Rural Internet

[crazyzoe]

Not sure where to post this question so thought I would try here. For those of you that live in rural areas. What type of internet service do you use? Any good results?

[Iambjm]

Depends on where you are. I had wild blue satellite and hated it, then ATT put up a cell tower right across the road so I switched to wireless and love it.

[Eric Wettschreck]

Mine is through Frontier Communications. It's high speed but pretty expensive from what I've heard others are paying.

[Tom7227]

I am a Twin Cities guy and so I have no idea what the correct answer is. Don't the phone companies all offer internet with a land line package? I would think that anything that relies on a dish would be subject to a lot of problems with lost signals, weather related problems, things like that.

I am interested in learning what works out state.

[toughguy]

For Landline if you're rural and served by Century Link (Qwest) good luck. If your served by a small independent or Coop your odds of getting good service at a good price are much, much better.

[harvey lee]

I had Frontier and left that a year or so ago and glad I did. had alot of issues with e-mails and thi9er speed stunk.

I now have Media com and the e-mails have zero issues and the speed is a bit better.

Not many options for us in our area.

Years ago I had my internet through my phone line and that was the worst service I have ever had. Could only get dial up and it was way slooooow.

[BobT]

Rural Osakis. We use DSL from a local provider and it has worked fine.

[Dotch]

We've been running Century Link DSL at the ranch and at the office. It works fine. Once in a great while there's downtime but not frequently. It's a lot faster than Clearwave wireless was, cheaper and typically works during locally heavy thunderstorms where some satellite signals won't. The main problem in this area is that the DSL service is only available where they ran the fiber optic cable several years ago, primarily on main roads. There is little competition with other options typically running into more money than the DSL for the same speed.

[Roadkill Randy]

I use Verizon's wireless high speed air card. Works good for me, bundled with my cells and their home phone connect box. Air card is great as it is then portable.

[Dotch]

What speed does it run? Just curious.

[crazyzoe]

Thanks for the input. The area would south of Prior Lake about 8 miles. I thought about going through Verizon wireless but unsure of the speed and connection in that area. I have heard horror stories with the satellite providers so thinking about voiding that.

[bobbymalone]

real rural places don't have the landline infrastructure for DSL. At least that's what the phone company tells my parents.

Their internet comes over the satellite. I wouldn't try streaming netflix, but it works well enough for email and casual internetting.

[toughguy]

I work with rural broadband providers from all over the country. There are plenty of very rural places with high speed DSL - even fiber to the home. Depends on who's serving you.

[Walleye Guy]

I have Wild Blue at our lake home. Its not super fast and its pretty expensive. However I have found it to be extremely reliable. I have it coming into the garage and then hooked up a wireless router to it.

Its an expensive "nice to have" for the amount we actually use it. However the kids can use it for doing homework on the weekends and I can usually squeeze a couple days a month of working from home by having the satellite internet connection. That makes it worthwhile in my opinion.

There is a monthly 12 GB download limit and if you expect the speed to be on par with a cable or DSl connection you will be disappointed.

[upnorth]

There are a few options in the boonies. 1. Wild Blue or other satellite services. 2. DSL maybe. 3rd AT&T or Verizon type of wireless. Wild blue has faster service now days, but still some weird latency because of the satellite. DSL would be the cheapest and most stable. 3G/4G wireless can be good but not cheap.

Also look around there may be someone offering wireless internet services in the area. There is one up here that runs on I think 900 MHZ that offers decent service. Google may be your friend looking all this up.

[JOHNBIGDOG]

I tether off of my Verizon cell phone. I have unlimited data and just recently upgraded to a 4g phone. I can then use my laptop as a Wifi network to connect my Wii or other device. Internet is as fast as anything else I have used before. It may be worth your while to check with your local cell phone provider.

[JakeJ_Mn]

I live where nothing is available but dialup, satellite or wireless. Our wireless cells work just ok where we live. I tried the Verizon and ATT hot spots with limited success, so I have Exede(WildBlues high speed) now.

I get 12 Mbps downloads, but am limited to a data package. For 10 Gbs a month it's roughly $58.00 per month and extra Gbs are $10.

If you aren't gaming live, using/viewing webcams, streaming video or watching Netflix it's more than enough. Still limited, but better than dialup. According to Exede, a 1 1/2 movie over the satellite download takes approx. 1.3 to 1.6 Gbs each.

So far I have had no outages and the speeds are consistant. From Midnight to 5am, you can download as much as you want without it going against your monthly data.

[delcecchi]

Thanks for the input. The area would south of Prior Lake about 8 miles. I thought about going through Verizon wireless but unsure of the speed and connection in that area. I have heard horror stories with the satellite providers so thinking about voiding that.

One problem with satellite is latency. Bandwidth might be ok, but if every item loading has a big latency it can kill the bandwidth.

[dougger222]

A couple years ago had wild blue through dtv and it was VERY BAD. At the time bundles with Quest (DTV, phone line, wild blue). After 6 months with the wild blue and very slow connection and at least one day a week with no connection finaly pulled the plug on it. Although it was a 2 year contract they took the box back left the dish and didn't charge me anything to cancel the contract.

Currently have internet through Century Link and it's ok. Don't miss living in maplehood but sure do miss that darn comcast super fast internet!

[upnorth]

The latency will be seen at the start of every request. If you are pulling down large individual files you will see it less than a lot of smaller files.

Once the packet stream is started won't be as bad as when it starts.

[delcecchi]

The latency will be seen at the start of every request. If you are pulling down large individual files you will see it less than a lot of smaller files.

Once the packet stream is started won't be as bad as when it starts.

I mentioned it because when loading web pages it seems like there are a whole bunch of different small files that get downloaded. Some are ads, others seem to be graphics or headings etc.

[upnorth]

That would be accurate Del. If you look the code for a web page a lot of what you see are links to images/text/etc that needs to be downloaded individually. And each one will be making a separate request.

[delcecchi]

Are the requests serialized or can multiples go out while waiting for the return? If serialized that would cause the larger latency of satellite to really adversely affect the performance.

Thanks for the confirmation.

[mainbutter]

Depends on where you are. I had wild blue satellite and hated it, then ATT put up a cell tower right across the road so I switched to wireless and love it.

Pretty much EXACT same story here.

Hated wild blue satellite, love our 4g service.

[upnorth]

Del not a real web developer, more of an infrastructure guy so I am not totally sure how the app would send a request. I would assume the request would be sent as web browser reads the page, I doubt it would need to wait for an acknowledgement(ack) before sending another. But again not totally sure about that.

TCP does use ack to be sure all the packets in a download to be sure the entirety of data was received. But not the same as this. If something seems out a of place it the missing packets will be resent.