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I've lived in the United States continuously [...] to the best of my knowledge everybody (who has internet at all) has theoretically unlimited internet

For $50/mo, satellite customers are only allowed to transfer 10 GB/mo. Please see this story about ViaSat and the plans offered by WildBlue.

Get satellite

What do you think Wildblue is?

Satellite internet is crap. There just isn't enough bandwidth available to get decent speeds out of it, not to mention the horrid latency.

steam DRM [...] lets you have the game on more then 1 system

In single player or multiplayer mode? If I have friends over at my place, and we want to play a video game together, do Steam games support "spawn installation" over a LAN?

US broadband sucks for any thing that is on live like and caps make it suck even more.

Which is a point against Steam because redownloading a game costs against your cap, which can be as low as 7500 MB per month in some parts of the United States.

Still capped. Wildblue limits users to 16.6Gb for an $85.90/mo plan and has extremely high latency. Pings on the order of 3000ms are not unusual. What's really unusual about this is that their "fair access policy" is asymetric. On their "cheap" plan you get only 2300MB upload before they throttle you to 28kbps up and 128kbps down. Cellphone service is by far the better option if you care about games in the slightest. Satellite is ok for file transfer and downstream video if they would only let you use it.

Also, you are locked in to a two year contract at those rates ($2000+!). Just think about buying a wireless ethernet bridge if you're within 10 miles of DSL. Once installed, it could provide 10Mbit to 1000Mbit around the community.

tracert is your friend

Last hop is through some ISP called 'Wild Blue'.

Now what?

Not the greatest speed, but there are options:
HughesNet
WildBlue

The only technology that blankets the planet is satellite. No other signal has the reach. It's that simple.

It isn't just HughesNet anymore, there are other companies in the space (get it?) now too, like WildBlue, Skycasters and some others.

I would highly recommend picking up a portable satellite setup like you'll find by clicking on my signature. I'm not really shilling for it, it's my father-in-law's hobby business, but he has come up with some pretty cool stuff.

http://www.hughesnet.com/

http://www.wildblue.com/

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-satellite-broadband.htm

Maybe if you gave her some real options for it, she would have it.

Oh wait, $99.00 a month is too expensive?

you are not complaining about accessibility, you're complaining about the price of available service.

All graphics are completely procedural, as in mathematically described. That means you don't get to have an artist sit down and draw them.

Then give the artist a dataflow diagram, similar to GraphEdit, to build procedures.

Puts limits on how they can look and demands a fair bit of self similarity.

Nature is self-similar.

You use a MASSIVE amount of memory in relation to your file size.

But it doesn't have to be pushed over the wire or the optical disk, which becomes important as Xbox 360 games begin to run up against the 7 GB/disc limit and PC games begin to run up against monthly download caps.

You can't have things like voices and such in the game, takes too much space. Even with extremely efficient compression (which produces audible artifacts) voices will quickly make your game larger.

I forget: how big was the S.A.M. synthesizer on the old 8-bit home micros?

All assembly coding. To do this, you are writing everything as efficient as you can. That's wonderful, but hard to maintain. For a large project that is going to need to run on a lot of systems, be patched and so on, you want a higher level language. Doing everything in assembly would be a nightmare to maintain.

Sure, demos aren't intended to be maintained much past the party, but some of the procedural techniques apply just as well to C or Lisp or ML or whatever if you want to trade off some efficiency to gain maintainability.

On the contrary, if increasing the on disk size makes it better or more efficient, then you want to do that. Disk space is extremely cheap.

Specifically, there are places where disk space is still a lot cheaper than bandwidth.

It's already easy to snag gigabytes of stuff on a torrent site

Even with a 7 GB/mo cap?

http://www.wildblue.com/aboutWildblue/how_it_works_demo.jsp

WildBlue's two satellites, located 22,500 miles above the Earth's equator in geostationary orbit

So no, that isn't LEO.

WildBlue provides satellite service throughout most of the U.S. Speeds, low. Latency, high. Gaming, impossible. But at least it works.

I believe that they use low earth orbit satellites, which means that they may not have the technical capability to provide coverage over Iran, at least not all the time. And then there's the matter of getting ground stations smuggled in and installed, and they're large enough (the size of a DirectTV dish) to be difficult to conceal.

There's a number of places that offer satellite internet to geosync satellites. http://www.wildblue.com/aboutWildblue/how_it_works_demo.jsp http://www.ussatellite.com/how-satellite-internet-works.html

Satellite-based broadband internet service is available now:

http://www.wildblue.com/

Disclaimer: my dad is a reseller.

But, anything based on satellites will always have a latency that's a few hundred milliseconds on the side of uncomfortable if you want to do anything interactive, like gaming or video chat. Bandwidth is happy though.

WildBlue is two way. $250 installed. {To June 30th]

No trenches. No cables. No conduits.

No expensive legal muck-ups over easements and rights-of-way. I'm betting at some point there will be a conflict.

When it comes time to lay new water and sewers lines.

Widen the shoulder and dig a new drainage ditch for the county road.

3b: If you've chosen to run the connection to your neighbhour's home, ensure that you don't piss him/her off. They are now your cable internet provider.

Don't even think about it.

There are ISPs which are agreeable to this sort of thing.

But - sadly - the trencher that accidentally snags your line will probably belong to someone else. 500 to 1000 meters of undocumented fiber is going to look a lot like theft of services.

You should look into Wild Blue satellite Internet access. It is a two-way satellite connection with 1.5Mbps download speed. Much better than one-way with dial return. http://www.wildblue.com/

1. No Script won't always make things faster. Small, compressible AJAX scripts often save me loading a whole page. The most recent version of /. for example is way, way easier for dialup users with scripts enabled. So yeah- bug whitelist if you go with no scripts. Adblock is probably more appropriate (thought I don't use it)

It's ridiculous to suggest text mode only unless it's less that say 24000kbps. 2. Email. Just use POP or IMAP in offline mode and have it ask before downloading big messages, I choose 300k. At least Apple mail does this well ("Subject, from sender@domain is 1.3MB, Delete, Skip or Download")- I'd bet that thunderbird does too. On a slow connection you want a local copy of messages.

Or use Gmail's Web Interface and leave it open. It takes a minute to load the first time but after that it's excellent for dialup users.

3.

This is totally untrue. Have you read satellite provider's Fair Access Policy. $50/mo+$250 equiptment will get you all of about 7.5GB/30 day rolling period WildBlue. This year they changed their throttling policy to not only slow you down if you exceed, but they actually give you intermittent service until you fall to 70% FAP threshold. That means that if you downloaded the full 7.5GB in three days, you've shot yourself for a whole month. If you're on satellite monitor your own bandwidth!

4. So in summary dialup isn't a death sentence. Ajax is often helpful. Order your distros on CD. Save your email for offline access. Satellite considered dangerous.

The most important thing is to find an ISP that won't cancel your Unlimited account or demand additional fees for high usage. I uses Lanset (Please pardon their home page- bleh!). They kick me off if I've been on for 8 hours straight, but they don't mind if I reconnect. My connection is active probably 20 hours a day.

I'm writing this on a 31.3kbps connection. I also have a ProPak account with wildblue- but it's on the other side of the mountain.

PS Cell data service is definitely worth checking out if available. We don't have cell service here either.

There's always satellite internet. It isn't the greatest (long latencies), but it exists. Try HughesNet (http://www.hughesnet.com/) and WildBlue (http://www.wildblue.com/); I think there's another one out there, but I don't remember their name.

Unless the business has a strict need for high upload speed, why not satellite? My house and my studio are outside the reach of cable and DSL and I've been using Wild Blue's service at both locations for about 2 years. My brother's business uses it as well. Granted, costs aren't competitive with DSL or cable at a given bandwidth, but it is a lot less expensive than a $450/month T1. The package I have at my studio is advertised at 1.5Mbps down and 256kbps up. Overall it is just as reliable as the cable connection I had when I lived in the city. Wild Blue and a couple of other providers cover pretty much everywhere in the US, including Gilsum, New Hampshire. I do agree with the point of the article, that rural areas need better service. I wish BPL was available at my studio's location, just for its up/down parity, but isn't quite the dire straits it is made out to be. That is particuarly true if we are talking about 'households' that don't likely need a lot of upload bandwidth.

Just woke up, a bit groggy, and I see free wireless broadband! I am stuck with crappy (no pun intended) satellite broadband and was very exited about an alternative. Oh well will keep waiting for Clearwire.

If you have to go with satellite, might want to give WildBlue a shot. It's $300 for equipment, but the service is pretty good and affordable when compared to the other providers like StarBand and DirecWay. My father-in-law has it (he's in an area with no cable or DSL) and now he's able to participate on the intarweb with the rest of us.

I happily signed up for WildBlue's satellite service about a year ago, since (1) they're not DirecWay or StarBand and (2) I was sick and tired of 26.4 (yes, 26.4, not 28.8 even, but 26.4) dialup service. My wife & I had moved from our happy happy DSL-connected (Verizon, technically, but on BBN/Genuity/Level3's old 4.0.0.0/8 network) townhome out into the boonies of VA since we could turn a 115% profit on selling our house and move closer to my work.

Soooo then the fun started. Don't get wrong, most of these problems are because of having satellite service in general, and not specifically because of WildBlue as a provider. I can normally get 550ms - 600ms ping times to WildBlue's NOC on the other end of the satellite connection, and 600ms - 700ms to most well-connected places on the 'net. But you get rain fade, intermittent signalling problems that pop up and then mysteriously go away, and occasional problems with the satellite modem itself where you need to power-cycle the beastie to get a usable signal back (don't forget to use a UPS or a filtering power strip at the very least, clean power saves you many headaches, especially in older houses).

The specific problem with WildBlue is that they've oversold their service (check out the WildBlue Uncensored forums for more gory technical details if you care), and you can get a fair amount of congestion during peak usage hours, depending which satellite beam (geographic area) and NOC you happen to be in. Plus all sorts of other fun stuff like flaky DHCP service, cable cuts at the NOC, slow DNS service, and all the assorted joys of using a residential ISP.

At least WildBlue's FAP (fair-access policy or bandwidth limitation) is not as draconian as their competition, but it's still annoying for me. I end up downloading ISOs, game demos, etc. off of other non-limited connections when I have the chance so I don't bust my 17GB monthly download quota.

I've also had friends who signed up for the Value or Select pack on the same beam complain about slow downloads (way below rated speeds) and super-high latency. After checking the signal, having a tech adjust the dish, check for obstructions, etc. they upgraded to the Pro pack and hey presto! problems went away. I've always had the Pro pack, so I can't say for sure, but it looks like WildBlue is using a QoS implementation to distinguish between users on different plans, along with the FAP.

World of Warcraft is kind of okay on WildBlue. You get about 800ms - 1200ms latency, and doing raids or other groups where you need lots of chatting + coordination is kinda painful, but it *is* playable in most situations.

Halo / Halo 2 on Xbox Live is just ... um, don't even bother. It's an exercise in frustration. I ended up cancelling my Xbox Live subscription since I just didn't use it.

Oblivion is pretty cool! :)

The problem is that the latency involved with satellite completely eliminates entire categories of online games (FPS, RTS), leaving you with either MMORPGs or turn-based games. I've ended up playing a lot more current single-player games, old ROMs under emulation and digging out older classics (Starcraft, Baldur's Gate) to play through the single-player missions & stories again.

VPNs and interactive remote access (SSH, VNC, NX/FreeNX, Citrix, Tarantella, remote desktop) suck pretty hard on satellite too. You can get them to work most of the time, and some have latency-reduction features that can help, but it's still painful. Character-interactive logins and apps over a VPN on satellite feel like you're squeezing the bits through a 300 baud connection. Dialup or ISDN is far better for this sort of access, if you need it.

In short, if you have any kind of option for better landline service (ISDN, DSL, cable, fiber-to-the-home, T1) go for that instead. Satellite should only be your last resort.

And often those people would have no access to broadband if it weren't for regulated monopoly. In exchange for building out to West Dingleberry, the telco is granted the sole right to serve that area. Otherwise the risk outwieghs the potential profit.

There are numerous satellite broadband providers offering 1.5Mbps down and up to 256Kbps up throughout all 50 states at around US$50 to US$100 per month. Nothing precludes one person from getting a corporate account that allows reselling of the bandwidth. These speeds are only held back by FCC regulations.

Hardly. As long as there is competition in a hugely capital-intensive market, you'll have a minimum of providers undercutting potential new competition, along with collusion. At best you'll get very, very slow one-upmanship without major capital improvements.Let it crush more? So that we have fewer, not more, options as to how we get deliverables?

Every thing I listed that was crushed was replaced by more choice and lower cost. Regulation did not help this, it was the lack of regulation that gave people incentives to take risks. Some people failed, but the hardware and labor up to that point was bought by someone else to use.

Unregulated markets of non-commodity goods (like internet service) result in monopolies and oligopolies. That's the natural state...

No, it isn't. Look at www.dslreports.com to see how many competitors there are -- the less regulation there is in a municipality, the more competition there is.

even your totally unregulated Austrian model has to adjust for monopolistic force in order to work properly. If you really want better performance in terms of net result for the consumer, you either need to take actions to prevent monopolies, or take actions to regulate them -- whether you're from the Austrian school of thought (such as yourself), the Keynesian (such as the FRB), or another (such as myself). In the case of the telcos, it was determined that regulation was a better bet because of the alternative would have either been state-owned infrastructure, or no service to less dense areas.

Again, untrue. Once local service regulations were reduced (and not removed), we saw incredible outreach for cell phone service and broadband access. It wasn't the regulations that gave us this growth, it was new technologies that were finally allowed to compete with the old and dead monopoly technologies that provided it.

I can (and have) driven all over the country and North America and I'm shocked at the cell reception I get compared to 5 years ago. This isn't regulation that provides for consumers, it is companies taking risks. In small towns, we seen tiny companies put up a cell phone tower to re-lease to the large providers so that they can offer their customers service.

Don't forget that a good part of the country still does not have broadband available. Video streaming in is impossible for many places, not to mention streaming in HD. Physical media isn't going anywhere, for quite a while.

Really? I see you as being wrong. Check out this image. For those VERY few white spots on the map, you have Satellite broadband which is available in 99.9% of the US.

According to various trade journal publications, the days of 1.5Mb/s are over, soon to be replaced with 1.5Gb/s bandwidth almost everywhere -- except where the municipality or the state prevents it.

If we provided people in China with satellite internet terminals, like this then the firewall would be completely out of the loop. And since the antennas are directional, it wouldn't be too hard to conceal your RF signals and would be difficult to jam.

At the risk of being a shill, I use WildBlue. It is cheap, the dish is small, the speeds rock, and it works. About the only thing it sucks for is off-hours fragging. My speed us 1.5 up 256 down, with 500ms latency (last time I looked). Most could live with that, I know I can.

BTW, I looked at a getting a T-1 before I found this place. Verizon doesn't run them to homes per policy.

Wildblue is back in business and is 1.5 down 256k up at the highest $80/mo tier. It is 2-way on the sat. They block Voip though - boo!

Offtopic - why would they say SSL VPNs might work faster than IpSec VPNS because of latency?

http://www.wildblue.com/aboutWildblue/qaa.jsp#5_5

http://wildblue.com/

Looks more promising than DirecWAY at least...

Hughes, parent company to DirecTV, also owns DirecWay. DirecWay is one of the major players when it comes to high-speed internet. The problem with satellite Internet though is the latency. Speeds are great it's just the latency that kills you. This satellite that they're using for MPEG4 was originally going to be used to introduce the KA band for the ultimate high-speed Internet (think beyond T-1 speeds) with a lower latency. Unfortunatly they scrapped the idea for more HD channels, in which you see now. None the less, DirecWay and DirecTV can integrate together onto the same bill and use the same dish (the larger one with a add-on module for T.V.) If you want speed using the KA band though I believe that right now only WildBlue offers it. They launched their satellite last year and are beta testing it with a handful of people around the U.S. but it is scheduled for full deployment later this year. Not to mention they advertise it at only $49/month. They're only using a set spectrem for the residential community and you can expect speeds around 1.5down and 384?up. Not sure on what the up is.

WildBlue promises similar service (1.5Mbps down, 256Kbps up) for 2005, but it looks like Telesat/Viasat might beat them to the punch.

Don't confuse Ka-band (Kurtz-above band) with Ku-band (Kurtz-under band). Ku-band has already been in use for satellite Internet for some time now through (awful) services like StarBand and DIRECWAY, and is also widely used for digital TV broadcasts. Amazingly, even C-band Internet service is available. C-band service requires a much bigger dish, but in some areas this is the best (or only) broadband option. Ka-band service may change that for certain regions of Canada.

I wonder if owners of big dishes will be able to modify them to handle Ka-band Internet. It would probably be inconvenient to share if you want TV as well, but merely adding the decoding module would be trivial if they released a kit. It's already relatively simple to add support for new kinds of services, such as 4DTV.

I recommend a satellite Internet provider like Starband or Wild Blue (when it comes out).

WildBlue (formerly iSky) will be offering two-way satellite internet in late 2001 (for those of us who prefer not to deal with either AOL or MSN).