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Parascuba

Parascuba

Awesome Friend
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Joined
Jan 29, 2021
Messages
75
Sorry I was away from the site for a while. Was the search for land for a while. So I have a choice of small land as 2.5 acres. At least I could mess around and learn how it works. If I decide to go for big. I will buy bigger land. I'm going to be only one person on the land. I don't think I'll need 10 or more acres. Anyway While middle nowhere. How do you access the internet? Right now I'm in Michigan in one of the large cities. I'll stay here until I paid off the property. The property located in Navajo, Arizona I have a plan for a house, I have few ideas. But one thing bothers me... Internet. There's no electric line anywhere near that property. I will use a solar panel to power up the house. Still, the Internet... Everyone told me dish/satellite is worst during storms. But I don't know for fact. Since you guys are here. I'm sure some of you are off the grid too. So... How? What about Starlink? I heard it's a new technology
 
Next time you visit the property take your laptop, see what is available, and how it works in the area. How far will you be from the nearest town? There must be some type of service in the area.
 
A few years back our dial up got so slow that I had Huges install satellite, probably the best move we've made, Ziply phone company took over the Frontier system, which was not giving out new DSL connections, Ziply ran fiber optics lines down our way and offered DSL converters for a lot less than our satellite, but every one who signed up for that had nothing but problems, we're glad we stayed with Huges. One of the things I had Huges do was to place the satellite dish under the 2 foot roof overhang, it keeps the snow off and when it's snowing or raining, I have never had a failure to use the internet. We have a solar backup system and it easily runs the system. I've heard that Starlink was a good system, I've not checked it out to see if it would beat Hughes, mainly because Hughes has worked flawlessly. The only problem I've had was that I couldn't get on line during the daylight hours, called up Hughes, they did a connection test and said there was a problem with my modem, they sent me a new one within a week, it also has Wi-fi which the first one didn't have.
 
viking said:
A few years back our dial up got so slow that I had Huges install satellite, probably the best move we've made, Ziply phone company took over the Frontier system, which was not giving out new DSL connections, Ziply ran fiber optics lines down our way and offered DSL converters for a lot less than our satellite, but every one who signed up for that had nothing but problems, we're glad we stayed with Huges. One of the things I had Huges do was to place the satellite dish under the 2 foot roof overhang, it keeps the snow off and when it's snowing or raining, I have never had a failure to use the internet. We have a solar backup system and it easily runs the system. I've heard that Starlink was a good system, I've not checked it out to see if it would beat Hughes, mainly because Hughes has worked flawlessly. The only problem I've had was that I couldn't get on line during the daylight hours, called up Hughes, they did a connection test and said there was a problem with my modem, they sent me a new one within a week, it also has Wi-fi which the first one didn't have.
Click to expand...
If I had a nickel for every time I have seen this ad on TV, I could buy him one:mad:.
They are hands-down the leader in remote internet service:


*Disclaimer: Not affiliated with Hughesnet in any way, not even a customer.
 
Supervisor42 said:
If I had a nickel for every time I have seen this ad on TV, I could buy him one:mad:.
They are hands-down the leader in remote internet service:


*Disclaimer: Not affiliated with Hughesnet in any way, not even a customer.
Click to expand...

When I checked out satellite providers Hughes was high on the good list, getting a replacement modem as soon as I did is certainly a feather in their hat. I've never seen Hughes ads in our area.
 
SpaceX Starlink might be something to consider. It's still in beta with limited coverage now, but might be more widely available when you're ready to move.

I've also heard good things about HughesNet.
 
My granddaughter lives in the middle of nowhere,she had Hughes very high cost and not worth a dime, my area got a new internet connection, I live in a very small city, well close to it, Sardis internet, she finally got that and loves it very fast, I have charter, love it too. Always fast.
 
We have spectrum at the house for 10+ years now. Only time we've lost service the modem died. Took it and swapped for a new one and it was right back up.
We use direct TV for our service and thought about going to Hughes net for internet. But when it get heavy clouds or heavy rain, or snow our TV service is typically bad to gone. I watch radar coverages during weather events and don't want to chance losing the net at a time I need it most
 
Bacpacker said:
We have spectrum at the house for 10+ years now. Only time we've lost service the modem died. Took it and swapped for a new one and it was right back up.
We use direct TV for our service and thought about going to Hughes net for internet. But when it get heavy clouds or heavy rain, or snow our TV service is typically bad to gone. I watch radar coverages during weather events and don't want to chance losing the net at a time I need it most
Click to expand...

I think it may depend on market size.

We are a very small market for them.
People say the service is bad and reception drops off at the drop of a hat.
This is just what a lot of people on our local website are saying.

Jim
 
We see tons of ads for Spectrum, called them over 10 or more years ago, they didn't have service by us then and when I called them a few months ago, they still didn't have service out here and probably never will, anyway, Hughes has been totally reliable.
 
viking said:
We see tons of ads for Spectrum, called them over 10 or more years ago, they didn't have service by us then and when I called them a few months ago, they still didn't have service out here and probably never will, anyway, Hughes has been totally reliable.
Click to expand...
An aside

The Princess was involved in the internet in the early days. When she learned that internet was coming she signed up early. When we did get connected the ISP handle ended in "1". I did have to set-up a proxy server to allow more than one computer to access the internet at a whopping 1Mhz. We could down load an image in less than 15 seconds!

Bottom line

There is a small advantage of being located just on the edges of subburbia and within walking distance of the nearest farm and gun club.

I now return you your previous discussion if internet options.

Ben

Foot notes
Starlink is still in early development and as a result is costly. The hardware required is impressive in that one unpacks it and it finds a satellite automatically. Elon Musk is throwing 100 satellites plus at a time into orbit with some of his launches.

The Princess was the architect that developed one of the world's first Ethernet sniffers. Today known as Wireshark. A packet capture program used by hackers to monitor and record Ethernet packets.
 
I have lived in this house for 13 years and had DSL at 3.5 meg.
Today a Spectrum van stopped in front of the house so I went out to chat. I will be getting high-speed internet and cable TV in 2 or 3 months. I don't want the TV but I can't wait for real high-speed internet.
I told the guy I would give him $100 to put my name on the top of the list for installation. He said we would all get it at the same time. Doesn't hurt to try. :)
 
Parascuba said:
What about Starlink? I heard it's a new technology
Click to expand...

I know a guy in rural Arizona that just switched to Starlink. He gave it a thumbs up as the best provider so far in 17 years at his location.

He did say that there are brief outages because of sattelite position, but they only last a minute or two and it is right back up and running.

This is what he said about it:

Our long awaited Starlink kit arrived last Friday. We live in a rural AZ town with no cable, horrible DSL, and extremely intermittent radio modem services.

Starlink is still in Beta, and it does go down a few times a day, but it has never been down for more than a few minutes. Usually it's up and ready to go. They have an app that shows exactly how long the outages are, ping times, and even tells you how long until the next satellite hits when there is a gap. This is by far the fastest, and so far, the most reliable Internet we've had out here. For us this is our 6th Internet provider in 17 years at this location.
Click to expand...

Here are the speeds he is getting:


1619020112422.png
 
If I had to rely on satellite, I would go with Elon Musk’s company. If you can land a rocket on it’s tail on a ship, you can handle internet stuff. I’ve read that it is expensive, but you can essentially throw the antenna in the yard and it connects itself. No need for a tech to fiddle at all. I also trust it will just get better and better.
We have ‘wired’ internet access, but it is pitiful. We pay for ‘high speed’ but turtles are faster.
 
We moved to a rural location, a county that doesn't have a whole lot of people and is not connected to an interstate. A neighboring county is connected to I-40. Someone, somewhere, at some time, decided that this area needed to develop and they installed fiber optic over the whole county. Development fizzled, just never happened. Roads that were scheduled never got built. Industry that was supposed to be coming never came. But here we are with fiber optic internet. And it works well. We got lucky.
 
PopPopT said:
We moved to a rural location, a county that doesn't have a whole lot of people and is not connected to an interstate. A neighboring county is connected to I-40. Someone, somewhere, at some time, decided that this area needed to develop and they installed fiber optic over the whole county. Development fizzled, just never happened. Roads that were scheduled never got built. Industry that was supposed to be coming never came. But here we are with fiber optic internet. And it works well. We got lucky.
Click to expand...

North of Cumberland Co?
 
I know this is an old thread, but I wanted to weigh in to say that Hughesnet SUCKS!!! It is absolutely the worst service I've ever had. Not just in terms of reliability and price. They have the worst customer service. They outsource to India and give their CS agents scripts. If its not in the script they can't help you. They also have a deny everything policy when something is wrong on their end. It's always the customer's end. They will lie about outages. They shadow-throttle customers and don't provide speeds agreed upon. They miscalculate usage and treat customers who get capped like absolute garbage. I had them for several years and could not wait to get away from them. I left a very long scathing review on dslreports and shortly after that, they pretty much shut my internet off (dslreports gave my first name and location and I'm the only customer in this area with that name so they figured out who posted the complaint). I checked the advanced settings in the modem and found they had throttled me so I couldn't even use the internet even when I wasn't over my limit. I was paying to get 1.2mb down and never got above 300kb. Their cs agents were inept at best and some were incredibly rude. They yelled at me. They hung up on me. They refused to put me through to tech support and refused to let me speak with managers. At one point they claimed that we were loading 5mb an hour when our modem was unplugged. They claimed we loaded several Gb in an hour when that was physically impossible on our connection. Loading a single Gb took days because the longer you tried to load something, the slower it got and then it stopped loading so you'd have to pause and resume after waiting several hours. I hated it. Toward the end I was having to take my laptop to McDonalds to get any signal and do anything and HN basically told me that they would not fix my equipment as it was obsolete and I would have to sign up for a new 2-year contract with their new satellites at a higher pricepoint and less bandwidth allowance. It was less than half of my bandwidth limit. Fortunately, I ran into someone in BestBuy who told me about Exede (aka Viasat).

I got Viasat in about 2012. It still had limited bandwidth, outages when it rained (although HN went out when a bee sneezed). Customer service was based in US and was great at first. Last few years it declined and they laid off all their US CS and outsourced to India. They never put in modem features they said they were going to add. Never updated to have live tracking of usage (which is possible). They shut down their forums and stopped responding to customers on social media and in the past few months they drastically miscalculated bandwidth. They advertise 150gb per month as our plan but it's only 1000mb rather than 1024 so it screws us out of a few Gb. They count their own software updates toward our usage. I think there is a class action lawsuit against them.

As an aside on HN, the only reason they have better satellites now is because they used stolen technology from Viasat. The company that built their dishes had a deal with Viasat to make proprietary dishes using patented tech developed by Viasat and the terms said they were not allowed to sell the specs to any other companies nor build satellites to those specs for any other company. The mfr broke the contract and created a bunch of satellites for HN and HN got their stuff launched before Viasat. There was a lawsuit and Viasat got $$$ but the judge refused to order the satellites made with stolen tech for HN to be decommissioned.

But anyway, I'm sick and tired of how bad Viasat has gotten. Internet is unusable during "peak hours" which seem to get longer. Used to start around 8pm to midnight. Then started moving to 7 then 6 then 5 and now 4 to 4:30 it gets incredibly slow and can stay slow until around midnight to 3am. They go down for maintenance unannounced during non-peak hours and never have any ETA on when it will be done- and its happening more often lately.

I'm supposed to be getting Starlink today. I'll update on how it works.

TL: DR? Don't get Hughesnet!!!!
 
We tried Exceed satellite Internet service at the recommendation of a neighbor.
The plan sounds good, less than $100/month.
Had to sign a two year contract. Found out real quick that with the wife and I on our laptops in the evening we were running out of data by the middle of the month, and extra data was expensive.
We were paying over $150/month!! I’ll drive over into Georgia and sit at McDonald’s and use their internet before I’m paying that much.
Still had to pay the basic every month for two years but I refused to use one byte of their stinking data.
We have a modem through our land line phone company. We pay $80/month and the speed ain’t too awfully bad.

We have no satellite TV, got rid of the dish almost 10 years ago. Same reason - too expensive for what we were getting.
 
The prices for Exede really went up. With tax I'm paying about $112 a month for 150*Gb (that's 150 x 1,000mb so not real Gb). Newer plans with that data limit are $200 last I checked. Starlink is only $99 a month so its less expensive. Still high, but we need internet out here.
 
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