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Dennis wrote in a column back in July:
"Yes, it's true: for over 18 months I've been running this web site off nothing but a dial-up modem, and I can't take it anymore. It's not that I don't want broadband, but I've been unable to get the services I wanted. Though the small road on which I live is only 15 minutes from a major mall, the population of the road (about a mile long) is so low that Comcast won't string cable and BellSouth won't run DSL. So I'm biting the bullet and having satellite Internet access installed.....
Wish me luck."
Well, good luck, Dennis. I share your pain, and I'll be interested to read how you make out with HughesNet. I haven't yet seen any follow-up articles, and neither the search engine on the MacSimumNews site or Google turned up anything.
I don't like to complain. Having any Internet access is a lot better than no Internet access, which is what we had here until October, 31, 1997. However, living for nine years with a dial up connection that gives 26,400 bps throughput on a good day is getting more than a little old. Even the glacially slow speed would be more tolerable if it was dependable, but it isn't. Here in this neck of the woods (literal, and a LOT farther from Dennis Sellers' mile-long remove from modern alleged civilization) your connection will get dropped from time to time for no evident reason, or more often, the modem will seem to connect normally (?) But you just don't get anywhere, or a similar phenomenon will manifest stealthily after you've been on line for an hour to, when you notice that everything has gone static. Logging off and re-dialing will restore the usual sluggish performance, but it is maddening.
Calling the Internet service provider's tech support is essentially futile. The typical line is to try and blame your computer configuration, which I am 100 percent sure is not the issue in this case, since the exact same behavior manifests on several different computers running different operating systems. The second resort is to blame the phone company (in this instance, actually another division of the same company), which is probably an accurate deduction, but complaining to the phone company's tech support has proved equally unsatisfactory. The telco has on several occasions over the years dispatched service technicians out to test our line, which they consistently pronounce to be "better than average" for this area, which I don't doubt. Twice this summer, our next door neighbors have lost their phone service entirely for three or four days before repair personnel got around to driving out here to "fix" it.
The pleasures of rural living don't include access to first-rate utilities. My inference, tacitly confirmed by some of the service people I've talked to, is that the infrastructure equipment here is pretty old, borderline obsolete, and not in great condition, but the company is disinterested in upgrading it because of low client/subscriber density.
So why not get broadband? Because, as I am not infrequently obliged to explain to city folks, there isn't any. There's no cable TV or cable anything else here. The outer limits of DSL service (same ISP) are about ten miles distant in two directions. Actually, a fiber optics line carrying DSL to a more densely (so to speak) populated community ten miles away passes through here, visible from my living room window, but it's like can express train; it doesn't stop here. Tantalizingly, a fiber-optic spur was run from that line to our local switching station, about a kilometer from where I live, and has remained hanging in a coil from a utility pole for more than a year. However, the prospects of having it connected in the foreseeable future are slim, I'm told.
An article in yesterday's newspaper noted that there are still 79 communities in Nova Scotia representing 15 percent of the population with no broadband access. The provincial government has committed to complete coverage by 2010, and the telco is currently reviewing its expansion schedule for next year, but I'm not holding my breath.
According to a telco employee I spoke with off the record, extending DSL support to this community would require installation of new telephone switching equipment at a cost of about Can$180,000, and the number of potential subscribers makes that simply impossible to justify on any business model. With in the four kilometer radius that would be supported, there might be 25 households, not all of which own computers, and even some of the ones that do are not currently using the available dialup service.
Wireless isn't a viable alternative either. The nearest WiFi "hot spot" is about 50 miles distant, and even cell phone service in this area is pretty much limited to analog, for which you may have to climb a hill to get reception. This really is a "null zone," or almost, for electronic communications.
If you want more than one, or if you're lucky, two, a television channels here, the only recourse is to get a satellite dish, and by the same token, satellite Internet service is currently the one technically and logistically feasible broadband solution. The problem with satellite Internet is that it is astronomically expensive.
The local telco, Aliant, from whom I buy my dialup service, has recently introduced a satellite broadband service, but at suck-in-your-breath prices, and it's not as fast as DSL.
The basic monthly service fee of Can$59.95 for 512 Kbps downoload/128 Kbps upload is substantially higher than what they charge for DSL where it's available. Still, being heavily dependent on the Internet in connection with my livelihood as a writer and editor, I would probably be inclined to grit my teeth and fork over the 60 bucks a month (plus 14% sales tax) in order to save myself an hour or two of "world wide wait" each day. Unfortunately, that 60 bucks is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Equipment & installation fees, including the necessary satellite dish, modem and "professional installation" are the real killer. With a one year contract, they will set you back a cool Can$999.00 up front, or Can$93.50 per month in addition to the basic service fee over a 12-month contract. If you sign up for a three-year contract, the cost is a Can$599.00 lump sum in advance, or Can$23.00 over and above the service fee for 36 months.
With the 12-month contract and paying the lump sum equipment/installation fee up front, the damages, with tax, come to Can$1,958.98, or Can$163.25 per month.
With the three-year contract, the grand total with tax is Can$3,143.21, or a somewhat more reasonable(!?) $87.31 per month. They do tell me that if DSL becomes available locally within the contract period, I would be able to switch to the lower-cost service with no cancellation penalty.
Canadian HughesNet distributor Galaxy Broadband, has a Can$69.99 per month package, which is more than twice what I pay for dialup and a lot more than the Can$40-$50 monthly cost of DSL were it available.
As with Aliant's satellite service, the monthly fee does not include the cost of the satellite dish and modem plus installation, which are estimated on the company's Web site at Can$300-$500. Since I live in the outer boonies, more than one hundred miles from the nearest Galaxy installer franchisee, I'm guessing the upper number. Then there's the Can$49.95 one time connection fee. Note well that since I live in Nova Scotia with the wonderful Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), all of these figures are taxable at an additional 14 percent.
But we're not finished yet. A satellite Internet transceiver is a radio transmitter, and thus must be licensed with Industry Canada at an annual fee of Can$75.00.
Are we done paying now? Not necessarily. That $69.95 "monthly" fee is contingent upon your signing a 24-month service contract, with a cancellation clause that obliges you to pay a penalty of either Can$550.00 or the remainder of the contract, whichever is less, for early termination of the service. You can also opt for a nominal Can$79.95 monthly fee with a Can$450.00 cancellation penalty on a twelve-month service contract.
So, once you tally up all of these sundry charges and average them out over a 24 month contract. (Including HST but excluding any early termination fees), you get a grand total of Can$2691.15, or a whopping Can$112.13 per month - more than three times what I'm paying now for dialup service, or about two and a half times what DSL broadband costs ten miles up the road. There's no way I can reasonably justify spending that much for Internet access, even if it did save me a couple hours a day waiting around. Concededly, I would still have some equity, of sorts, in the satellite dish and modem at the end of the period, but I doubt if there is much of a market for that sort of used electronic equipment, since one is legally required to have it installed by licensed installers who have a vested interest in selling new equipment.
Then there's another player, Explornet, whose "KaZam" satellite broadband package supports download speeds up to 512 Kbps and includes five email accounts for a service fee of $54.99 per month.
Explornet's equipment fee is a somewhat more reasonable Can$399.00 if you sign up for a minimum two - year contract, and installation is extra. Not counting installation, which I would guess at a couple of hundred bucks in this neck of the woods, the total for two years including tax would come to Can$1,959.39, or $81.64 per month, or probably closer to Aliant's $87.31 once the installation fee is factored in, but you're getting that rate with a two-year rather then a three-year contract, so advantage Explornet on price, but still rich for my wallet, and no bail-out clause if DSL becomes available. I also have a resistance to locking into multi-year contracts.
Hmmm. Maybe dialup, slow and aggravating as it is, isn't so bad after all? Uh.... wishful thinking. It's a constant frustration. Web pages are slow to load, and downloads take forever, with anything over about 60 MB borderline impractical. You're essentially locked out of streamed content, audio or video. At least email, which is one of the main things I use the Internet for, works pretty well on dialup, and however fast a connection you have, a lot of your online time is spent reading, which is no faster with broadband than it is with dialup.
I would love to have a fast Internet connection, but there's definitely a limit to what I'm willing to pay for it, and satellite Internet exceeds that threshold by several magnitudes.
There is one other option that might help, at least a little. My ISP, Aliant, offers a "Dial-up Accelerator" that the company claims can speed things up by a factor of "up to" 19x compared with a 56K modem, through "proprietary text and image compression, content caching and other network optimizations". However, it only works with Website loads, email downloads, and such, and will not speed up software or music downloads or streamed media content. It also doesn't help with secure pages, such as those used for online banking and credit card forms, so it's no big whoop. It does, however, support the Mac, with minimum system requirements being:
• OS X 10.2 or later
• PowerPC G3 processor at 333MHz
The cost is Can$4.95 extra per month, so I'm intrigued, although also skeptical, since I figure the main bottleneck is the crappy telephone lines between here and the switching substation 10 miles away where fiber optics begin. Even 56k modem speeds would be a big improvement, being twice what I'm able to get right now. Maybe I'll give it a try. At least there's no long-term contract.
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Charles W. Moore
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