Millenicom → Re: Help deciding which service to choose.

Yeah, what he ^^ said and you can't really take the speed tests for mobile broadband as any kind of idea at all as to what speeds you will see unless you see someone that posts a speedtest from the exact tower you are going to get service from because every tower is different. They have different loads depending on where they are located like next to a large town or major highway or on the lower load side, a tower located out by itself away from towns and large highways like mine. Plus one tower can be fed by a T1 line which only allows for a max of 1.5 Mb/s up and down before anyone is on the tower which will slow that connection pretty quick and then a tower just 5 miles down the road could be fed by a fiber line and have great service.

You can get around that 24 hour trial period one of 2 ways that I know about. The first is a bit underhanded but has been pulled off by many many people, Just go to the Verizon store and sign up for one of their devices and take it home and check the signal and service and then return it saying you were not happy with it and decided not to get service. Verizon gives you 14 days I think to test a device. The other way is to get a prepaid phone from Verizon and take it out there and check to see what kind of signal you can get but the trick to this is you have to get a phone that displays whether your signal is 3G/evdo or 1x. Chances are though that if you take any of the prepaid phones home from verizon and it gets above 2 bars then you will likely be just fine with the hotspot. I have 4 Verizon contract phones in this house and my hotspot gets a better signal than every one of the phones.

As for gaming, you shouldn't need speed much for gaming, it is the latency that will kill that and again, every tower is going to be different. I have seen numbers from 50 to 600ms reported but the vast majority including mine stay in the 100 to 200ms range which is totally compatible with most games. I had a WISP for a while that gave a 128Kb/s upload and download connection and I was able to play any game I wanted because my ping averaged 20 to 50ms. As for video, my connection runs at around 1.2Mb/s 90% of the time and I can watch standard def video with no buffering at all. A you tube video usually finishes loading before the song is halfway done to give you an idea. I watch movie trailers alot on my Blockbuster webpage and since I dropped HN and got the hotspot I have not had a single trailer buffer. I was a Hughesnet customer for almost 10 years and I have to say that so far Millenicom beats them hands down. You might also look at this »www.viasatresidential.co ··· ede/home if you live about anywhere in the eastern half of the country and a few other places. That is the service on Wildblue's new satellite and offer 12Mb/s + download speeds and 2 Mb/s+ upload speeds but it will lock you into a contract and it isn't cheap and keep in mind that the caps they offer are for upload and download combined.

So you have millenicom? What device? the Novatel or something else?

I just checked out this Exede. Wow! Now I don't know what to do. I know Hughesnet sucks pretty bad but this Excede is interesting. What do ya'll think? They make it sound like it's a whole new technology... So the cap is up and down combined... Just to be clear when is upload actually used? Only when attaching files or photos right? I don't think I use much upload at all.

EXEDE isn't new technology, its KA band satellite. Its a new satellite with lots of capacity. up to 12mbps in the eastern half of the us.
however, they dropped the caps. UP and DOWN combined!

$139 will get ya monthly service with a 25GB cap!
$149 setup fee.

$59 will get ya 7.5GB
$89 will get ya 15GB

Going back and forth but have read some reviews on Exede saying that it is hard to keep it under 7.5/mo. They claimed doing what they always do. I'm also not excited about the setup costs with satellite. I don't like the way they really "rope" you into their service. Thinking about going with millenicom. Just wish I had longer than a 24 hours test period with it.

Every time you click a link or buttong you are sending information out to the satellite and eventually to the web so know, you are uploading as often as you are downloading, the differance is the amount of information you are sending to get a webpage compared to the information coming back in the form of that website is drastic and thus your upload usage for normal surfing will be small and the bulk of that cap would be used up by downloads. Gaming however is a whole nuther beast, the uploads and downloads while playing a game are much more comparable and you can begin to eat up that limit quite quickly in that case. When I was on HN, a normal day me and my family would use around 300 MB download usage and around 20 MB upload usage but if we were both playing World of Warcraft for several hours we would still use 300 to 400 MB down with the kids surfing added in but we would also use 100MB+ in uploads. But even with that, thats only around 3GB in a month if you use that every day on the upload side. It all depends on what you want to do with it in the end but outside of watching alot of video, you probably wouldn't ever see that 25GB cap but on the lower plans it might get a bit shakey till you learn what you can and can't do.

Well 1 thing to remember is if you are not happy with Millenicom in a week then it costs you the equipment and set up fee and a months service, if you wind up not happy with Wildblue then you are stuck with it for 2 years or paying the ETF to get out of it. Can't say which way to go because they both have their pro's and con's. I do know that we couldn't live with the 7.5 GB plan at all but we have 2 teenage boys plus we play WOW. If I go back to satellite ever then it will be after HN launches their satellite Jupiter and I will dish out the $600 or so for a business system powered by Jupiter. With a business system the pings stay down around 600 to 800 MS and the speeds will stay better for longer and that comes with a larger dish with a 2 watt transmitter so weather outages are almost nonexistant and you get US support. Personally I would get a prepaid Verizon phone and check the signal and if it was decent I would go with millenicom, but thats me, can't speak for you.

Thanks for the info! I think I am planning on going with millenicom. If it's really bad, I'll send it back within the 24 hour. But even if it doesn't work out well in the long run, I'll know that I tested it and I won't have too much to lose. I do hate the thought of the high setup fees, equipment, and 2yr commitment. I never liked leasing equipment. Usually you could have it paid for with just 2 yrs.
I hope that is not $600/month for business! lol I would go to subway once a day and use there's first. ha

I did this to prove the service problem in my area was the fault of Vz and not the fault of M'com. If you make a deal with a store manager, you can come out of this for free. Even the restocking charge can be written off. You will have to work with tech support but in the event you find you have adequate signal, there are ways to easily show that your service is intermittent and therefore unacceptable. Then go with M'com, risk free.

No it is a bit over $600 for the setup and equipment. With the business systems on HN you own the equipment and thus have to buy upfront. I will go with the cheapest true business plan they have which is the same plan I am waiting for them to cancel now on the residential side, it is $120 a month.