Anyone have anything good to say about their satellite internet experience? We are looking at a rural piece of land that doesn’t have a good broadband option. My wife works from home daily and uses a lot of screen sharing, email and data transfer throughout the day. I think we would be able to stay under the highest data cap available (50 GB – Dish/Hughes/etc.) but I am worried about the reliability, customer service, etc.
I haven’t used it myself, but I know there is a huge difference between download speed vs. upload speed. Not sure how well that would work with screen share(?).
For screen sharing the latency over satellite will be annoying. The same thing for voice over IP (skype, sip, google hangouts). My brother has internet service bundled with his dish network tv subscription and regularly hits their highest data cap. He has one son still at home though so it is hard to say what exactly is using up the bandwidth. In our house we use about 240GB monthly over DSL (that’s upload + download). Netflix, online gaming, Amazon Prime, video conferencing, voip – it all adds up for us as a family of 4.
I imagine satellite internet is affected by the weather the same as TV is. We’ll lose signal at times when it is storming out. We have Dish for TV only, not internet.
I have only secondhand knowledge. I have a relative who needed sat internet in rural Wisconsin. He told me of the trials/tribulations of life in the country. I remember him saying that he researched several sat internet providers, there’s more than just HuguesNet out there, but most of them are tuned to the commercial user.
My understanding was that the main issue was performance variations depending on atmospheric conditions. His speed and quality would vary quite a bit from day to day and a good rain or snow event and it was game over for the internet until the storm passed. Bottom line was that it was better than nothing, but far from the equal to a wired connection. It was also expensive.
My wife works at home 100% of the time for a big tech company. In thinking about her use, she’s basically setting the wire on fire 8+ hours a day. Video conferencing, VOIP, uploads/downloads of big data sets, etc. We had to upgrade our land-based service to a commercial grade connection to get enough bandwidth and she has a cell phone with 4G LTE as a backup so at least she can work if the internet goes down.
I’d say you’d want to make very, very, very sure that sat net works for your wife before buying property.
Grouse
Anyone have anything good to say about their satellite internet experience? We are looking at a rural piece of land that doesn’t have a good broadband option. My wife works from home daily and uses a lot of screen sharing, email and data transfer throughout the day. I think we would be able to stay under the highest data cap available (50 GB – Dish/Hughes/etc.) but I am worried about the reliability, customer service, etc.
I was in the same boat but elected to pick up Verizon Fusion for my internet. It worked quite well but is capped with the amount of data and cost is reflected in the amount of data used. I believe we had 30 megs of data for about $90 per month. Speeds were fine unless trying to stream or download video/movies which we did not because it would cost a ton of data.
I had the Verizon Home Fusion as well. It worked well- – till the antenna went south on me. Then it was the usual lies, broken promises and failed follow ups that Verizon has become very famous for- – jerr
We have dish network and Internet through that… its a different company … exceed i think…but signed up through dish. We get 10gb/mo for about $50. Not the greatest speed but it’s comparable to verizon… except cheaper. Plus you don’t have to deal with verizon… which I can’t stand. So… not super awesome but we didn’t have many options. So it’s better than nothing.
Is the Verizon and Dish services actually satellite internet? I was under the impression that both of these services were essentially repackaged cell phone internet, coming off of the 4G cell towers.
Any service that is showing a “location map” probably isn’t sat internet. Sat net should work anywhere on the continent.
My mother in law has one of those wireless broadband pay as you go boxes from Walmart. It actually works surprisingly well for her limited use. She can Skype, the speed is pretty good, etc. But all that’s linked to how good of a 4G / 4G LTE signal you have. We’ve taken it on trips for the kids to use and it often bogs down when you hit an area that only has 3G.
Grouse
For Dish – it is definitely satellite and not 4G. Also, after looking at their FAQ it seems that they don’t support VPN either?
Q: I work from home. Can I run a VPN with dishNET Satellite?
A: NO, dishNET Satellite will not typically support a VPN.
https://www.mydish.com/upgrades/products/satellite-internet
As has been stated – will be faster than dial-up but will still disappoint in other ways.
out in the country here, i’ve run DSL, Exceed and 2x Hughes. Right now i’m on my second trip with hughes. I’m getting 50G for $80 which is about as cheap as it comes. the weather can be a b**** granted, but it’s been worth it. I’ve got a 3g Verizon clam for phone and a land line for weather backup. in my media business, i send a lot of material during the down time window (2am to 8am). I get another 50G for that period. Even during production, i rarely go over my limit. Some shoots can go 80-100G each so we use a cloud for that.
And Hughes has not shut down my VPN, like Exceed did…
Dave is correct. I have a dish for TV on my house… and a dish for interwebs. My parents with verizon Internet have a little hot-spot thingy… which plays off towers connected to satellites… right?
Thanks all for the info…I haven’t been back on here for a bit cause I found out that property was sold. Pretty bummed!
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