So, my only option where I live is satellite internet. No cable no DSL.
My current provider is Hughes.net. I also get the TV from them on the same dish. No options there either.
I’m getting 938 KBPS down. 55 KBPS up. Download allowance is 250 megs in a 24 hour period. And then it is throttled to unusable. God help you if you happen on a site that starts streaming when you open it. Which most do with adds and such.
So. In the vernacular, and trying to compare, I guess that 938 KBPS down = 1 meg. 55 up is just silly, but I don’t have to send anything but emails and such. No way to work at home at those speeds though.
So how does this compare? I’m guessing that good internet speeds and allowances are about 1000 times this. What about data limits? 250 megs is nuts, and very hard to avoid.
I ask because I’m thinking of upgrading the sat dish. But I doubt it’s more than half again of what I get. But may be way expensive.
Adblock (or, less drastically Flashblock) will get rid of that autoplaying stuff and save you a good deal of that allowance.
I don’t think most people on cable or DSL have data limits at all, and most have much faster connections than you are getting. I don’t have data limits, and never have had. Of course, even satellite is a big advance over dialup, which is how nearly all of got online 15 years or so ago. From what I hear, plenty of people in America are still on dialup.
You can’t compare satellite with regular broadband. Actually , just under 1 Mbps is only broadband in the sense that it’s faster that dial-up, but it’s not really good enough today. But like I was saying, satellite is worse than just the numbers suggest, because the data has to go all the way out into space and back. That takes about a quarter of a second, so it slows down most things a lot. Does this also connect to your phoneline? In that case at least your outgoing data doesn’t have to bounce off of the satellite.
If you want fast browsing, try turning off javascript in your browser. That makes many sites a lot faster but some stuff doesn’t work anymore.
Note the difference between megabit and megabyte. 1 Mbps = it takes about 8 seconds to download a megabyte. So you’d burn through your 250 MB/day with about half an hour of solid downloading.
For normal stuff 250 MB/day is fine, but not if you need to download OS upgrades, video or even more than a small amount of audio (podcasts).
You could move to a big city and have fast internet access, but then you’d pay much more rent.
Just looking at dish.com, they offer packages of 5, 10 and 15 GB per month that don’t appear to have the daily download allowance. The speed appears to be 10 Mbps. Sounds like that’s a huge step up from what the current service is.
Thanks all. Dumb of me to not think about ad block or Flashblock.
I understand completely that there is the latency of sat com. I’m not an online gamer so that is really not an issue.
And I understand that Hughes and their sats have limitations. Not like they can just shoot another one up.
Anyway, I called Hughes. To upgrade to what they call 4G would cost $200 in equipment upgrades (after rebates) and an additional $10 a month to boost me up from 250mg/24hrs to 330mg/24hrs. Download speed would be boosted by perhaps 10x.
Not worth it of course. Faster download to get throttled quicker is about all that means.
250/MB a day usually works fine. Until you get shut down in the middle of something. Kinda sucks.
Thanks for the suggestion. I had it for a few years with Verizon for when the Sat went completely down. Or on the road. A MiFi. It works, but not that well. At our house cell service is getting better, but is still kindy sketchy.
No need for the MiFi on the road these days, as all hotels have the WiFi for free.