rural girl
join:2009-07-30
Snohomish, WA
| Try Wireless before getting satellite internet
As of yesterday I am out of my contract with Hughes Net and I couldn't be more thrilled. We moved from a large city to a rural area, and were disappointed to find out that we couldn't get DSL.
After being disappointed with the speeds we upgraded to a higher plan. Right after that nothing changed. I spent hours on the phone with tech support. Finally, they sent out a technician. He adjusted our dish to communicate with a different satellite that had less people on it. This actually got us very close to the speeds that were promised.
But, for us, the killer with satellite is the latency. I needed to be able to work from home, and when I was using the server there was always a typing delay. Plus, my husband couldn't do any work from home.
After lots of research I am happy to say that we are now happy with our wireless internet from cyberonic. The plan we are using is with Sprint, but there are no limits. They gave us a modem with the Sprint card so all of our computers have internet access at the same time. They advertise speeds up to 1.5. My average speed over 5 days (with 80 entries) was 741 down and 350 up. Yes, I was getting similar speeds with Hughes, but the HUGE difference is the latency. With Hughes the latency was about 1000 ms, and with cyberonic I'm averaging about 300 ms. With much less lag time we are able to do so much more. We've heard that we may be able to get closer to the 1.5 consistently with an amplifier, but, for now, this works for us. When Sprint updates all their towers to 4G we should get even faster speeds.
It isn't cheap though. We are paying $69 a month for the first 6 months, then $89 for the other 6 months. But I was paying $69 for the higher Hughes Net plan and I was very unhappy. We had also looked at the wireless plan from millenicom ($59 a month, no long term contract), but decided to go with cyberonic. (When I read some millenicom reviews some people suspected that millenicom is actually monitoring bandwidth, even though they say they aren't.)
So, for all the people who live in rural areas or can't get dsl or cable, I just wanted to give my impression about Hughes Net "high speed internet." Although it is faster than dial up, the latency prevents a lot of operations or makes them very very slow. Also, forget about using this in a snowstorm, heavy winds, etc. I would recommend wireless over Hughes any day. (Clearwire is cheaper than cyberonic, but they have TERRIBLE reviews, so we didn't even consider them.) Good luck in your quest for high speed internet! |
