Bus Living, Truck Living, Boat Living. You name it, if you live in a home that is capable of moving by itself, or have the desire to, then this is the place for you.
If money were no object and one could afford such excess, how well do these things really work?
We have someone at work who wants to use this and I'd like some real world, non-propaganda, sales talk.
I'm a mechanical engineer and something of a electric technophobe , so I tend to stay away from electronic gizmo and whizbang write ups and opinion sites. I work with several electrical engineers and some say this is good while others say it's bad.
Oh, it works, and it's not necessarily any more expensive than a wired broadband connection or even dialup service if you have a dedicated telephone line.
I ran Tachyon satellite service for a couple of years, acting as a "babysitter" for a system that had to be kept online and updated while the owner was traveling out of the country. When it was slow, it was 2Mb/sec (fast) when it was fast, it was 10Mb/sec (scorching fast). Tachyon is enterprise-grade service and it comes at an enterprise price. The service I had would have cost me $700/month if I had been the one receiving the bills. Their selling point is that it is always on, always fast, and if there is a problem, you talk to a technician here in the US live 24/7/365 and the problem gets fixed. Period.
If Jerry Campbell is still hanging around the forum, he can tell you about Huges.net service, as he's had it for about a year and carries it with him in his travels in his Crown bus.
Hughes.net, Wild Blue, StarBand, etc are all consumer-grade services, but still boast 99.9% uptime. Typical monthly prices range from $39.95 to 159.95, depending on speed and traffic quotas. Dialup service is typically $19.95 - 29.95/month, and if you have a dedicated phone line for the modem, that is going to come to another $20 at least.
Consumer satellite systems (and Tachyon also for that matter) have what's commonly referred to as "The Bit Bucket", or as they call it, "Fair Access Policy". What it comes down to is that they grant you a certain number of bytes per month and if you exceed that quota, then your service falls back to dialup speed (Tachyon is more liberal, they will ignore the occasional over-quota, but if you become chronic about over use, they will ask you to upgrade your service). The purpose is to prevent you from sucking the satellite dry downloading Russian porn and preventing all thse other satellite users from getting their naughty photos. You would have to be doing massive downloads or streaming video/audio for hours on end to hit the quota limit on most services.
All satellite services have "latency". which means that there is a delay because your request, and the returning data (viewing web pages, etc) has to travel 22,000 miles up to a geosynchronous satellite, back to earth, the request gets found, back to the satellite, then down to you on the ground. What this means is that you will experience a delay after clicking something on a web page. Nothing will happen for about two seconds, then your page loads very quickly. (Which is better than what I have here on dialup, I click things and nothing happens for half a minute or more). The practical limit is that VOIP, real-time gaming, hot-n-heavy telnet sessions, etc, are basically impossible via satellite due to the delay.
Lower priced satellite equipment is more likely to be interrupted by weather anomalies. If you get heavy rain, dense cloud cover, ice or snow, investing in a bigger dish and higher power radio is advised unless you don't mind the occasional outage.
I've investigated several satellite IPS services since moving out of the city, and one of these days might even get around to ordering up service. I could get a small business service plan and share it with one or more families here in our small valley. They'd be thrilled and I could split the cost.
Hi Geoff,
I have Hughes.Net. I pay $59.99 a month for the residential plan. Wild blue and I believe Starband are a little cheaper But I need to be mobile and I need a particular Hughes satellite to get the coverage I need for my migration. My limit is about 175 MB an hour, if I remember correctly. If i go over that the speed drops to 50 KB for the next 24 hours. The speed is from 1000 Kbits down to about 500Kbits for download and 2 or 300Kbits for upload. It's easy to setup. Voip actually does work but is like talking on the ham radio. You have to say OVER or GO Ahead and take turns talking which noone seems to be able to do naturally. If I lived around civilization I'd probably just have a cable modem. If or When you're in the boonies and you have the electricity the satellite is a wonderful thing. If money didn't matter I buy more SPEED..
Good luck
Adios
Jerry
and one could afford such excess, how well do these things really work? 
, so I tend to stay away from electronic gizmo and whizbang write ups and opinion sites. I work with several electrical engineers and some say this is good while others say it's bad. 
