When we moved out to the country we knew that internet access was going to be an issue. I guess timing was on our side as the Telesat KA band satellite access service was just launching around when we would get possession of the house. The only stumbling block was the cost for setup and installation was close to $1000 and that money was needed for other things (new house and all).
So for the first 3 months I was using dial up to work. At first this was kinda fun, going back to my roots as I have been online since you could be. It was also interesting to see how website load when you are working at 56k. For the most part things would be fine as long as you were not dealing with images or files over 2megs. I did run into some issues using a VPN connection and SSL (was dead slow). This was starting to be an issue so we had to finally pop for the Sat access.
For this there is really only one choice and that is Xplornet.com. They have many plans but for me I chose the most basic since you can always bump up the bandwidth as required. They did chose some cheesy names for the plans. For the past 2 weeks I have be running the KaZam plan. This is about 512 down and 120 up. Since it was installed it has been on the whole time and (fingers crossed) has been rock solid. I have been calling it low-speed since it is not near the DSL/Cable speeds that you would get in a city but it much better than dialup for sure. Because it has to send the stuff back up to space there is a slight lag .6 seconds when you make requests. So far this has not been a huge issue for me.
For the installation they just have to mount a dish (bigger than the Sat TV dishes) and run the cable (2) into the house and then into the modem. From there it is just like a DSL/Cable connection. I have the modem connected to a LinkSys wwi-fi router and have signal thru out the house. It was funny when I was setting up the router I was going to secure it like I also do (lock it right down) but then remembered that hey nobody can even get my signal since we are kinda out in the middle of no where [:)]
At the same time I also got my Bell ExpressVu working so I now feel more like the city boy as I have HD tv and wifi again.
If you are looking for internet access anywhere in Canada then I would recommend Xplornet.com as it seems to be the real deal.
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Hey Jaimie, See you been busy
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