Satellite Internet

We have been using satellite-based Internet for about a month now and I thought it was about time to share that we have found it quite usable! We had been using Verizon's LTE which we jumped on as soon as they announced an unlimited data plan. But that service throttles back to a very slow speed too quickly. That makes it just about useless for streaming for the remainder of your monthly billing period as soon as you hit a monthly limit. Since they do not seem to be responsive to requests to increase the amount of data you can use each month at the higher speeds, we looked elsewhere.

Hughes offers www.hughesnet.com for reasonably competitive rates. They also throttle back to a slower speed once you have used up your allocated amount of data for the month but their limit is much higher than Verizon's and their slower speed is also much faster.

Some expect the latency of the data exchange (when the data is traveling 40,000 miles round trip) to be too high. However, it is actually rather easy to get used to. Since we do not play interactive games we do not require the lowest latency possible and for regular web browsing, email, online document editing, uploads, downloads, the satellite service is really just fine.

So, for those thinking about this service I say, "Go for it!"