# rural highspeed ISP recommendations needed!



## darkscot (Nov 13, 2003)

my brother made a move to rural Ontario, just outside of Trenton. a radiowave highspeed ISP said he was in their service area but after going to his house they deemed it not feasible.

anybody have any recommendations for alternate highspeed? especially satellite or radiowaves in that area?


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## Macified (Sep 18, 2003)

Hughes Sattellite has installers in Canada. I still have to figure this out for the cottage and will post as I find details but your brother can start with Hughes.com and figure it out.


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## darkscot (Nov 13, 2003)

much thanks for the speedy response! we'll check that out!


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## krs (Mar 18, 2005)

There is an excellent web site where you can search for ISP's that cover the specific area you're interested in.
For Trenton they show a few wireless and also a couple of satellite providers that you could check out.
I'm also a bit in the country just north of Belleville - town next to Trenton.
I switched to DSL from Dial Up at the beginning of the year - the speed is just over 1 Meg which turns out to be even slightly faster than DSL access in the City of Belleville.

The ISP web site is here

Select 'Ontario' at the top, then Trenton in the pull down menu, and then 'satellite', 'wireless' or 'all' to get a listing of the ISP's. If you click on the ISP you get details about their service offering, pricing etc. and most important a user rating which I found very useful when trying to pick a new ISP.


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## MACSPECTRUM (Oct 31, 2002)

hughes solution is horrible

i have direcpc thru expressvu and it really really really sucks

it's going away as of june 30 but telesat.ca will be offering a better service
right now telesat is only offering telesat to current direcpc customers so tell him to wait for a bit until after end of june

don't go with the other satellite systems
more expensive monthly and equipment and only 500k down and 50k, yeah, that's right, 50k up

telesat.ca ka band will offer

512k down, 128k up for $55/mth and $500 equipment plus installation

check out

http://www.digitalhomecanada.com/forum/showthread.php?t=18238


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## krs (Mar 18, 2005)

Man - is that ever expensive especially for the speed they offer.
And I thought the $27 a month I pay for DSL was a bit much.

Has anyone ever tried accelerated Dial-Up? It's supposed to be up to five times faster than regular 56K Dial Up....my ISP now offers that at no extra cost to Dial Up subscribers.


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## MACSPECTRUM (Oct 31, 2002)

accelertated dial up is just DNS caching and lower res. pictures being downloaded is all

doesn't really help if you surf image heavy sites of which you need to see the images

for ruralites, there is no good answer, but best of worst

as for price, right now i pay $23 for extra phone line, for upstream, direcpc is only downstream via satellite, i have to have a dial up ISP, chalk up another $20 or so and then the direcpc is $50 / month for a total of about $90 a month for, get this

400-600 down and 22K up

ain't technology great when it really sucks?

another reason i hate bell so much


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## krs (Mar 18, 2005)

MACSPECTRUM said:


> accelertated dial up is just DNS caching and lower res. pictures being downloaded is all


I don't think it's quite that simple.

My ISP recommend using either Firefox or Mozilla with the accelerated "feature'. apparently Internet Explorer does not work with it all the time (and we're talking Windows machines here).
If it was just DNS caching and lower resolution pictures - why would IE have a problem with that?

Anyway - I decided to try this out and reconfigured firefox on the Mac mini to use this accelerated Dial Up capability. It definitely made a noticable difference in how quickly the web pages came up; text was essentially instantaneous and pictures were definitely faster than with a straight 56K connection. I used some web pages I have never been to with the mini, like Microsoft, to make sure here was nothing in cache and the web site itself was fast.
Now if my ISP offered V.92 I might just go back to dial up and use the accelerated capability - from a practical point of view it's not that much slower than DSL - I spend half my time now waiting for the web sites to respond.


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## darkscot (Nov 13, 2003)

well the upload is the most important issue here, he's got files to send off to clients so telesat looks the best for him. much appreciated info macspectrum!


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## groovetube (Jan 2, 2003)

a friend uses broadbandontario.com , but that's no cheaper. But it works where no other does.


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## James Z (Oct 12, 2002)

Wow their is a lot of Quinte folks around here.I'm in the same situation myself here in Ameliasburg, wireless service does not reach me as I do not have a line of sight to the towers and their are 2 close by.Now my mother in law emailed me the other day she is with kos.net and sent me the info they sent her on the accelerated dial-up and asked me if it would work.Now she uses OS9 is this going to make a difference?She does have OSX on her machine but change is something she's not quite ready for.If someone can let me know if trying this on her machine would help that would be great.

Thanks James


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## Macified (Sep 18, 2003)

MACSPECTRUM said:


> hughes solution is horrible
> 
> i have direcpc thru expressvu and it really really really sucks


It's the Bell side of the service that really sucks. The way Bell has implemented Hughes is to do one-way only. You have to have a dial-up internet account in addition to the sattellite service. 

Going with a Hughes account directly gets you two-way.

I haven't tried it but as far as I can tell, it's the only service that's going to reach my cottage.


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## krs (Mar 18, 2005)

James Z said:


> Wow their is a lot of Quinte folks around here.I'm in the same situation myself here in Ameliasburg, wireless service does not reach me as I do not have a line of sight to the towers and their are 2 close by.Now my mother in law emailed me the other day she is with kos.net and sent me the info they sent her on the accelerated dial-up and asked me if it would work.Now she uses OS9 is this going to make a difference?She does have OSX on her machine but change is something she's not quite ready for.If someone can let me know if trying this on her machine would help that would be great.
> 
> Thanks James


James -
I used OS 9 until a short while ago.
Problem was that I couldn't find a decent browser that ran on OS 9 and was still supported. Firefox doesn't run on OS 9; I used Mozilla for a while but it would crash several times a day and I could not figure out why and try to fix it.
Got all sorts of suggestions from the various discussion sites but nothing I tried made a difference.
The accelerated dial up works well with Firefox and Mozilla. not so well according to KOS with IE - IE is no longer supported on the Mac in any case.
Netscape may be another option on OS 9 - you would have to check with KOS if that can be configured to work with accelerated dial up.

I had bought the OS X software ages ago - that's why it's OS 10.2....kept hesitating to switch from OS 9 but now I'm really happy I did - would never go back.
Just the fact that OS X does not crash is a big time saver and not nearly as frustrating as OS 9....not that OS 9 would crash that often, it was the MS applications that took OS 9 down.
And then I found that more and more applications I wanted only came in OS X - that finally did it.

BTW - Did you check recently if DSL is available? I was interested in DSL for years - registered my name and phone number to be notified when DSL was available in my area.
Well, I found out by chance that DSL came to my area out in the country a bit over a year ago but nobody ever notified me.


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## James Z (Oct 12, 2002)

No DSL out here.I myself use OS 10.3.8 but trying to get her to switch to OSX is not so easy, she is very comfortable with OS9, as she has no problems ever.I might just install her settings on my machine and see what kind of benifits she would get if she did go to OSX.

Thanks James


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## MACSPECTRUM (Oct 31, 2002)

krs said:


> I don't think it's quite that simple.
> 
> My ISP recommend using either Firefox or Mozilla with the accelerated "feature'. apparently Internet Explorer does not work with it all the time (and we're talking Windows machines here).
> If it was just DNS caching and lower resolution pictures - why would IE have a problem with that?
> ...



you may have missed the point of rural living and evil Bell's horrible line service
my modem line gets a maximum connection of 26.4 K and usually dials up at 22K

i now use firefox with the "tweaks"
i tried an accelerator that only worked with IE
still wasn't close to what i have on my bell (crappy) satellite/dialup service

telesat will be the answer for me in the future cause i doubt bell will ever put adsl in here
repeat: evil Bell


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## MACSPECTRUM (Oct 31, 2002)

Macified said:


> It's the Bell side of the service that really sucks. The way Bell has implemented Hughes is to do one-way only. You have to have a dial-up internet account in addition to the sattellite service.
> 
> Going with a Hughes account directly gets you two-way.
> 
> I haven't tried it but as far as I can tell, it's the only service that's going to reach my cottage.



assuming your cottage is in canada, your statement of *I haven't tried it but as far as I can tell, it's the only service that's going to reach my cottage.* ain't correct, grasshopper

telesat.ca is your answer

from http://www.muskoka.com/services.htm a hughes solution provider
The cost for the hardware is $899.00 plus $400.00 for a standard installation. Monthlies are $49.99 per month for first month, and $79.99 after second month on a two year contract or $89.99 per month for the remainder of a 1 year contract. 

500K down, 50k up


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## Kevlar (Sep 22, 2004)

Frontier Communications is the company my friend uses to get high speed access between Stirling & Campbellford.


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## krs (Mar 18, 2005)

MACSPECTRUM said:


> telesat will be the answer for me in the future cause i doubt bell will ever put adsl in here repeat: evil Bell


The feasibility of ASDL depends only on the length of the loop between your house and the DMS central office or DMS remote. The longer the loop the slower the maximum speed that you can obtain with DSL.
If you can figure out how long your loop is to the central office or the remote you can determine if there is ever any hope of getting DSL.
Although I'm outside of the belleville city limits, there is DMS remote about 2km from my house so my DSL connecting speed is pretty good.
The DSL download speed supported by my ISP is 3.0 M; the upload speed 800K


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## MACSPECTRUM (Oct 31, 2002)

> The feasibility of ASDL depends only on the length of the loop between your house and the DMS central office or DMS remote.


and the fact that bell execs happen to have cottages at the CO (central office) which was built a year ago and has ADSL
so bell execs get adsl this summer at their cottages, but i get the big ZERO
hmm, how'd that happen, eh?

bell has already told me that there are no plans for ADSL for my area for at least 2005 (translation: "never")

did i mention bell is evil?


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## krs (Mar 18, 2005)

I guess that means you're not a happy camper.

I'm still amazed at the cost of satellite service - $1300 to get started and then $80.- a month. I suppose if I run a business and can write it off that's fine but just for personal use.....
And the speeds are not that great either for the money.

Any idea how well satellite performs in heavy rainstorms? Satellite TV used to have a problem when the weather was really bad.


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## MACSPECTRUM (Oct 31, 2002)

krs said:


> I guess that means you're not a happy camper.
> 
> I'm still amazed at the cost of satellite service - $1300 to get started and then $80.- a month. I suppose if I run a business and can write it off that's fine but just for personal use.....
> And the speeds are not that great either for the money.
> ...


actually costs are coming down
telesat is offering $499 for equipment for DirecPC customers and $99 instllation
$55/mth gets you 512k down and 128K up

the "other" satellite internet providers are taking this time to try and use scare tactics to get people to buy their service

oh and by the way, you HAVE to sign up for at least one year
early termination penalty = paying out the rest of the contract

where is the CRTC to protect us?
oh yeah, i forgot, they got bought off


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## Macified (Sep 18, 2003)

Telsat isn't available yet and I don't know when it will be. Thanks for the pointer though. I'm going to keep my eye on them and hope that they are ready when I really need to set this up. My wife and one of her colleagues have to have service or long weekends at the cottage are out. I'm hoping I can set-up a wireless link between our cottages (on the same small lake) so that we can share the cost of the service. There is a wireless provider in our area but we are in such a valley that the service doesn't reach us.


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