.
No, I don’t think I have ever been there. I need to go see about it.
I seldom actually log on to the WildBlue site.
I am internet mobile in my car for work and I have used both the Sprint and Verizon air cards. In my area, the Sprint coverage sucked. If I could get a connection at all, it was so slow it was unusable as pages would time out well before they could ever load. Verizon has upgraded to EVDO (whatever the heck that is) and as long as I’m in a metropolitan area, the connection signal and speed are ok… better than dialup and not as good as cable. As I travel outside of the metro areas, however, the connection speed and signal drops considerably.
Right now it’s my only alternative to be able to access the net from virtually anywhere so it’s a good value to me. There’s certainly room for improvement, though. (Verizon, are you listening???)
Waiting on activation to Wildblue Uncensored.
I live in a UK country town.
I led a campaign to get British Telecom (BT) to upgrade the local telephone exchange to allow Broadband. 
And now I have Wireless Broadband from BT.
Why does satellite interent communication require a dish, but satellite telephone communication does not?
My apologies if this thread is too old to post in “legally.” Kill the zombie if you want and I’ll start a new one.
I have two questions:
_ Are you Wildblue users generally satisfied with the product? I’ve seen a lot of negative comments on epinions and similar sites, so I’m worried about the service. Hughes seems to generate similar complaints.
_ Can someone explain this concept of using aircards and cell phones to access the Web? Is this a realistic alternative to satellite?
Thanks.
Yes, it is subject to rainfade, though. It’s no good for gaming over the web because of the signal lag. The satellite is 33k miles away.
I set up a card account for my Boss; it’s great in town. I tired one for me and it was darn slow. I presume that speed is a function of how many cell towers the signal must pass through before it gets to the internet provider.
If you like to play online games, satellite ISPs suck because of the high latency (the time it takes for a signal to get from your computer to the Internet location or vice versa). Imagine if you are driving your real car, and it didn’t turn until 2 seconds after you turned the wheel. If you were playing an online racing game you would get pretty much the same results, minus the actual death and destruction.
I think the government should provide fiber optic broadband at 11 mb to all persons outside of a city limit. Just like the REA of yore.
Until then, I loves me Wildblue. (pro-pac) I do not ‘game’ so the only place it is really a pain is on secure web sites because of all the hand shaking needed.
We do not have that much problem with rain … Cells around here are not that thick so we get through better than where the thunderstorms are bigger and have more rain in them.
It beats the heck out of dial-up, the only other option here. I have been on better DSL hookups but that hit of going back to dial-up is a killer. If you can’t live without a big pipe, stay in the big city.
Wildblue says I can get more speed when the new satellite is up and running. We’ll see.
It is very worth it to me.
With all due respect, and knowing that you cherish the rural way of life (peace and quiet!) - Hubby will retire next year and our intention is to move out of the city to an area which will probably requrie WildBlue to get 'net access. The reason why I need that is because I work from home half time, and need to send drawings/data etc. to clients from my home office. If WildBlue will work for me, I see it as my only option.
So you don’t have any problems with technical support or billing or anything? And the speeds are more or less as advertised?
Out in Hermiston, Oregon even the phone companies couldn’t be arsed to put in wires so they went with a WiFi cloud for both data and phone access–from what I hear it works swimmingly. Wired watermelons, heh heh…
As for using a cell phone to tether, I used my T-Mobile Dash on EDGE (about 4x diallup) for almost a week at work while I was waiting for Comcast to get their shit together and install the cable. It worked great, pages loaded a little slower but it was a great deal better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. There’s a nifty little third party app out there that makes it exactly as easy as 1) plug phone into USB, 2) activate the app, 3) launch browser. I could even get phone calls while plugged in, but I couldn’t browse while on the phone call. Text messages didn’t even make it bobble.