Tetsuo Time

I was looking at Engadget and I spotted an article about the broadband stimulus package that was approved. The thing that got my attention (no not the youtube\4chan stuff) is what technologies they where talking about in this article. They make it seem like this stimulus package is going to be used to bring more satellite internet to more areas. I disapprove of this. If you want broadband in very rural areas satellite is currently your only choice. They are incumbent.

That was my only choice here up until last year when they finally started offering DSL in my area. As some of you may know as soon as they showed up I dumped Wild Blue like yesterday's trash. Seriously.... dial-up would be preferable to it. Why? High monthly prices, under 20GB a month bandwidth caps, horrible ping times to servers. Sure, downloading stuff was OK but that's about it. With that horribly restrictive monthly cap (and people thought 250GB on comcast was bad). You can't even make use of your download speed much. Also since there is horrible ping times forget about doing games or VOIP (skype, etc.). Other services like Hughesnet are even worse because they enforce DAILY caps (around 1 CD worth a day or less... I forgot).

Instead I think the broadband stimulus package should be used to stretch more fiber to more rural areas and speed up existing rural fiber deployments like mine. I can only get 1.5Mbps here with my DSL. Perhaps what they could do is to places like mine upgrade us to fiber to the premises and have DSL go to those areas that previously didn't have any service.

We should have had terrestrial broadband in more places than we do now already. They had already given the telco's funds in order to do so but they didn't live up to their end of the bargain pocketing a lot of that money I heard. This time there's supposed to be oversight but I seriously hope the money doesn't end up going to perpetuate the crap situation the rural areas are currently in with satellite being their only choice or the second to the slowest DSL package being the only other choice. Seriously if it's just satellite then it'll be like they did nothing.

I am thankful that satellite is not my only choice right now. It's sad that we are behind other countries when it comes to broadband deployment... Korea is moving towards getting 1Gbps internet connections for everyone in their country right now.

Terrestrial wireless (wimax or long range wifi) would also be OK... I know of at least three projects in my own state that network houses using radios. Those work much better\cheaper than satellite. I still think fiber is the best way to go but if you must go wireless this is the best option. Basically satellite should only be used in areas so remote the only type of signal you can get is from a satellite in the sky.

I was looking at Engadget and I spotted an article about the broadband stimulus package that was approved. The thing that got my attention (no not the youtube\4chan stuff) is what technologies they where talking about in this article. They make it seem like this stimulus package is going to be used to bring more satellite internet to more areas. I disapprove of this. If you want broadband in very rural areas satellite is currently your only choice. They are incumbent.

That was my only choice here up until last year when they finally started offering DSL in my area. As some of you may know as soon as they showed up I dumped Wild Blue like yesterday's trash. Seriously.... dial-up would be preferable to it. Why? High monthly prices, under 20GB a month bandwidth caps, horrible ping times to servers. Sure, downloading stuff was OK but that's about it. With that horribly restrictive monthly cap (and people thought 250GB on comcast was bad). You can't even make use of your download speed much. Also since there is horrible ping times forget about doing games or VOIP (skype, etc.). Other services like Hughesnet are even worse because they enforce DAILY caps (around 1 CD worth a day or less... I forgot).

Instead I think the broadband stimulus package should be used to stretch more fiber to more rural areas and speed up existing rural fiber deployments like mine. I can only get 1.5Mbps here with my DSL. Perhaps what they could do is to places like mine upgrade us to fiber to the premises and have DSL go to those areas that previously didn't have any service.

We should have had terrestrial broadband in more places than we do now already. They had already given the telco's funds in order to do so but they didn't live up to their end of the bargain pocketing a lot of that money I heard. This time there's supposed to be oversight but I seriously hope the money doesn't end up going to perpetuate the crap situation the rural areas are currently in with satellite being their only choice or the second to the slowest DSL package being the only other choice. Seriously if it's just satellite then it'll be like they did nothing.

I am thankful that satellite is not my only choice right now. It's sad that we are behind other countries when it comes to broadband deployment... Korea is moving towards getting 1Gbps internet connections for everyone in their country right now.

Terrestrial wireless (wimax or long range wifi) would also be OK... I know of at least three projects in my own state that network houses using radios. Those work much better\cheaper than satellite. I still think fiber is the best way to go but if you must go wireless this is the best option. Basically satellite should only be used in areas so remote the only type of signal you can get is from a satellite in the sky.

This week I have been looking into an alternative to the internet service provider I have been using (WildBlue). As you may have noticed a few weeks ago I listed a bunch of alternatives but none of them in my opinion are as reasonable as the one I'm currently using. However, I recently found one that is the most reasonable wireless ISP that I have heard of so far. It's called, "La Cañada Wireless Association".

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