Cable Internet Not Available What's Best? (new home, movies, to move)

[TwinbrookNine]

My new home is in a rural area not served by cable. Far as I can tell, there is satellite (like Hughes) internet service or some thing where you point a small antenna toward a city 60 miles away (fortunately, over water mostly). So far, nobody I've talked to knows much about either. I don't watch TV at all - just internet (my laptop connected to my 55" flat panel TV - You Tube and foreign TV stations on wwitv, mostly). So how many gigabytes per month would I use up watching streaming video probably 6 hours a day? I ask this because Hughes has limits on GB use, then it's null for the rest of the month. And that antenna thing I see around...what's that? It's about 15" square.

[Larry Caldwell]

Wireless is best if you can't get cable and can get a signal. I've never heard of anyone getting wireless from 60 miles away.

Next best is cell service.

$20 standalone Unlimited plan for the ZTE Mobley for cheap rural internet! - AT&T Wireless | DSLReports Forums

Third best is satellite. It's OK for streaming but horrible for ping.

If you need a responsive ping, DSL may work, but the bandwidth will be very low.

[PNW-type-gal]

At the last house, our choices were DSL (provided by Centurylink, where the offered speed was 2Mbps but was really more like 0.6-0.7Mbps). The "advantage" of that was that they had no bandwidth cap - not that you could stream much to hit the bandwidth. After multiple back-and-forth arguments, I finally got them to lower the monthly fee because they had no intention of running new cable and putting in new boxes to solve the problem.

The 2 satellite companies (Hughes and WildBlue) both had a very tight bandwidth cap (5 or 10 gig, I think) plus the latency made streaming or anything that needs real-time without serious buffering not possible.

There was a line-of-sight wireless service from Fireserve, but we didn't have the line-of-sight for it and the neighbor who did have the right aspect had tons of problems with it in bad weather.

Just before we left Verizon put in more cell towers and we were using a hotspot from them - still had a bandwidth cap and some latency issues, but it was better than anything else. We still use the hotspot when we travel and we easily go through 20 Gig a month - and that isn't streaming movies, just web surfing and streaming music.

[StealthRabbit]

Welcome to the 15% of US population without access to internet!

Best to move out of USA for both Healthcare and Internet. USA companies have funded a lot of 3rd world internet,

AT&T is very terrible in much of rural West Coast. Verizon rules (if you can get it and afford it)

Satellite might work if you don’t need VPN handshake or upload speed.

16 miles from PDX... I have ONE choice... dial-up.