SG Broadband Community

I live in a very rural area and so I'm stuck with dial up.I have been considering getting satellite internet and wanted to know what every ones opinions are on them.I have looked at hughesnet,skyway,and wildblue.Has anyone had any experience with these companies?

Faster than dial up...so OK for surfing 'n stuff. But some packages can have high latency, so if you're looking to do online gaming...

Cell service where you are?

Yes I have cell service...but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I just wanted something for faster surfing..I do a lot of online surveys and it takes for ever for pages to load.

Yeah todays "busy" web pages must be painful over dial up.
Cellular is a 1/2 decent option if your carrier blankets your location. If you get "so so"...perhaps if you can move towards a window or some place with better reception..that may give you a better option than Satellite. Roughly same performance though, just diff prices.

YeOldeStonecat wrote:Faster than dial up...so OK for surfing 'n stuff. But some packages can have high latency, so if you're looking to do online gaming...

Cell service where you are?

I am in the same boat. No cable, no DSL, do have cell phone service though. Any possible way for online gaming over 3G??? By gaming I mean COD MW2.

Wildblue is getting better and same with Hughesnet, just give them time to get their acts together with the latency.

Sava700 wrote:Wildblue is getting better and same with Hughesnet, just give them time to get their acts together with the latency.

Well thats encouraging but until then I'm screwed I guess.

Ive had some experience with a 10mbps hughesnet business line.
Seemed to work pretty good for what it was. The only issue like some others said is with latency, but unfortunately, thats something thats going to pop up a lot with sat internet. Sat can deliver pretty high speeds, but the latencies are higher than anything else I have ever seen. All in all, hughesnet is a pretty decent company though. Definitely a better choice than dialup IMO.

-John

Latency is the big issue with satellite internet. We have HughesNet Gen5 and it works as advertised. Huge improvement over their previous setups. I had Hughes 15+ years ago and it was primitive, required daily tinkering and visits from technicians, satellite changes, and it never worked dependably for more than a day or two, so we cancelled it and got AT&T cell-based service. That worked nicely for several years until hurricane María. It fell apart then and as of 6 months later it still wasn't working right, although AT&T wanted to charge full freight for it, so we switched to Hughes and it's been pretty reliable. HughesNet is not for gaming due to the latency and they so inform you when you sign up. Since I don't game on-line, it's no problem. But it does work, it isn't dependent on anything landline-based here in Puerto Rico, downloads can reach 45+Mbps, and it is very usable. Plus, if a storm is looming, I can easily take the dish down until it passes. My only regret is if I'd waited another month to signup, the plan price dropped by $20/mon. and they gave you 5Gb more data before slowdown. But what we have is quite usable for just two retired people. If I were still working (former computer consultant) I'd want something zippier but this serves quite adequately and if you don't have cable or DSL or FOptic, Hughes is a decent alternative.