If you live in what we in the Broadband industry refer to as a “dead zone” ( an area where cable and DSL internet aren’t available) then in order to fully participate in the 21st century you’re looking at two options; Wireless (Radio Frquency) service or Satellite High-Speed Internet.
Pro Cons- Wireless internet’s Yin & Yang
As with all things, there are ups and downs to both WIFI and satellite internet. However, from my personal experience with using both kinds of high speed internet and talking to countless WIFI subscribers, it can allow you to preform the same functions as all other broadband connections, if you are close enough to the tower from which you are receiving the signal. Also, with wireless internet, you have obstruction issues not common with Satellite High Speed Internet (Wildblue or HughesNet) such as buildings, trees, moving vehicles – there are a multitude of animate and inanimate objects between your home and the tower which can dramatically effect your service.
With the recent acquisition of so many ‘mom and pop’ wireless organizations, who couldn’t handle the growth, once phone companies turned corporate conglomerates, such as AT&T, have put a lot of focus into the wireless internet realm hoping to reap what was sewn not only in urban areas but in the plains of rural America as well. According to an article on fiercewireless.com, AT&T hit an all time high of wireless subscribers at 51 million + in the last quarter of 2009. Yes, all was well, until so many of those subscriber’s turned their backs on the Wireless heavyweight after finding out the hard way that they, like so many other rural area high speed internet providers, imposed strict limits and harsh monetary penalties for downloading content in excess of 5 gig per month. Not only that but their speeds were reported on average to be around 100-600 kbps consistently, again, depending on how close you are to the device that is broadcasting the wireless signal.
So, in effect, wireless internet is good to have if you frequent different rural areas of the country where high speed is not available, yet you need to interact with mainstream America. Maybe someone with an occupation such as a cattle ranch inspector or a Wildlife biologist who report their findings in real time from the field would benefit from this type of service. My advice is, if you do travel often (unless you have to pay $61 per month under a two year contract to be convinced otherwise) is to get a laptop that has a wireless card built into it, find a place of business or even the hotel you’re staying in when you’re out of town, and cross your fingers in hopes that someone is broadcasting a WIFI signal that you can use for free.
Satellite stays Stationary yet Remains Spectacular
After doing some personal research that included calling some of the big names in wireless internet and pretending to try and sign up for service, i was utterly shocked at their lack of knowledge, not only about their own products (which was scary enough), but also about their ONLY competition in rural areas, satellite high speed internet. I won’t name any names but, i called every major wireless provider in the book as well as on the web and the only comparison that any of them could give me was “satellite internet is slower because it’s new” (after a rep asked his supervisor, as the rep could alone not answer my question). The truth is, in hard science, that a microwave, KA-band signal (used by satellite internet) is exponentially stronger and therefore more consistent than the RF (radio frequency) signal used by wireless. Also, with a two-way satellite internet connection (Wildblue or Hughesnet), the only obstruction issues you would encounter would be those between the dish that is mounted on your property and the satellite(s) orbiting the Earth which reside in the southern sky above the Equator. Because of the turbo-charged power of the signal sent out from the satellite, light clouds and light rain effect service only minimally. Different than satellite television, as a storm gets progressively worse, conversely your speed starts to decrease. Now, if its the kind of storm that makes you want to unplug your computer, take it from someone who has lost a nice laptop to a lighting storm, and go with your gut.
The only bad news (for some), is that satellite internet is not a mobile unit by any means. For R.V.ers, traveling sales people and the like who require or desperately need a high speed connection on-the-go, a mobile broadband card is probably their only option. For the rest of the us in rural America who have a designated location where their computer stays most of the time, i can tell you with great confidence, that overall satellite high speed internet IS better than wireless.
Why the limitations?
When too many subscribers are added to either kind of service or when a number of those subscribers download too much, it effects everyone using that service dramatically.
It was originally thought that there was an infinite amount of bandwidth, so when satellite and wireless were first made available to the public, there were no download thresholds to protect the average user’s internet connection from being bogged down by all-day-everyday downloading internet junkies. Once this problem was discovered, something had to be done and strangely, with the same goal in mind (to limit user’s downloading habits) the two internet mediums took different approaches to accomplish the set goal. The Wireless companies decided to do what had worked for both landline and cell phone companies in the past. Charge overages ( i.e. most wireless companies allow 5 gig per month). Like signing up for a specific amount of long distance minutes per month and then exceeding that limit, the wireless companies started (and still do) charging through the nose, per Megabyte of information downloaded, those who exceeded their limits without notifying the user at the time the threshold was reached. This resulted in, just like on phone bills of past and present, gargantuan monthly invoices with no explanations as to why they were so huge. You can imagine the outrage and betray felt by the uninformed users of early, restricted wireless internet.
The satellite internet companies chose a different, smarter, and yes more pocket book friendly path. Instead of charging overages, both Wildblue and Hughesnet decided to simply notify the users when or before they reached capacity and slow the connection speed down for an interval to ensure the users could not continue to download massive files such as full length movies or high-quality video thus leaving bandwidth available to the lighter users and keeping their speeds consistent.
The Bottom Line: Which is cheaper?
A hyper-relevant and probably the most frequently pondered question by those in the market for a rural high speed connection is one of pure economics. Which one is cheaper, or between wireless and satellite, which gives you the most value?
Because the question is relative, both to what is available to you and what your budget looks like, the answer cannot simply be one or the other. In some areas wireless may be cheaper, but you have to consider that you are not getting the same amount of speed satellite offers and you are limited much more on the amount of data you can download in a given period (which with wireless can actually result in a higher priced monthly bill if you exceed the limits imposed upon you). Satellite Internet can run (depending on your location and the speed you choose) anywhere from $39-$99 per month for anywhere from 512 – 2000kbps while wireless usually runs between $35-$89 per month for (again, depending on your location and the speed you choose) 100 – 1500kbps.
So in a nutshell, wireless can be cheaper in some places, but as the old adage goes, “you get what you pay for”.
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Tags: High Speed Satellite Internet Service, Rural High Speed Internet, wildblue satellite internet
