Rural internet (look ma no wires)

RAllen · Jan 11, 2001

Paul
DirecPC is ok. Its better than just a conventional modem. As I mentioned, I have to use a second ISP for local acess. This means there are two companies that can have an outage. If I could get DSL, I would use that. DirecPC is better than any other present choice. If I was starting today, I would seriously consider Starband. DirecPC will provide the same service very soon but it is not generally available at this time.

Rick

PBMAX · Jan 11, 2001

LarryT,Yeah I kind of figured that an up grade would be some ware in the near future. 2 years in the electronics industrie is pretty good stretch for upgrades. When you figure they say the average PC is in its old age at 6months to a yr...By the guru standards.

You mentioned trying to avoid long term commitment.Dishnetwork wants the usual 1yr term and I would imagine DirectPC will still do there no contract deals like they have for the TV service(but as I mentioned they insist you buy an new PC to get theirs)and Starband (being the the ones holding the ball)of course has their own system they will sell you for the average price, but I don't recall the terms.

If Starband is currently the only Parrent co out there ,I would say the price will stay were it is till the target market is saturated.

I will most likely be in new house by the end of this month or middle of Feb. so if I do go this way I'll let ya'll know what I do and don't like...Besides the price....OUCH!!! $600 would by something nice for the TC21...Like mabye a remote vale and hydro. toplink... If any body beats me to it let me know how you like it.....

Thanks folks, YA'LL have been great.....

Lil' Paul
Proud new owner of TC21D
Laziness is the Father of invention.../w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif

W5FL · Jan 25, 2001

Re: Rural internet -ISDN

Richard, I am going to get IDSN also. Still is expensive, but hope to eventually be able to use it to replace both analog lines, so the charge per month will be the same. I did not get their "additional call offering" package to start with, so it will not step back from 128K to take an incoming call, but hope to add that after the system is working properly. At the very least, I will have moved the local pbx out in the boonies and have an analog connection located right next to it so everything should work better even on the analog lines. The digital lines operating compressed are quoted at much higher rates, but time will tell.

Any comments about ISDN that you would offer? I bought an ADTRAN 3000 modem that outputs two analog lines from the ISDN and hope to get it hooked up this weekend. The cost of the whole setup is about $50 per month which is less than I was paying for 2 analog lines of poor quality (26,200 at best) with 56K modems.

fishman · Jan 26, 2001

Re: Rural internet -ISDN

Wen,

I am showing my ignorance here, but could you explain how IDSN differs from a normal phone line? Are you out in the boonies as well? It sounds like it would require laying an additional cable, and like others on the board, I live in a location where most of the technological nicities are not available. Hope I'm not the only one on this board wondering about this . . .

W5FL · Jan 26, 2001

Re: Rural internet -ISDN

Yeah, I live in the boonies too. All they do is use the same old twisted pair but they send digital rather than analog data down the line. You have to have a modem to do the conversion at your house. There are actually 3 digital lines in a single ISDN line. Two 64K digital lines and a 16K control line. ISDN is old technology, but several TELCO's have dropped the price to compete with DSL, Satellite, etc. I will let you know if about a month how things work out. The investment was really small here, but the nice thing is that I should have considerably better service for the same price. The other nice thing is that you can be using both lines for 128K and an incoming analog call will come right through to your phone and reduce your bandwidth to 64K without missing a beat. It is not heavily advertised. My wife saw a writeup in the local paper from a resident, so I checked into it and should have a line installed in a couple of weeks.

fishman · Jan 29, 2001

Re: Rural internet -ISDN

Thanks Wen, I'll be anxious to hear how it works out. Limiting my tractorbynet.com fix to lunchtime during the week can get frustrating.

Anonymous Poster · Jan 29, 2001

Re: Rural internet -ISDN

Watch out for the connect time charges with ISDN. Around here ISDN costs $39 a month plus the internet provider cost if you sign up for both local and long distance with the same company. This only includes 50 hours of connect time. After that it is $1 per hour of connect time! The connect time is per channel so if you want to connect at 128k, you use 2 channels and one hour counts as two. Any phone calls are also counted towards connect time. We use a lot more than 25 hours in a month, sometimes more than 120.

Andy

Richard · Jan 31, 2001

Re: Rural internet -ISDN

Hey Wen..sorry long to get back...had flu for several lifetimes it seems.

I'm not sure I can offer you anything more than you seem to already know. Indeed, you already espouse more than *I* know.

Here in Tennessee, it seems, we get the lowest rate in the nation for ISDN. Business ~100/month and I think residential was around 30. That's for unlimited usage. Now, my ISP (bellsouth.net) has some usage limits, but not the line itself.

I don't know the Adtran brand, I use 3-Com at home and here at work. At work, I patch it into our network. I admit to having asked the Boss if I could terminate 5 modem lines and do this and they EXPRESSLEY told me no. Well, after terminating 5 dedicated modem lines at 20 each, and adding this ONE line at 100 (hmm, even swap so far) they LOVE me for the speed they now have. Sure is interesting how they just don't recall telling me NOT to do it.

/w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

Anonymous Poster · Jun 20, 2001

I have starband. It transmits 100K and recieves 500K and costs 99 per month including 150 Dish Network channels. Nice to have FOXNEWS! Only draw back is sometimes there's connection troubles with servers that use some security protocols because the information transmits in bursts and is not continuous. Really beats the hell ouyt of my previous 24000 connection. FYI the dish is a 3 foot in diameter oval thing.

gws · Jun 20, 2001

The starband system is a true TWO WAY system via satellite. No phone line for uplink is required. This is not the same as the direct PC offering.

Starband is ok as long as your mainly interested in web surfing, email. It is not usable for remote caming and many 2 way streaming audio and video services or VLAN links to the office due to the packet delays.

Its a bit expensive but if your looking for high speed access it may be you only choice

Hey, I am Gary