Rocky said:
I went to that Verizon website and the rates they show there are way more than what I pay.
They show the 256 line, which I subscribe to as costing 3,150/month, whereas I pay 1,494/month.
Maybe this is page is for gringo newbies?
Hi Rocky.. 2 replies .. I cannot say anything about the Verizon website... I just listed the link - real or not real, cheap or expensive, cannot say as I did not even look at the prices. There are price differences between residential and business services though, and I would expect that the one that you pay, is for a residential service (you lucky dog!). Just last week I checked on price for our new store soon to open in Sosua and received the 3,150/month quote.
As far as satellite uplinks are concerned, the number of possibilities over the past two years have increased tremendously. Around 5 years ago, when we first got interested and learnt this stuff, we had one option, telephone line up, and satellite down. We now find ourselves dealing with over 40 different configurations, speeds, offerings and so on. We now deal with 4 major suppliers each with their own satellites up there, and a dizzying array of hardware suppliers. For business, there is in my opinion in the Caribbean not a better and more reliable service to be found. With the synchronous services now, you can even place a sizable webserver underneath the satellite dish and you can get whatever bandwidth you want into a reliable network operating center with quite acceptable traceroutes. We have currently an on-line university out of Saba Island that is going to go satellite and we were worried about the bandwidth but, to our amazement, one of our providers was able to offer the wack of bandwith at a reasonable cost. So, this technology is simply developing at a dizzying speed.
Where satellite still falls a little flat in terms of cost, is for residential use. The cost of the equipment is coming down as we speak, but is still a little high, compared with say a terrestrial DSL modem. But then again, the equipment is high tech and 'big' stuff. Having said that, we've had deep price cuts on equipment just recently. The cheapest monthly connectivity one can get is around US120 per month - still high. If one can get a few households in a community together to install and share the connection wirelessly, it becomes really affordable and it is a good bet these days for condos, flats and so on.. and ideal for wide area wireless applications.
Also, the way satellite speeds are quoted, especially the non-synchronous services, is misleading. If I say 56 up and 400 down, you think, Oh, so slow. But in reality, the user does not see or experience the non-synchronicity... and the feel is of working at 400. The slow upload only comes into play only if you do large uploads, and for that, we have synchronous services these days. Also, the satellite owners have what they call 'fair use' policies. Your allocated upload bandwidth goes into a 'bucket' and if you use it non-frequently, you get priority in the que (damn, I cannot spell that word!). If you 'overuse' your allocation, you upload a little slower.
As I always say, terrestrial is one's first option because of cost. It is simply cheaper. When you don't have that option available, for me it is satellite. I've been working in the Caribbean under a satellite dish for going on four years now. The only time we really went down, is when Richard wanted to adjust our dish to look at another satellite while standing on a chair. Well, you know Richard... the chair toppled, he held onto the dish which neatly and slowly bent, and placed him gently and safely on the ground. We managed to fix the mangled dish
.
Reliability, we have mission critical customers under satellite dishes. Outages, we don't get 'em, if the dish is correctly sized, unless all the weather on the planet works together and showers us with sunspots and all kinds of weird phenomena. Having said that, a whole satellite went down just about 2 months ago. It just simply broke and is now space garbage.
So to conclude, satellite uplinks these days are rock solid in terms of reliability although one does get the odd hardware failure and need to swop out a piece of hardware (modem or LNB or something and usually you find the customer put it into another electrical outlet outside of the UPS), speed can be whatever you want these days and the speed is real. All this good stuff only if it is correctly installed for the application, points at the correct satellite for the application, correctly configured, sized and maintained. Almost like our battery banks and inverters.