For the off-grid dwellers - Satellite Internet - Which provider do you prefer?

[Samsonite801]

So I am working towards making a transition from a cityboy-life, to a country-lifestyle (more like a desert-lifestyle right now), a de-desertification project, to go live out in a rural community agricultural coop startup, in the Utah West Desert region, where there is no power, no cabled internet, etc...

Eventually, our community is going to have a 10g/s business-class fiber plumbed out there. There is a main fiber link way out there, fairly nearby to us, feeding out to a federal wildlife reserve (at a gravel road junction about 8 miles away from our ranch property), and once we get the easement approvals from the BLM to trench it in, then ISP will assist to splice the main road line, and we can get it strung out to our ranch. Well with COVID-19 stalling progress on prettymuch everything bureaucratic, this process has stalled with no sight to our approvals (our application likely caught up in some queue somewhere).

In the meantime, our shareholders have been connecting up HughesNet Internet services, and so far nobody out there has tried the competitor, ViaSat...

With Starlink in public beta now (and very limited access to the public yet, and limited geographic coverage), this option doesn't seem to be generally accessible yet. So it seems for now the choices are HughesNet and Viasat...

Part of my transition plan, I still require to work my job for some indefinite amount of time, and my job requires Zoom sessions with customers on mostly a daily basis (in many cases where I request control of their jump servers to triage and troubleshoot their datacenter challenges).

Concerned about the extended latency of satellite broadband (adding 500-800ms to the ping times), one day, I did a test run out there where I connected back to our corp lab datacenter to one of my jump servers, and while I was able to control it, i could tell the mouse was laggy...

So I am trying to work out how the internet will 'be' in the real world for working Zooms with customers. Some customers I can just ask them to keep control if the connection is too laggy and slow (and when they are comfortable following my instructions to some degree), but there are other customers who demand I take control and just fix it hehe... Some customers I can just try to blame it on their internet until they tell me their enterprise has like 100g/s fiber hehe...


Ok enough ranting about the back story, the heart of it, is there anyone out there who has tried both providers and have any comments about them, their customer service, uptime, throttled bandwidth performance, etc? Does anyone else work remote like with Zoom and audio conferencing who has any experience with real-world performance / latency with either of these broadband service providers?

Are there any particular plans which are more robust than others? Business vs residential... I've read on one forum a person said just get the slowest cheapest plan, don't bother with the high data cap plans, because no matter what, you will always be hitting your cap and get throttled (not a matter of if, but when), and so most the time you're always throttled anyways. Which provider has better performance and speeds while being throttled by the provider?

Basically, just curious to hear people's experiences with either provider, but it's a plus if someone has tried both and has a night-and-day preference of which one they prefer better, and why....

For me, if I am not able to work remote, then I must dial back on my transition a bit slower until we are able to get our fiber connection going out there, so hoping I can get away with the satellite solution in the meantime to help get me going out there faster.

THANKS

 

[Deleted-User]

What are your LTE options? Any local WISP's? Sat is still last option...

 

[Samsonite801]

What are your LTE options? Any local WISP's? Sat is still last option...

Hehe, hehe, and hehe I know right...

Well if you stand on the hill to the West where the water tank is, with one leg in the air and a foil cap on you can get a 1x AT&T signal...

Actually, someone installed a cell booster at the main community center building (receiver on a 30ft pole) which gets signal inside the building just barely, I think it flips between 4g and 3g a lot... Nothing to brag about. I was meaning to try it on my corp laptop to see if it could work at all.

Shareholders had been using that cell booster until they got the first HughesNet installed out there, and it sounds like everyone prefers the HughesNet over the weak AT&T cellular at this point.

They said the problem with the HughesNet now though, is if too many people are using it it goes too slow. So individual shareholders are installing their own HughesNet dishes on their properties and trying to keep their traffic off of the one at the community center now so that tourists/visitors can have some bandwidth if needed.

As far as WISP, none out that far, as we have mountains around us. I thought of putting up a rouge repeater run off solar panels on the top of the mountain though and hope nobody would see it and take it down... Other idea I had is until the BLM approved our fiber trench, if we could get enough approval to let us splice the fiber there, and set up a local repeater at that road junction (on a tower) and beam a point-to-point with an Orthogon or something to get it on the property. I would still need to check if we even had line-of-sight, might have to beam it to the bench, and then down, so might need two P2P links.

I've been pondering on this dilemma for months now, can you tell hehe... (I used to work for a WISP, so all that stuff has certainly come into contemplation as well)... I've even thought of going and getting a part-time job at the BLM in that department so I could help to process our easement application faster...

 

[Deleted-User]

I was too cheap to have DirecPC installed (min. $600 back in the day), so I foraged the web for Hughes installation instructions, and found the entire certification program online. Studied it, and found a sat dealer willing to sell me the unit sans install/fees, and away I went. Could have been a certified installer after that, but of course had no interest...too many interests. This was a dial-up assist, so you were comm'ing with NOC over dial-up, then sent the requests via satlink. GPRS days were gnawing at me to dump DirecPC after about 3 years of use, and finally did it when 3G rolled out. 4G and better will always be better than Sat (until Starlink), and the monthly fees for UL data will always be superior, as well as the QoS management. Sat stunk bigtime during usual traffic hours, and became a nightowl at 3 a.m. if I wanted to leach an mp3 (new at the time) off the web. Been using 'cellular' only for a few years, and aside from some minor slowdowns (Covid Zooming I suppose) around 6pm to 8 ish, I have had DSL-quality (and often MUCH better) service throughout the years. Would suggest setting up your own WISP leveraging LTE until the fiber is lit, as it will provide a cheaper and more enjoyable experience to current Sat offerings.

edit: I was active on the fora at dslreports.com, specifically the Satellite forum, so you might check there for the current state of HughesNet affairs. I'd imagine some have moved over to walled-garden communities like facebag and the sort, if you're into social media programming.

 

[Samsonite801]

Yeah my Mother up in the PNW WA, had that DirecPC dial-up assist for a few years, then later she got the DirectWay 2-way satellite for a few years, now finally up there where she's at in the boonies they got wireless internet from a local provider and they can get decent internet now, but is still a stretch to stream UHD 4k in the evenings, I think their tower is totally loaded down...

Yeah, I might have to go scout up there on the mountain and figure out if there is a nice little hidden 'open' spot to build a rogue repeater, either WISP or cellular...

I just want to know if Viasat is worth looking into, as nobody on our ranch has tried them yet. Maybe I go look at dslreports, thanks for the tip

 

[Deleted-User]

Heh. DirecWay 2-Way was a latency downgrade...folks were moving back to the 1-way, killing 2-way's growth, though there were still gas stations in the middle of nowhere that wanted to swipe ATM/credit cards to keep DirecWay in business.
Opensignal and Cellmapper for your locale, directional or Moxon antennae, rock and roll. VZW has UL data ($40) through Visible SIM works in Netgear NightHawk (buy unlocked), as does ATT's Connected Car UL plans ($20). Well worth tweaking on these vs. Sat.

Edit: IIRC, MoFi modems allow for band selection.
Edit: Party Pay on Visible gets you down to $25/mo

 

[Samsonite801]

I've used Open Signal before but not heard of the others (been awhile since I've been in the wireless world)... I'll check them out thanks.

At any rate, even with our plan to have fiber out there someday, I'd still totally like to set up another link for redundant connection (so I don't see it as a loss of time/efforts to explore every other possibility, even if it took some time to implement temporary solution)...

 

[Jmac786]

You’re only a couple months away from getting starlink access. I wouldn’t fool with fiber at that point even if it is business class.

We have AT&T Home Internet and average 19mbs. We are capped at 150GB a month as part of a bundling package. That is the only thing left preventing us from canceling our cable package. 19mbs is fast enough to stream Netflix with 4 phones connected at the same time no problem. Starlink minimal data speeds in beta are 50mbs and the service has no data cap.

Fiber will always beat starlink in terms of speed, but the question becomes “What is good enough?”. If you’re moving to the Utah Desert to do competitive gaming, then sure get fiber. If you want to watch March Madness, while the kids watch Disney, and the wife is on a Zoom meeting.. Starlink will be sufficient.

 

[Samsonite801]

You’re only a couple months away from getting starlink access. I wouldn’t fool with fiber at that point even if it is business class.

We have AT&T Home Internet and average 19mbs. We are capped at 150GB a month as part of a bundling package. That is the only thing left preventing us from canceling our cable package. 19mbs is fast enough to stream Netflix with 4 phones connected at the same time no problem. Starlink minimal data speeds in beta are 50mbs and the service has no data cap.

Fiber will always beat starlink in terms of speed, but the question becomes “What is good enough?”. If you’re moving to the Utah Desert to do competitive gaming, then sure get fiber. If you want to watch March Madness, while the kids watch Disney, and the wife is on a Zoom meeting.. Starlink will be sufficient.

Yeah, I've thought about the 'just hold tight for a bit longer until Starlink is available to the masses' thing.

Nobody outside the company really knows how long that is going to be. I signed up on 2 different email addresses on their website for:

"
To see if your location is eligible for participation in Starlink's Better Than Nothing Beta program,
enter your email and service address below.
"

Read all the news press articles, like 'this November public beta will be released', then later 'public beta is now released', still not even one update email from them, then articles like, 'initial coverage very spotty, expect it to not be reliable uptime until the constellation is fully built', etc...

Starlink really is an optimal future solution for remote locations (or any of the other low-Earth-orbiting-satellite options if they ever get up off the ground), but the the full implementation of any one of them is gonna take awhile. Let alone, with the full laser grid communication feature implementation hehe...

But I still have that hope it could be sooner rather than later, just waiting on that magic email

 

[Jmac786]

Yeah, I've thought about the 'just hold tight for a bit longer until Starlink is available to the masses' thing.

Nobody outside the company really knows how long that is going to be. I signed up on 2 different email addresses on their website for:

"
To see if your location is eligible for participation in Starlink's Better Than Nothing Beta program,
enter your email and service address below.
"

Read all the news press articles, like 'this November public beta will be released', then later 'public beta is now released', still not even one update email from them, then articles like, 'initial coverage very spotty, expect it to not be reliable uptime until the constellation is fully built', etc...

Starlink really is an optimal future solution for remote locations (or any of the other low-Earth-orbiting-satellite options if they ever get up off the ground), but the the full implementation of any one of them is gonna take awhile. Let alone, with the full laser grid communication feature implementation hehe...

But I still have that hope it could be sooner rather than later, just waiting on that magic email

I really think it’s a lot closer to commercialization than you realize. I can’t find any Falcon 9 launches scheduled with starlink satellites aboard. This makes me wonder how close Starship is ready for cargo loads.

Falcon 9: 60 sats at $10 million per launch
Starship: 400 sats at $2 million per launch

There are about 800 starlink satellites in orbit now. If Starship is ready, then it makes a whole lot of sense to halt using the Falcon 9 and switch to only using Starship. The next kink in the system actually becomes building the satellites instead of trying to get them launched. Using the Falcon 9 for the early deployments is worth the money because it provides time for testing satellites in space. Plus, those launches could be easily scheduled around 3rd party ride shares.