PCTech Forums

Hello, good to see this site is still up and running! I'm very suprised, I came here with a problem a few years ago. Great community. I wasn't sure where this post belongs so I'm just going to post it here. I'd just like some input on this.

I'm kind of in a bind.. I recently moved out of a large city where I had comcast cable as my internet connection, 10MB+ download speed. Now I moved into a rural area and there's no cable line ran on my road, and the only internet option was DSL from a local small phone company. I'm paying $49.99 a month for really slow DSL. My avg download speed is 250/kb's, and my upload is not even worth mentioning.

I'm debating on giving satellite internet a try, $54.95 a month for 800/kb's-1MB download and 300/kb's upload. I relaize that those speeds aren't guaranteed and satellite isn't the most relaible, and they restrict a lot on how much you can download/upload but I absolutley hate how slow my DSL is download wise.
I don't play any video games online, my PC is used for web design and a media center.. use to game a lot until I broke my crazy World of Warcraft addiction. ;)

If anyone has used satellite internet or could give me any input that would be awesome, thanks a lot. I've been reading a lot of reviews online but I'd just like to be sure before I do anything.

DONT DO IT!!!!

Wayne, i had satellite through starband for just over a year and 4 months of that year was complete downtime. It was the worse experience ive ever had with a company. The bandwidth caps are unreasonable by far, the speed is maybe half of what they claim. What they dont tell you is the bandwidth on a transponder is shared so if its loaded your speed is pure crap. Thus enters the bandwidth cap to reduce traffic to make the connection faster. The latency is anywhere from 700 to 1000ms, making it hard to sign in to certain secure sites and so on. Reliability is a complete joke, anything from a mist to a flood you can give up internet for a while. After a rain you will have to go out and wipe the feed horn on the dish to get signal again, on a foggy morning or a misty day you wont see the internet at all. Note that all the problems im mentioning, my neighbor had very much the same problems with wild blue satellite internet as well. Stick with the "slow" dsl, at least its usable, its not monitored and capped and its not shared.

Thank you for taking the time to reply liljim.

After a week of reading reviews and debating on what to do I'm going to stick with the DSL.. It's always up and running, I just dread downloading @ 250kbs compared to my old 10mbs connection. If I knew this was my only internet option I wouldn't have moved into this house, lol. By the way, remember when I said my upload wasn't worth mentioning? I enjoy uploading to my FTP at this speed ;(

Satellite will be slower than the speed test you posted, regardless of what they say i never saw more than 600-800 down. If your getting 1.3 trouble free, keep it.

In my opinion this kind of offer of satellite internet is good but in my experience it's better to talk to a real person before choosing a satellite Internet provider and visit your local office because sometimes it's only the guarantee poster or ads you see. You ave to discuss the problem to the right person.

You can also go to dslreports.com and type in the isp you are/were considering if you want to get reviews from customers.

I would look into your DSL provider and see if they have fiber-optics available. I know around my area, the phone company uses fiber-optics which also provides TV. The speeds are about 3-times faster than what you are getting now. Satellite internet is intriguing but the speeds aren't that great right now and the prices are steep for the speeds offered.

Satellite internet sucks! Go DSL if you have it. With satellite you are sure to run into problems such as unreliability, bandwidth sharing, and horrible latency. Not to mention it takes them two weeks to fix it if it breaks. Just not worth the headache. I believe liljim can attest to this as he has faced these problems before.

fuck the satellite