Why You Shouldn’t Buy Satellite Internet Service

October 23, 2008

If you live in a rural area, or just in a geographically isolated area near a major city, you probably don’t have access to broadband internet because cable companies don’t think it’s worthwhile to lay cable and phone companies don’t have DSL-capable switches near you. Chances are that at some point in the last couple of years you’ve received advertising in your mailbox from DISH Network or WildBlue or DirecTV or HughesNet advertising “satellite broadband” internet access. If you’re stuck on dialup, you may think that satellite will bring you into the modern age. Think again.

I’ve had satellite internet access since last September, and what I can tell you is that the service isn’t worth the money you’ll pay for it. First things first, the installation will cost you an arm and a leg if you don’t find a special that knocks that cost off your bill. DO NOT EVER pay out of pocket to install this service. The product you get in the end isn’t worth the monthly fee, let alone $600+ to put in the dish necessary to access it.

Second, if your installation is anything like mine was, you’ll have a barely functional retard doing the job. The “professional” who put the dish in at my house took 12 hours to complete the task, including a stellar job of burying the cable from the dish to my house under about 1/4″ of dirt that was quickly blown away by a light wind, exposing the bright orange cable in the yard. You’ll be told that you’re not allowed to touch any of the equipment in the event of any problems, lest you be charged for messing with the company’s property. That includes the cables going from the satellite dish to your house. Oh, and did I mention that any time one of the company’s “professionals” comes to your house, you’ll be charged for it? So you can’t touch your own equipment, but you have to pay for the approved people to touch it.

Third, get ready to pay far more for your service than any of your friends with regular broadband. We’re talking $60 and up – and that price is just for the lowest tier of service, which gives you the slowest speeds available on the network. If you want faster speeds, get ready to pay more like $70-100 per month. And even if you decide to pay more, don’t count on your speeds being constant. Oftentimes you’ll find yourself pining for the good old days of dialup, when things might have been slow but were at least consistent.

Fourth, you aren’t getting true broadband internet when you pay that much money. The speeds you’ll get are comparable to the lowest-level package of DSL that the phone companies sell to old people who don’t know anything about technology. Even watching a video on YouTube will be a pain in the ass for you because the buffering process won’t be able to keep up with the speed of what you want to watch. I suppose that if you’re really into honing your patience that could be a good thing, but otherwise there’s no upside; besides, a rock garden is a much better outlet for practicing Zen.

Fifth, get ready for a cap on how much you’re able to download each month. I recently saw complaints that Comcast was capping its cable broadband customers at 250 GB of data transfers per month; if you think that sucks, try 8 GB per month on the lowest-tier plan with your satellite service, and no more than 16 GB even if you purchase the highest tier. That means that if you like to do completely legal things like buy and download music from iTunes, or stream music from a service that you pay for like Rhapsody, or watch a lot of videos online (despite having to wait ages for them to buffer), sooner or later you’re going to run afoul of the terms of service and find yourself limited for the next month to speeds comparable to dialup. That’s the company’s way of punishing you for using more bandwidth than you need to “browse the web,” at least by their decade-old standards of what web browsing data transfer numbers look like.

Sixth, you’ll be locked into your contract for two years. If your contract is anything like ours, you’ll be asked to sign it after the installer has put in all the equipment but before he will leave your house. And again, if your installation was like ours, your contract will have a checkbox that say you agree to the terms and conditions of the contract – but the terms and conditions will only be accessible via the service’s website. So if you have no internet service and that’s why you’ve called them up to get the satellite connection, you’ll just have to trust that the company has no intention of screwing you over and put your John Hancock on the line. It’s a pressure sales tactic of the worst sort and no legitimate business would ask you to do such a thing.

Seventh, don’t expect the service to be remotely reliable. If there’s rain in your area, your connection will probably drop – even though your satellite television will still work just fine. And even when it isn’t raining in your area, it’s probably raining somewhere else in the country – including in the area over your gateway, which is where the satellite internet service provider’s land-based connection to the rest of the net resides. If you call the company and ask them for some sort of estimate of roughly how reliable you should expect your service to be and you get a genius on the other end of the line like I did, the company’s response is going to be something along the lines of “we can’t predict the weather.” (Apparently the folks who run these services also can’t understand probability.) Essentially, anytime it rains between you and the rest of the country, there’s a pretty good likelihood that your connection is going to drop.

Eighth, if you call the company and actually get someone useful on the other end, they’re going to tell you to call the company every time your internet service drops. Hopefully you don’t have a job, because you’ll be spending a lot of time on the phone with customer service; so often, in fact, that you’ll probably get to know the representatives well enough to be invited to their houses for birthdays and holidays.

Ninth, even when the connection doesn’t drop, don’t expect to do anything fun online. Your ping times – that is, the length of time it takes data to travel from your computer to the server with which you’re communicating – are going to be so outrageously high that you won’t be able to maintain a server connection for things like online gaming. So, no cool Xbox 360 multiplayer games or World of Warcraft on the PC for you! You won’t even be able to reliably do things like videochat with your family or play online poker, activities which aren’t nearly as stringent in their ping requirements as multiplayer games. Basically, you’ll be limited to surfing the web and checking your email – and even then, your web-browsing habits had better fit the company’s profile or you might run over your download cap.

Don’t be fooled by ads in your mailbox full of promises of blazing-fast internet service just like they have in the big city…or in the suburbs, or even in rural communities with nice, flat geography. Just say no to satellite-based ISPs! They don’t follow through on their claims and they’re more than happy to rake in your money every month without providing the service they promise. You’re better off sticking with your cheap dialup and keeping your fingers crossed that some land-based ISP will offer you a better option sometime in the near future.

The post Why You Shouldn’t Buy Satellite Internet Service by Jason Kirk, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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