Ask Slashdot: Good Satellite Internet For Remote Locations?

EdIII writes "I've been looking for a decent contention service (4:1,10:1) in South America and I am not finding much. I have also heard that some frequency bands are a lot better at cutting through cloud cover. This is for a fairly remote ground station with reliable power generation, but also routinely cloudy. I would need at least 3/1Mbps with hopefully decent latency. What's your advice Slashdotters? Yes, I know that some of the solutions can cost 20K for deployment and 2-10K per month for service. Feel free to to tell me about a good commercial service. There is another ground station that might be deployed in north east Alaska."

Comments

In Summary

[EndlessNameless]

Get Iridium for latency-sensitive traffic (if you have any) and a geosync provider for bandwidth, and then configure QoS on your router to meet your needs.

The cost of a decent router will be incremental compared to the dishes, and you gain a degree of redundancy. (Latency will go out of spec or bandwidth will be at capacity, depending on which link failed, but it is better than nothing. At least you can send an email explaining the situation.)

Re:There are none

[neorush]

I've been a satellite internet user for ~10 years, I have used both wildblue and hughesnet. The big problem for regular internet use is not latency, my current hughesnet connection:
Pinging google.com [173.194.33.4] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 173.194.33.4: bytes=32 time=775ms TTL=54
Reply from 173.194.33.4: bytes=32 time=1013ms TTL=54
Reply from 173.194.33.4: bytes=32 time=1108ms TTL=54
Reply from 173.194.33.4: bytes=32 time=1098ms TTL=54
Ping statistics for 173.194.33.4: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 775ms, Maximum = 1108ms, Average = 998ms
While this makes online gaming pretty much impossible, you can reasonably browse the web send emails, etc....though.

The REALLY BIG PROBLEM is bandwidth. I am on the most expensive package hughesnet provides...and that is 450MB a day. Which again is fine for checking email and 'normal' web browsing (according to hughesnet) but any kind of downloading, like for instance my new smartTV with built in YouTube and Netflix, yeah, useless. I switched from Wildblue to hughesnet a few years ago because wildblue uses a 30 day bandwidth total like most cell services, so if you use all 15GB of bandwidth in the first week, you have to wait until the end of the billing cycle to get more bandwidth. Hughesnet is a 24 hour cycle, so after 24hrs you get your 450 mb and are back to normal speed.
The other nice thing about hughesnet is they let you keep your previous days unused bandwidth, so if I do not use the internet for a day, the next day I will have 900mb of bandwidth to use, if I have 100mb left at the end of the day, I get 550mb the next day, etc...of course the "pool" maxes at 2 days worth of bandwidth. Both services also have a 2am to 7am unlimited bandwidth, the problem is it feels like the connection drops to a crawl during this time, and the normal 300 kb/s I would get during the day is more like 20 or 30kb/s. But at least I have my linux servers and windows updates scheduled to run during this time.
By the way, I live in NY, and there is not even cell service at my house. Currently it looks as if I will have satellite internet for the foreseeable future.