OT wireless or satellite broadband

Talking to the Apple and our ISP tech support, it does not seem like there is anything we can do but go to broadband. At our end of this dirt road, DSL is out of the question, cable isn't ever coming this way either, so it looks like wireless or satellite are our choices.

Satellite is less expensive (per month) than wireless, two of the neighbors have it and think that it is okay. Online reviews of satellite don't look so good. Wireless is higher priced, one of the techs thought that there were fewer links in the satelite chain, two neighbors have it and like it. Online reviews are better than satellite, but still not 100% positive.

What do you have ? Do you like it ? What don't you like about it ? Which is better ?

Thanks

Greg

Upload speed is pretty miserable. Considering my underground phone lines were put in late 1950s and in bad shape - I've got pretty slow dial-up. But, the satellite is just a hair faster. On a "best day" a 157 KB attachment sends in 35 seconds with satellite as opposed to 85 seconds with dial-up. It also has bad days, and there are many times for a few minutes, it loses signal and won't work at all.

Our original plan was - to get rid of the dial-up. But, we didn't since we want it for backup.

We've only got the $60 per month setup. For more money, we could get an uplink transmitter that's supposed to be faster.

I couldn"t even get a second phone line, without the phone company charging me for infrastructure that other folk would use. I have 12 wire-pairs from our house to the phone box, and they wanted $500 to run more circuits in my neighborhood! I thought everything past the interface unit was their business. Isn"t that why we have a utility?

I ran the microwave input to my router, so all the PCs in the house can access the internet at the same time. So, if you"re doing a home network, be sure to get a router, not a switch. A "switch" doesn"t have an input for a "WAN" (Wide Area Network). Our two main PCs are wired to the router and run Gigabit (1000 Mbps). We have one remote PC running on a wireless link to the router. "N" (draft) standard, so it runs about 300 Mbps.

One last thing. If you do set up a wireless network inside your home, there are TONS of precautions you need to take. I won"t get into them here, but...

HAVE FUN!!!

I didn't have a choice. Lots of data to move and it has to move it in a hurry. :>(

Allan

Some neighbors have wireless, but say that weather (snow, rain) degrades or totally cuts off the signal, and the speeds aren't what they were led to believe.

We can't get the wireless because of trees in the way, it's line of sight. And SWMBO doesn't want satellite because it's cheapest with television service and she's convinced my daughter and I will spend all of out time watching the Cartoon Network. I tried to exlain that there's RFD-TV and the Playboy Channel, but didn't get any traction with that!