Wireless Internet options

[bill at horne.net (Bill Horne)]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Drew Taylor" <drew at drewtaylor.com>


> Do you have a direct link or specific product name I can look into? From
> Hughes site, there are many different 2-way satellite options and I can't
> really figure out if they are all the same & just branded differently, or
> if the actual services are different.

For Earthlink "home" service:

$400 for hardware
$200 for installation
$70/month for 400 Kbps download, 60 Kbps upload

> Also, I'm concerned about latency for
> satellite connections. Any experience with this? I'm planning to do lots
of
> SSH sessions and/or serving from home, so this is an important issue to
me.

Well, you're going to be disappointed: Earthlink sales quotes a "five to six
second" round trip delay, and although I'm sure it's shorter, it's never
going to match a terrestrial link. The usual number used for geostationary
birds is 500ms, but that's for dedicated channels and DirectWay's bandwidth
is spread a lot thinner than that.

The only problem that would bother me is that VPN's have trouble with that
kind of delay, so they expressly warn against using them, and they won't
support online gaming or streaming audio/video, either.

HTH.

Bill