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Bremen, KS | I would like to hear from those of you using either cell or satellite for your home/business Internet access. Give me the good, the bad, and the ugly of your experiences! My rationale follows below.
The local community has been informed this week that our ISP is shutting down its present fixed wireless system effective May 1 and will not be replacing the service coming from the closest tower. Those within five miles of Marysville or Hanover may still be able to receive service from their new system at 10 Mbps @ $90/month unmetered. The rest of us are out of luck and will be forced elsewhere to retain home/business Internet access. A large part of the area being abandoned is served by AT&T and no cable plant upgrades have taken place for nearly 40 years. Others are served by Diode Communications out of Diller, NE which also does not have fiber to the home, so land-based Internet access is unavailable leaving only cellular or satellite as options.
For the cellular option we have the choice of US Cellular or Verizon. I am just getting started looking at their offerings of plans and pricing and will be stopping in their respective stores in the coming days. Does anyone have a plan as a fixed location through either company? For the record our cell phones are with USCC. Are data caps higher with business plans?
As I understand it, the two satellite providers are Exede and Hughes Net. A cursory look yesterday may give the edge to Hughes at the moment as they offer up to 5 Mbps @ $60/month with a 20 GB/month cap. I have not looked at Exede's plans as of yet. I'm well aware of the latency with satellite and am trying to determine if that would be a deal breaker.
One issue is having a routable IP address as I do use secure shell to gain remote access to our computers when I am away from home which I mainly use for reading email and handling administrative tasks and some file sharing to my laptop. If neither of the four companies offer such, I've been advised elsewhere that one can achieve such access using a VPN which is what I might need to do. Either option is going to involve data caps and while I don't know what our monthly usage is I think that we could probably live with 20 GB. Coincidently, last week I set up the router I used in Marysville up until a year ago with a newer version of OpenWRT so I could monitor our usage. I just put it online Friday evening having no idea all this was coming down the pike. Right now it has a monthly estimate of just under 9 GB after six days of monitoring. As our present access is quite slow we don't watch YouTube videos and NetFlix is out of the question. Most of the usage is probably due to updating computers and one task is to get them as close to the same Linux distribution as possible to share updates and reduce duplicate downloads as much as possible.
I've already been contacted by one neighbor in a near panic over this so I am gathering information not only for myself but the neighbors as well.
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