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Thanks, I appreciate all this input. Which is better for a family; DSL or cell phone internet? We grew up and currently live rurally, understanding sacrifice. We work from home and homeschool. So having the best internet available for our location is a priority. Viasat tells us low earth orbit may be available when the home is complete.
This is a question with no real answer. We are rural. Have fiber internet thanks to forward thinking county government. Have good data speed thanks to verizon. You just have to look at options and cost. If I didnt have fiber or DSL then I would bite the bullet and settle for the expensive option of a data plan. Satellite has its drawbacks. Snow and trees can prevent reception
This is a question with no real answer. We are rural. Have fiber internet thanks to forward thinking county government. Have good data speed thanks to verizon. You just have to look at options and cost. If I didnt have fiber or DSL then I would bite the bullet and settle for the expensive option of a data plan. Satellite has its drawbacks. Snow and trees can prevent reception
Thanks, I appreciate all this input. Which is better for a family; DSL or cell phone internet? We grew up and currently live rurally, understanding sacrifice. We work from home and homeschool. So having the best internet available for our location is a priority. Viasat tells us low earth orbit may be available when the home is complete.
My son and DIL live out in the country from Murray, Ky., and I think had to settle with DSL. She was studying for her nurse practitioner degree and had to go elsewhere to take her online classes. DSL wasn't getting it. They got the AT&T internet through a card they put in their modem. She said it's the difference between night and day. She was able to finish her classes at home and they could finally enjoy online movies.
My son and DIL live out in the country from Murray, Ky., and I think had to settle with DSL. She was studying for her nurse practitioner degree and had to go elsewhere to take her online classes. DSL wasn't getting it. They got the AT&T internet through a card they put in their modem. She said it's the difference between night and day. She was able to finish her classes at home and they could finally enjoy online movies.
All rural areas are not having problems with Internet, phones, or TV. We are rural, and have decent for all 3. We did ditch the land land, for a VOIP system, that sounds better than the phone company did. $16 per month and $6 of that is the federal and state taxes, unlimited calling all 3 countries in North America. 2 numbers {and lines}, and a lot more extra services than the land line we replaced and all they had to offer and no extra fees to use them. We use OOMA. Their home phone service is ideal for work at home jobs, and is the one home VOIP system that can handle a fax machine on one of the 2 lines. We have 5 wireless handsets to cover the whole house. Cell phone has top strong signal.
Our state's biggest city is 100,000 people, and we live 50 miles from that city. We have lived in small towns for almost 30 years in 3 different states, and once the switch was away from dial up, have always had good Internet, and phone service. If you have Internet good enough to stream movies, you can use a VOIP phone system way cheaper and better than a lot of land lines. If you want to appear for business reasons to be in a metro area instead of out in the sticks, your phone number can be in any city in the USA at no extra charge. I knew a man in California who got one (one line FREE and only $6 a month for taxes for his mother in law in New York so she could call his kids and wife for Free instead of the high phone bills she was running up from the land line). Phone was in his name and his mother in law and friends looking out for his mother in law could all call him. The phone number was local for them. Phone at his California home.
We'll be building a home rurally where satellite internet, a landline phone, and dish tv are what's available. A repeater may not help our cell phones work. Any of you using satellite internet or only a landline phone? My kid's gaming consoles will receive a latent signal, so some games won't work. We plan on hardwiring devices to cables/wall ports (instead of using wifi) for a more solid connection. We online school, use laptops, tablets, kindle, ipad for work....We'll use old fashioned phones for power outages. No cordless handset systems. I appreciate cable type suggestions to use for these ports. It's called "ethernet" or "cat" wiring? Thanks in advance.
We-ll.........
Are you sure we aren't neighbors? Landline phone is my most reliable phone communications, Hughesnet for the Internet, and no cable anything. I suppose if I did TV still I could get the Dish or analog to digital converter for broadcast or both, but I have left TV behind. I don't do wifi because I do not want to bathe my house in RF radiation.
Here's the problem in that, IMHO, satellite is really not built for people who use the Net as most people use the Net. I shoot through monthly quota in 5 days, if not sooner; it is only 5Gs. I suspect the reason why I do is because most sites treat the world like it has unlimited Net and it is the ads that eats it all up.
Hence, no easy, quick answers. Forget about OLD. Get ad blockers and those programs that freeze the moving ads. Download all you need from locations other than your home, locations where your use of the Net isn't limited, and then bring the information home to use. Get a weather radio because you won't be able to use weathre maps.
Welcome to the world of submarine games where you come to periscope depth, put your comm masts up, send your signals, listen, pull your masts down, and submerge. Rinse and repeat. Welcome to the world that is not so easy Internet when you are away from the cities.
Last edited by TamaraSavannah; 07-09-2020 at 07:24 PM..
Streaming is what uses data. customers always say "I was just watching a movie and playing a game online." Some services, like You Tube, don't use as much bandwidth. Anytime you watch tv or a movie online, you are using bandwidth and will need at least 3mb service. Satellite is bad for streaming due to latency (distance to the satellite and back.) Voip uses bandwidth too and you'd have some issues with voip over satellite. The only two types of internet service that I haven't supported are satellite and cell phone. I'd go with cell if I had good coverage at my location. In some cases, you'd be better off to bite the bullet and do satellite tv.
DSL quality depends on how close you are to their equipment. Too far away and it will be problematic (or you won't be able to get service at all.) And this can be true even when you live in town. Company I work for does line of sight service in some locations. Works well if you are close enough and if there are no trees to obstruct the signal. Fiber is really the best option if available.
Company I work for does line of sight service in some locations. Works well if you are close enough and if there are no trees to obstruct the signal.
Our weekend place has never had Internet. Too far from urban areas for anyone to run anything (except electricity ). I've used our cell phones to create a hotspot so at least we had some Internet, albeit a slow, poor signal.
But now a new company has put in a tower, just a couple miles away, that offers line of sight service, and we're close enough to get a decent signal. Booyah! Had it installed a couple weeks ago, and it's great. I get 25Mbps, with no data caps. Finally, I can stream and load web pages without getting a cup of coffee while it loads. It's no Gig Internet like I have at home, but it's plenty for a country place.
Fiber optic is a type of cable that is incredibly fast. Much faster than coax or ethernet or any other type of normally used cable. It's the backbone of the Internet. Almost all traffic around the world is on fiber optic cabling. And most Internet providers (Comcast, ATT, etc) use fiber optic cables themselves, to carry & transmit their own traffic.
The challenge with fiber optic is the expense. It's far more expensive to run, and connections & interfaces are also not cheap. So typically what most Internet providers do is run fiber optic as far as they can, for example to an interface box that handles a neighborhood. Then they run coax to all the houses. That keeps costs down. That's known as "the last mile problem". They can get fiber all the way to you, except for the last mile.
There are a few newer neighborhoods that have been wired with fiber optic cabling. And some newer multi-family (apts & condos) have fiber all the way to each unit. But almost no older neighborhoods have it.
I got lucky, our condo bldg (finished in 2018) has 100% fiber. So I get Gig Internet right in our unit.
But again, fiber is not an option for 99% of this country.
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I see.
). I've used our cell phones to create a hotspot so at least we had some Internet, albeit a slow, poor signal.
