Legit Reviews

I seriously need some help here guys dial up is killing me. We cant get DSL or Cable and im not dropping 500 a month for a T1 does ANYONE! know of any alternatives?

where do you live?

Lake Worth, Texas in the frickin sticks man! ARGH!

Some companies do broadband over satellite, any idea if thats available where you are? Though that'd be expensive I can imagaine, and the latency apparantly isnt too good.

Try this to see if there are any companies you might have missed:
http://www.broadband-service-providers.com/

Dan

Satillite can be pricey...Look at this

I was stuck with dial-up until the end of August. I checked everything out, and nothing was reasonable. The satellite options available all had download caps that limited total bandwidth to pretty close that of dial-up in the long run, if you're saturating your dial-up line. I had a separate phoneline for my dial-up, and was getting well over 5 GB of downloads per month, excluding browsing and program updates, etc.

Final solution: I moved. Ironically, the phone company I'd been pestering for the past 5 years finally brought DSL to my house 2 weeks before I moved out.

there is still always my place. el o elo el

Hang in there - my in-laws have the same problem! They can only connect at around 26k also! Phone company wont do anything about it, cable company wont run cable unless they pay the full bill for running it back to them.

I have been searching for a couple years on a way to set something up at my house, like a sat dish, and let them connect wirelessly through mine. I just cant find anything that does not need perfect line of sight

good luck finding something, sat is EXPENSIVE!!! and VERY limiting. Supposedly once everyone gets upgraded to fiber, they wont have this issue, til then, the phone company will keep being cheap.

Mike

Satalite does not need line of site......bad weather also won't cause problems......but it IS sh1t!

Haven't you guys in the US got ADSL 2+ ????
Normal ADSL will work upto 5km with speeds upto ~5mb (higher on good lines, less on others)
ADSL 2+ extends the reach and speeds.........We are moving to 2+ in a few months, my line currently could take (in theory) 8mb
with 2+ I could get upto 20mb

The range of ADSL 2+ is around 10km from your local ASAM (Exchange)

HONkUS --> Is there not WiMaX available or even fixed wireless DSL?
WiMaX gives good coverage and speeds........doesn't cost too much either!

Mobile broadband could work.

Ken, we can only get DSL if the local telephone provider supports it.

The Black Pumpkin wrote:Mobile broadband could work.

Ken, we can only get DSL if the local telephone provider supports it.

That's when you start a petition.......get all the people in your area to sign it....Companies will upgrade their exchanges only if they know there's a demand. It does cost alot of money to put an ASAM into the local exchange, but if enough people want it, they will do it. Remember DSL is a fixed monthly charge, usualy with a 6 to 12mth minimum contract, and most people still only use it to check their mail. The Telecoms company will make the $$ back within a year or two.......plus if a phone company can provide DSL then they can also sell that DSL service wholesale to other smaller ISP's.......and that's even more revenue for them.

Trust me, phone companies know all this too well....... but it's upto you (their customer) to prove it to them b4 they invest in the equipment!

But it all depends on how far you are from the local exchange and how many users there are connected to it.

ps. I work for a very large isp in Ireland, which also happens to own ~90% of all the phone lines ;)

wow you guys are really helpful, I had no idea how deficient our internet backbone was here in america until WiMAX was mentioned. I thought WiMAX was just a myth lol.

Im gonna check with Cingular as they have wireless broadband but I dont know if im in their coverage area.

I think I need to show you guys some pictures of where I live its like freakin Deliverance out here.

WiMaX is no myth.........my company has been running a trial for the past year.......and it's friggin' cool. There is very little problems with it and it's just as good as cable/phoneline DSL......

Fixed wireless DSL can cause probs with low signal and usually your upload speed is capped at around 128k

There is one solution...

Move!



JK. I know how it is man, we used to live where we could only get dial-up. Once we moved we could get cable, and that is really nice.

kenc51 wrote:Satalite does not need line of site......bad weather also won't cause problems......but it IS sh1t!

I was a satellite earth station engineer for years so feel I need to clear up somethings stated here.

First -you need line of site to the southern horizon in the northern hemisphere. The satellites are at the equator in geostationary orbit about 36k kilometers above it.

Second -there is delay in transmissions to and from the satellites of about 250ms. So on-line gaming is not for satellite. Everything else including telephone is okay. In test conducted by Bell Labs, the delay did not cause any noticable problem in phone conversations with the exception of cultures who talk over each other (example: people from NYC) This is not a joke.

The cost of satellite receivers is not expensive and but transmitters are. So for a totally satellite transmission path its big bucks. Most use a dial-up landline for transmissions to the internet and the satellite for downloading off the internet as a way of lowering the cost.

As with any radio frequency signal - atmosphere and water attenuate the signal. Some frequencies are more attenuated than others. Heavy rain will cause the biggest problems. Water (aka rain) actually depolarizes the signal. Since with satellite you are going through only a small portion of atmosphere - rain is the biggest problem but only if heavy.

Well looks like we might be able to get Cingular Wireless's 3G wireless internet service. Its marketed for laptops so much so in fact that they only have PCMCIA interface cards and not PCI. We just have to make sure we can get a signal from our house and we should be able to get "between 300 and 700 kbps" on the 3G network. Its 59.99 a month for unlimited use. I was going to check it out today but I got called into work. Thanks for your help guys you all really know your stuff!

Well I got the Cingular 3g servie and itsn ot as fast as DSL/Cable but its good enough to play battlefield! we had to buy and aftermarket antenna, big thanks to Dragon Cooler on that one and we have yet to mount it on our roof but even with it sitting outside the door on a metal table we get 2 out of 5 bars as opposed to no bars with the standard antenna. Download speeds hover between 500kbps and 1.8mbps, uploads hover between 50kbps and 150 kbps and the latency in online games is around 150-300 m/s. It might sound bad but battlefield 2142 and CS:S are completley playable with this connection I was surprised. Thanks again to everyone for helping me out with this this community is great!

Congrats on the move to more bandwidth
I bet you are loving it over dial-up. I used the internet at my grandma and grandads the other day, that's dial up, and I thought listening to the dialing was well retro cool! I forgot how painfully slow browsing is as well.

Hows the pricing per month for the 3G?

Dan

Awesome man! Glad it worked for ya!

its 59.99 a month for unlimited access and the card is 399.99 but it comes with a 100 dollar mail in rebate. We tested it last week, we drove around before a Stars game and watched youtube videos and the thing never lost connectivity. It maxes out at 1.8mbps download but I didnt measure the upload or latency on the road. Its cool stuff and yes I am really happy to be gone with dial-up. our dial-up wasnt the normal 56k either our phone lines are so patchy id be lucky to connect at 24.4k at BEST. I have a Genesis emulator so id go to a page and play sonic while it loaded it was pitiful but no more! WOOHOO!!