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Review by paganize 
UPDATED: 1 year ago
member for 9.1 years, 170 visits, last login: 105 days ago
 Paris,Henry,TN
 $34 per month (12 month contract)
 about 2 days
 "Only Broadband available for most rural users"
 "not very fast, and a little flakey at times"
 "Not as good as Cable or DSL, but lots better than Sat, ISDN or Dial."
| Pre Sales Information:
Install process:
Connection reliability:
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I decided to move to the Sticks (Paris, TN) from the Louisville, KY area back in 2003 so that my kids could go to a decent school; I knew Broadband wasn't going to be available.
Most of the county is too far from a CLEC to consider DSL, and Cable makes it to only about 50% of the county, so that was out. I briefly considered Satellite, but the perpetually lousy reviews and worse-than-dial-up upload speeds made that out of the question. My best option turned out to be, like I suspected it would be, ISDN. Tennessee has a long standing agreement with Bellsouth that works out to be a subsidy for ISDN; you get Basic service for about $39.95 a month, which means 2 phone line and rock steady 64kbps uncompressed speed (No one in the area offers 128k these days).
Imagine my surprise when a local Satellite installation business started offering WISP. I jumped on it as soon as it was available.
As I had a old TV antenna tower, installation was $199; I have no idea what would have changed if I didn't have one. The installer came out 2 days after i ordered, and put up a big antenna, and ran the power cord and a CAT5 cable down to the point on the wall I said I wanted it, drilled a nice pro hole, and then proceeded to plug the antenna in and start testing on his Linux (in Paris, TN. wow) powered notebook; finding things satisfactory, he asked if I needed help setting up things inside, I asked for the network parameters, found out everything was DHCP based, told him I had it from there, and we were done. I went inside, plugged the cable into my wireless router, and 10 seconds later I had internet.
Initially, I was subscribed at capped 384/128 service, at $29.95 a month. in the nearly a year that I've had the service, it has only very rarely not met these parameters in testing, usually exceeding them. Reliability has been more consistent than any service I've ever had, except ISDN. They are currently offering a 768k service I'm considering upgrading to.
Good Points: the staff, while small, is technically very competent. The service is highly reliable, and provides broadband to a very rural area.
Bad Points: not very fast, and DHCP based; it would be nice to have a IP address, and they filter P2P out pretty heavily, but not fanatically.
Internet services that mostly work: Skype, Instant Messaging, VPN, Freenet, Miro, and to a degree, Torrents.
Internet services that mostly do not work: Gnutella based P2P, anything requiring a static IP, and forget UDP based stuff.
UPDATE 3/10/08: The basic "Bronze" package has been upgraded from 384/128 to 512/256. I'm not getting those speeds, but it's close.
UPDATE 11/18/08: The service has been really flaky lately; very intermittent service, turtle-like speeds. I wouldn't be too surprised if this was daytime over-subscription issues, but this is 3 in the morning; it actually seems a little better in the daytime for some reason. Still intermittent, but longer periods of actual internet. However, it's still the only game in town for me and while I would really like to have the 512/256 they are advertising, I can deal with 384/200 as long as it's consistent.
I'm actually thinking of renting a closet in town so I can manage some of my bigger websites.
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Beasley Wireless
