Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Satellite internet and internet speed questions

Looks like we got the new house, question now is internet. the phone system only will do 3mbps and dish says they can do 10mbps. I not sure what a mbps is.

megabits per second. Divide by 8 and thet is your MBps Or megabytes per second. What is your internet usage? Do you do a lot of netflix, youtube, roku, or other streaming of video? Do you do online gaming? If you do online gaming Xbox live, Playstation, PC, etc. Stay away from Satellite the latency will make it unusable. Also like I mentioned about the video streaming, you can go over the very small bandwidth cps on satellite very very quickly.You will get $200-400 internet overage bills in the mail. If all you do is forums and minor stuff satellite can be ok but if you use the internet a lot be forewarned of the drawbacks of satellite internet.

Mega Bits Per Second
Mega = Million
I have Excede satellite internet and average around 12Meg (mbps). I also have a Majic Jack for the phone. You can't beat $20 bucks a year for basic phone service. My daughter has a Majic Jack as well and she is more satisfied with hers than I am. It sounds like I'm talking through a barred of water sometimes.

BB your magic jack issues are likely due to the latency I talked about above.

Your choices for internet are:

Dial-up (basically unusable these days)

DSL (quality depends on your distance to the phone company, but 3mbps is pretty doggy)

Cell phone (speed and download limits. Can be very pricey)

Satellite (delay (latency) issues and limited monthly download as well as weather issues - snow means no signal)

Cable (very fast, especially with fiber optic. No weather issues. Not available everywhere, though)

My Magic Jack isn't unusable,it just sounds funny sometimes. I have the latest satellite equipment and new modem so the latency you talked about isn't really a problem. I take my laptop and Majic Jack with me when I go to visit mo Mom in Dallas and Daughter in Austin and still have the same problems. They both have cable Broadband internet service.
And my son has brought his x-box here and the internet worked perfectly for him playing Call of Duty.
I think I just have a crappy Majic Jack.

I have a starband dish ... I live in the sticks and 50.00 a month... it ain't the fastest for sure ...it was a "free" eq and install special u-tube is not some thing it does well...and there are no cost over runs - "they" well just slow your speed down....

no gaming but we do stream a lot of music and some you tube stuff. I have to be able to work from home and be able to upload stuff to a "cloud" server.

the DSL around here is being upgraded. What used to be a max of 5 (usually was 3) can go as high as 100 now, of course you pay $90 a month for it.

I dropped DSL and went with cable , with DTV as my TV provide and comcast for internet.

If I went with the new high speed DSL, I could get phone, TV and internet (@50) for almost $70 less than what I'm paying now.

Not sure how reliable the new technology is though so I'm going to let other be the beta testers.

We've had Hughes (commercial system) since they put up their first satellite as DirecWay; the company my wife worked for at the time paid for it. There were no alternatives at that rural home. No cell reception (in a valley), two cups and a string for a phone lines (no DSL) and no cable.
When we bought this farm, same issue. No phone line DSL, no cable, no cell reception. We were and are stuck with Hughes, and there are not enough customers out here for Frontier to consider upgrading the phone lines. We get about 3.5 mbps download and .5 upload, at best. Weather has not been an issue except during extreme snows. We've not had any problem exceeding their limit; I sometimes do large downloads late at night when it doesn't affect our monthly allowance.

We recently bought another farm in no. WI, and of course, no cell reception. There was however CenturyLink, which sucks too, but saves a little $$ over Hughes, as they gave us a bundle deal on the phone, internet, and DirecTV. The speeds on that DSL is quite similar to the Hughes.

I used to have Hughesnet. Now I have DSL from the phone company and it's only 1.5 MBPS, but it's still worlds better than Hughesnet ever was. Do a search on here and you'll see complaints like mine are a common theme with satellite internet. I got rid of them three years ago so maybe there's satellite's gotten better since, but when I got rid of them I was to the point where I just couldn't take it anymore.

Funky sounding audio with something like Magic Jack means some data is getting lost along the way. The way it's sent doesn't guarantee packets are 100% correct or arrive in order or occasionally don't just disappear. Can't tell where the data gets lost beyond somewhere between here and there. Fortunately speech is redundant and you can loose a lot of data before speech becomes unintelligible.

We have Excede Wild Blue and it is fast. We used to have dialup.
I you do any down loading of Youtube etc., you can do it "free" between midnight and 5:00AM.

Qtip
Soli Deo Gloria!

I would take anything before Hughes Net. Had it for 6 years and I was constantly running into the fair access policy slow down. If you can get 3 mps DSL you will be way ahead.