I thought the whole point of DSL was that it didn’t require installation of new transmission lines.
I have Verizon DSL. It works on plain old telephone lines. DSL works within about 2 miles of a phone company office/switching station/whatever. I know because I am right at the limit and just barely was able to get DSL.
14,000 feet of line or so is the working limit for a DSLAM. I used to live at about 13,000 feet but because the small phone company liked me they ran new, solid connects all the way to my service box, allowing me to edge into their top tier of service.
No. There was a tech-woo fad for a while of putting these things that looked like the inside of package security tags in the battery compartment, or sticking them on the outside of the phone, to get “DRAMATIC!” improvements in connection strength. They looked like big postage stamps made from pretty patterns of copper foil between transparent outer layers.
Complete gobbidge, but they were the sort of thing sold to the gullible and thrown in as a bonus with cell phone purchases.
Thanks for the suggestions guys. I looked into Verizon’s data plans and modem since that’s about the only provider we get out here and it’s like $70 a month for about what we’re getting now. So it’s slightly more expensive and I don’t even know if we’d be able to get a strong enough signal. :\
Really Not All That Bright we’re about 5 miles outside of a town with a population of 1800. Which, coincidentally, gets great net. But we’re so far out there’s no chance we’re getting DSL anytime this decade. In fact, during the 6 years my parents have owned this place, the only ‘advancement’ of the DSL lines has been within the last 6 months. And that was only because some rich guy moved in and paid the phone company the cost to extend their DSL service out that far. Of course, he lives like a mile closer to town than us. B( Trust me, I’ve exhausted all possible alternatives to satellite and have been thwarted each time.
gaffa That would be an idea, for sure. But unfortunately we’re surrounded by tall oak trees, so there’s no way it could get an unobstructed view of the sky from that low.
The technician just left. Of course he said everything was fine. He noticed our signal strength was going down a bit so he increased the power in the dish or something. I don’t know. Just going to wait till about 3 and see if the net goes to shit again.
Sounds like your getting the best solution for your location. You can’t seriously expect there to be affordable fast internet for every location on the planet do you?
Both Wildblue and Hughes are offset dishes, so the actual reception angle is much more vertical than the angle of the dish would suggest. Check the angles for a C-band dish, non-offset dish for your location to get an idea of what you actually need. For instance, at my current location in Kansas City, the elevation is 36 degrees, while Chicago is 29.8 degrees.
Ive done this on a farm and it worked a treat.
Oh, I understand (and mine’s worse than that since I’m a bit north of the 45th north parallel). If latency of satellite signals sucks, and Hughesnet uses satellite signals, then my statement that Hughesnet latency sucks is pretty much proven. 
The latency isn’t the only thing that sucks about Hughesnet, of course. Many of those things are inherent in satellite technology, like the signal going away during thunderstorms, heavy cloud cover, or enough snow & ice to cover the dish. Many of them are not, like regular general outages, ridiculous quotas with “throttle-back” penalties, upload speeds 1/20 of the download speeds, long response times to tech support emails, long waits on hold for tech support phone calls, techs that don’t know their asses from a USB port, and massive fluctuations in bandwidth.
Not so, as others have mentioned. Virtually all POTS-based broadband has gone to some variant of DSL these days, and as mentioned upthread, you need to be within about three miles of the switching equipment for it to work.
When I had a ranch in the middle of nowhere, I got great DSL because there was a school within two miles. I then moved in close to a larger town (2,300 people), but I’m four miles from the switching office, so no DSL at all. They actually put in a repeater across the highway about half a mile away, but that doesn’t help me because the wires from my house go by a different route.
Don’t give up on a solution! We got together about 100 households and approached the local cable TV company when they were doing some infrastructure upgrades. As long as they were running fiber-optic to town anyway, they went ahead and ran lines out here too, so despite being over four miles away from a town of 2,300 people, we have great broadband now.
Is there a fixed wireless provider in the area (here is a site that lists providers). Until the phone company upgraded the lines, I used one of these services. It wasn’t perfect, but it was much better than what you are getting with satellite service. The restriction is that you need line of site to their equipment. I did, even though it was two and a half miles away.