New Hope for Dialup Members?

[Ianab]

  Last I heard, it costs about $80,000 to add broadband to an existing fiber-optic terminal.  The phone company isn't going to invest that until they have enough customers to justify it.

Thats exacly right, but they are never going to get enough cutomers (100?) in range in most rural areas.

Thats where the local guy has found his niche, he puts a wireless router on a pole for a couple of thousand and only needs 10 connections to make it pay. The 10 users are probably sharing one 8mb DSL line into his router, but even 1 or 2 mbit is great compared to dialup.

Our town council has floated the idea of putting in low speed wireless internet free for the whole town. Pay extra and get full speed. When the cost is split over the whole town it's much less than what we pay individually. The Telcos will hate it of course.

Ian

[Larry]

Last I heard, it costs about $80,000 to add broadband to an existing fiber-optic terminal.  The phone company isn't going to invest that until they have enough customers to justify it.

It might take almost 2 years for em to get a payback…if they looked at it as cost/subscriber it would be pennies.

Right now my AT&T/Yahoo dialup is not working…because they just let the kiddies at UofA out for Christmas break…and there all on facebook.  Happens when they get a snow day, last day of school, first day of school, and most any other occasion.  I’m on our business PC with an AT&T 3G air card right now.  I bought it because they said I could get on the 3G network…well I can…about 2 minutes every hour than the rest of the time it drops to the 2G network.  So…I’m paying $75 a month for service that doesn’t work as advertised.  The phone company is waiting for a handout from the government.  The PSC could give a flip less about my service because it is a non-tarrifed item.

And Google still has the better idea...TiSP.

[WH_Conley]

Come on Warbird, tell us what you really think.

[D._Frederick]

GF,
What  is the problem with Hughes other than the $~75 per month? I have the same problem, am 3miles away the phone station, too far for DSL.

[clearcut]

I had a Hugesnet (Direct PC Directway) connection for 6 years and as soon as a Wireless ISP established service in my area, I jumped right in and have had excellent service ever since ($40/month). 

What's wrong with a satellite connection.

1. Cost - $80/month for slooooooow uploads and sometimes fast often slow downloads.
2. Latency - the time to send a signal into space, back to the ground, over the intertubes, back into space and back to the ground killed applications that used secure connections, on-line gaming, bittorrent, and video.
3. FAP - Fair Access Policy - if you downloaded too many MB over a short period of time (I think it was 180 MB over 4 hours) , Hughesnet slowed your connection to a crawl. Thoroughly sucks with a major software update.
4. First tier customer service through India that you always had to pass through to get someone who could actually help.
5. When I started with Hughesnet, I had access to streaming music that did not count against the FAP limit and to Usenet groups. Each simply went away one day with no notice from Hughesnet. Only when customers complained did they post a notice that they deleted these services to "improve customer service".
6. Big ugly dish stuck to the roof.
7. Frequent weather related outages.
8. Frequent unexplained outages and slow downs.

[GF]

GF,
What  is the problem with Hughes other than the $~75 per month? I have the same problem, am 3miles away the phone station, too far for DSL.

Problem I ran into with Hughes was it did not support VPN connections such as Cisco VPN's.   Also it was dog slow when going to https sites, http sites were ok, hit an https site and and was like using dialup tried all kinds of different https sites and all were slow.  Also having a teen boy he liked downloading exceeding the Fair Access Policy, they then throttle you down to dial up speeds.  For $80 a month it definitly was not worth what I was getting.


D._Frederick
   I would look into a couple of routers with patch panels and bounce the wireless from a location or friend that has DSL to your house, the patch panels I used are capable of 9 miles one direction with line of site and 18 miles if you have two with line of site.

[trapper]

finally was able to get dsl a couple weeks ago.  now i can watch the videos you guys post.  on  dialup i even skipped most of the pictures

[SwampDonkey]

on  dialup i even skipped most of the pictures

Why? We size them so they don't take for ever to load. 

I can see a photo intense page getting a little slow though.