# Best satellite internet ?



## Rusty O'Toole

I happen to be in an area where my choices are dialup, Bell Wifi or satellite internet service. I have Wifi now but it is expensive and I always run over my allotted time.

They tell me satellite will give me faster download speed and about 10 times the time for the same cost or less.

Can anyone recommend the best satellite service? I am near Cobourg.


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## Retired Peasant

I'm east of Cobourg, but still in Northumberland. Have you looked into Xplornet? Up until a year ago, we too were stuck with either dialup or Bell's mobile stick (very expensive data rates!) Xplornet has put up many towers as part of the Northumberland Broadband project (and also the EORN project). They added a tower within our range about 13 months ago; we now get fixed wireless at a reasonable rate.

Northumberland was supposed to have 95% coverage when the project was completed.

Xplornet has had terrible reviews in the past, however they are much improved. They will check your site to see if you're in range of the new 4G towers, and if not, they offer satellite. We used B&P wireless in Castleton.


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## carverman

Rusty O'Toole said:


> I happen to be in an area where my choices are dialup, Bell Wifi or satellite internet service. I have Wifi now but it is expensive and I always run over my allotted time.
> 
> They tell me satellite will give me faster download speed and about 10 times the time for the same cost or less.
> 
> Can anyone recommend the best satellite service? I am near Cobourg.


Same cost? Where are you in an isolated area somewhere near Coburg? Here is one satellite internet provider but they have data cap limitations.
Check out their residential plans. $69.99 a month for 36 month agreement and a $75 installation fee? 
Their upload speed is 128kb/s and download speed is 1.2 mbps..that is very slow compared to cable or dsl service. 
http://www.galaxybroadband.ca/residential-service-plans.html


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## Rusty O'Toole

I live in about the least isolated part of Canada outside a major city. 5 miles east of Cobourg, half a mile from Lake Ontario, a mile or 2 south of Hwy 401 in the Toronto - Montreal corridor, the most densely populated part of Canada.

When I moved here in 1997 Bell promised me high speed internet in 3 months. We are still waiting. They have it 3 miles east of here and 2 miles west of here. Hell, they have it in Kandahar but not here. I live on a road with 100 households that could all use it. I guess Bell is waiting to see if this Internet thing is going to catch on before they spend the money.


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## Retired Peasant

carverman said:


> $69.99 a month for 36 month agreement and a $75 installation fee?
> Their upload speed is 128kb/s and download speed is 1.2 mbps..that is very slow compared to cable or dsl service.
> http://www.galaxybroadband.ca/residential-service-plans.html


Xplornet offers 3.0 Mbps/500kbs for $59.99 and also 5 Mbps/750kbs for $84.99 on satellite


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## Xoron

One thing to watch out for with Satellite internet is latency. You have to ping signals to and from the satellite orbiting around the earth. This can cause havoc for some time sensitive programs like VPN clients (connecting to work), video chat (Skype), VOIP and any other realtime type of applications.

I had a traveling sales rep that I supported that used VPN over satellite. It was hit or miss whether he could get / stay connected to our corp network.


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## carverman

Rusty O'Toole said:


> I live in about the least isolated part of Canada outside a major city. 5 miles east of Cobourg, half a mile from Lake Ontario, a mile or 2 south of Hwy 401 in the Toronto - Montreal corridor, the most densely populated part of Canada.
> 
> When I moved here in 1997 Bell promised me high speed internet in 3 months. We are still waiting. They have it 3 miles east of here and 2 miles west of here. Hell, they have it in Kandahar but not here. I live on a road with 100 households that could all use it. I guess Bell is waiting to see if this Internet thing is going to catch on before they spend the money.



Short of moving...you may be waiting for a long time. 
DSL dry loop is a twisted pair telephone line..the kind that very few customers still use these days..unless you still have a home line. However, if the physical wires don't come to your house, then maybe that is why they are stalling. Or maybe, they have no provision (digital internet equipment) located in your area Bell central office to send your internet service over a trunk to their ISP or another ISP. 
Did you try other service providers for dsl? This satellite internet is interesting..but still in it's infancy here in Canada and very expensive for what you get. 

I guess if you are in the middle of an area that doesn't have cable or high speed dsl, you are very limited...except for wi-fi.


Signal latency is the time your internet signal takes to get to the satellite (orbiting around the equator at 22.300 miles, about 0.125 sec) and then back down to whatever earth station has the equipment to then send your internet signal over land lines to the ISP another 0.125 sec, so there has to special echo suppressors in speech, and I'm sure data is the same way. 
Round trips can take up to a half a second or so on a satellite compared to land ISP which is milliseconds, it has to be slower, so downloading large amounts of data is going to take longer.

The other problem with an outside dish in this country is the weather. Freezing rain, sticky snow in the winter will impede the signal collected on the dish and heavy rainstorms in the summer months as well.
I believe they use KU band (12 to 18 ghz) which is very high frequency and more susceptible to atmospheric disturbances.


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## Retired Peasant

carverman said:


> The other problem besides signal latency (and that is why the service seems "slow" by comparison to high speed dsl or cable, is that the round trip DELAY from your ground station (dish) and the satellite (Intelsat 7)
> (I believe) they are using, which is an American satellite built expressly for such service. I don't believe in Canada we have a satellite (yet) that can handle internet or any communications uplink *Directly* from a small
> dish located on your premises. So far it's been the TV signal providers like Bell, Rogers, Shaw etc, that have the larger dishes and base stations to transmit to Canadian satellites..but depending on what the CRTC
> decides, that kind of available service may be "around the corner" too as they say.
> 
> All of the Canadian Telesat satellites are made for large bandwith transmission called downlinks for Digital TV.
> 
> Intelsat 7 is mostly TV channels, XM radio and it looks like 6 data channels..although I'm not sure if those are the internet channels or some other data.
> 
> I believe they use KU band (12 to 18 ghz) which is very high frequency and more susceptible to atmospheric disturbances.
> 
> "Coverage in all of North America including northern Canada, Alaska, the Pacific Hawaiian islands, Puerto Rico, USVI, Central and South America is provided via the Intelsat Americas IA-7(G-27) satellite"


They launched their own satellite, and have 100% of the Canadian capacity on it strictly for rural broadband.
"The next-generation satellite is capable of providing Internet access to Canadians in rural and remote areas with download speeds up to 25 Mbps, and at monthly prices similar to what urban Canadians pay."


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## carverman

Retired Peasant said:


> They launched their own satellite, and have 100% of the Canadian capacity on it strictly for rural broadband.
> *"The next-generation satellite is capable of providing Internet access to Canadians in rural and remote areas with download speeds up to 25 Mbps, and at monthly prices similar to what urban Canadians pay*."


That's good news. I used to work for Telesat in the early 70s and was there for the launch of Anik A1. A lot has changed in the last 40+ years.
Telesat is planning on launching their next generation satellites.. 

Here's the residential plans on Xplornet.
1.5mps download..$45.00 )5 gb data cap) 5.0 mbps downloand $65.00 (20gb data cap) 10mbps download $85.00 (20mb data cap). 
I can just imagine the "Canadian prices" charged for "up to 25gb download speed. 
BTW, The last two plans you can buy extra bandwidth.

It all depends on what you want to do with it I suppose..1.5mpbs will certainly suffice for NetFlix, but unless you only watch the occassional movie, 5gb isn't really enough these days. 

I was on a Wind (Cellular technology) Wi-Fi antenna stick for a couple of year, in most months came close to the 10gb data cap, or even exceeded it. 
When I exceeded the 10gbytes (Fair usage)cap, they slowed me right down to the point, I could barely watch anything on youtube. 
I quit them and went to DSL with 75GB of bandwidth. Haven't exceeded it yet.


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## Retired Peasant

carverman said:


> Here's the residential plans on Xplornet.
> 1.5mps download..$45.00 )5 gb data cap) 5.0 mbps downloand $65.00 (20gb data cap) 10mbps download $85.00 (20mb data cap).


There were special prices negotiated for the EORN (Eastern Ont Regional network), which Rusty could get
1.5 - $40 (5 Gb data)
5.0 $60 (30 Gb data)
10 $80 (30 Gb data)
Current promotion is $10 off for first 6 Months
Just 5$ to bump the latter two to 50Gb


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## carverman

Retired Peasant said:


> There were special prices negotiated for the EORN (Eastern Ont Regional network), which Rusty could get
> 1.5 - $40 (5 Gb data)
> 5.0 $60 (30 Gb data)
> 10 $80 (30 Gb data)
> Current promotion is $10 off for first 6 Months
> Just 5$ to bump the latter two to 50Gb


If Rusty is not intending to watch streaming movies (Netflix ) he might be ok with the least expensive plan.
However, if he intended to watch movies, it's roughly about 1GByte per hour of movie watching. 
Assuming each movie is up to 1hr and 30 mins, thats about 1.5gbytes of data used, so at the cheapest rate..that's roughly equivalent about 3 movies per billing period.


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## Rusty O'Toole

"Short of moving...you may be waiting for a long time.
DSL dry loop is a twisted pair telephone line..the kind that very few customers still use these days..unless you still have a home line. However, if the physical wires don't come to your house, then maybe that is why they are stalling. "

I still have a land line phone and so do a lot of other people. My guess is, they make more profit by charging the maximum amount of money and spending nothing on equipment. A couple of years ago I had a problem with my phone and a service man came and replaced the wire from the house to the road, which normally runs underground, with a white wire of the type normally used indoors. He explained that he had used up his ration of wire for that quarter and would come back and replace it in a month or so when they gave him some more.


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## mrb

*Bad experience with Xplorenet*

very bad experience. They were double billing us every month and charging my credit card twice. It took more than 6 months to resolve. Our internet was ridiculously slow. After cancelling, they sent us a bill of more than $500 for the equipment even though we call them numerous time to arrange pick up of the equipment. 
Try to avoid that company if you can.


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## Rusty O'Toole

Since I asked this question Bell offered me a new 4G service which is excellent, a lot more usage for less money than my old 3G. And a special introductory deal. The equipment is by Huawei.

Other than the usual horrorshow of dealing with Bell, it has been pretty good. The sim card failed yesterday which left me without service and cost me $1500 in trading losses. Rather than wait for their service man (guaranteed he will never come) I drove into town and bought a new sim card and installed it myself.

So, I can recommend this service if you have no choice but Bell. I think I will keep my old 3G service active, just in case.


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