Victor asked:
I live out in a rural area of Virginia and I’ve tried both satellite internet through Hughesnet and a wireless broadband card through Verizon. Here’s how they worked out.
Hughesnet – Paid around $130.00 a month and received speeds of 80kbps-150kbps on a good night. Had a flawless line of sight to the Southern sky as well and the tech they sent back out said that was as good as I was gonna get. I believe my package was the 2.5 mbps plan to boot. Canceled and payed over $1,500 for their “early termination fee”.
Wireless high speed card though Verizon. $60.00 a month with a 5 gig cap and my fastest speed never topped 35kbps. I guess I’m too far out for a quality signal. Too bad the Verizon store clerk didn’t point this out to me. Canceled as well.
Now I’m back on dial-up with PeoplePC with a top download speed of 2.5kbps and that’s no joke. I’m dying here. Are there any other high speed services out their for rural folks like myself?
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One Comment
I’m 90% sure you’re just measuring wrong. You were getting 80KB/s-150KB/s on Hughes, not totally unreasonable for a 2.5Mbps plan. You were getting 35KB/s on Verizon. And you’re getting 2.5KB/s now.
I think you are misunderstanding the different ways access speeds are measured. They are generally sold in Kbps or Mbps (kilobits per second or megabits per second, raw line speed). But browsers typically indicate them in KB/s (kilobytes per second, useful data speed).
The conversion rate is typically between 9 to 1 and 10 to 1. So a 2.5Mbps service will typically deliver up to 250KB/s. 8 to 1 because a byte is 8 bits. And the extra 1 or 2 is because of TCP and IP overhead.
You don’t specifically state what your issue was with either Hughes or Verizon. Did you think you weren’t getting enough value for your money? Did you just feel like you needed higher speeds? Were you hitting the bandwidth cap?
What was the problem exactly?
Basically, your only other option is wireless point-to-point. See if there are any ISPs in your area that offer this. Otherwise, it’s satellite, dialup, wireless cell, or very expensive leased lines or nailed ISDN lines.