The Internet of Trees

Country living is great!  You can be as disconnected as you want.  However, if you want to be connected, it can be pricey (satellite) or miserably slow (dial-up).

I tried dial-up for a while but websites are too large for it now-a-days.  For example, I remember trying to login to any of my banks and the connection would time-out before I could login.

I tried Hughes Net for a while but it was so restricted (20MB/day!) that I couldn't do much before hitting the limit.

I gave up for some time but then Dish Network purchased Hughes Net and it is the best thing I have had thus far.  I have the top package they offer ($70/15GB/mo).  There is no daily cap thankfully.

The Good:

The speeds are similar to DSL (350K down / 140K up).  While most would consider this awful, relatively speaking; it is functional.

You get an additional 15GB/mo for off hours (2AM-8AM).  Great time for cron jobs!

There are no overage fees.  If you hit your limit(s) you get throttled down to dialup (or worse speeds).  I prefer that to automatically getting charged.

The Bad:

As I said, it is pricey at $70/15GB/mo with a Dish TV bundle.  ($50/10GB/mo - $40/5GB/mo)

If you hit your limit, you can pay an additional $10/1GB but that is steep.

The Ugly:

The biggest problem with satellite internet is the latency.  For example, I get between 700ms and 1s!  This makes anything interactive unusable.  VoIP is also out.  Forget online gaming (not that I really care for it).  VPN can be trying as well.

Summary

So there you have it.  Internet is available in the woods.  You just have to understand the quirks and limitations.  Be careful to not download something huge accidentally.  And make room in the budget.

I plan on writing a series of posts regarding some ways to help with satellite internet soon.

This blog

Since this is the first post, I thought it should be meta and introductory.

The blog purpose...

To talk about life in the woods and our little furry friends.  My wife and I will talk about other errata from vegan cooking to Linux server configurations.

About the blog website...

This was thrown together very quickly with blogger just to get something going.  The plan is to have four (at least) pages.

Home: this page will show all our blog posts without widgets in the order of newest to oldest

Hers: this will only have her posts and whatever widgets she wants.

His: same concept but laid out with widgets on the opposite side.

Gallery: this will be a film roll from her mainly.  She is the photographer; not I.

Fancy ideas I'd like to do:

Transitions with ajax or something where posts collapse and expand as the three main blog pages are selected.  (May require WordPress instead of blogger)

Posts transition left and right to allow for widgets to show up on his hers pages.