Wildblue Satellite Broadband Is it all its cracked up to be?

[Watermonkey 0]

I live in the sticks and I've got two options in my budget for internet service: Dial-up at about 24k or Satellite. I've looked at various satellite options and when Wildblue finally became available I hopped on board. Last month, probably because I was (and am) unemployed and spending a lot of time sitting in front of the computer, we blew right through the bandwidth usage limit on the lowest level package we were on so we had to upgrade to the middle package.

 

We have several issues with satellite in general: It's shared bandwidth so they've got limits per month on a rolling usage chart and with the middle package it's 12 MB per month. When it snows, the snow piles up on the antenna enough to actually bring the internet to a screeching halt until you go out and brush the snow off. Very annoying but it doesn't happen all that often. I put a plastic bag over the receiver at the end of the arm extending out from the dish so rain doesn't really bother it any more. Also, the satellite companies know they've got you, so they charge you big time. For $70/month we pay for 1Mps down and something like 256 or so up. And of course you get the limits on usage too. As a comparison if we lived in the closest town near the C.O., we'd be able to buy DSL from Qwest and get 1.5MB/s down and 512 up for about $34/month. Further more according to Toast.net where they tell me to go to test the speed, we rarely get their minimum speed of 700KB/s download(usually it's much slower, between 400 and 700k). The upload has been good for a while but there was a time where we've had very low upload speeds.

 

Anyone else have Wildblue and want to vent? On the plus side, they launched a satellite a month or two ago the size of a metro bus and it should be going in to service in February or March. That should improve their service, cross your fingers.