Satellite internet work ok?

stick1977

stick1977

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I do support for a liquor store that's really struggling with connectivity issues. They have a T1 through Earthlink because no broadband is available but it's fine (when it's working) as bandwidth isn't a concern, credit card transactions don't require a wide pipe. However the network keeps going down and none of the Verizon/Earthlink cable techs can make it stable.

Has anyone had experience supporting a network using satellite internet? I'm in the northeast, is the connectivity stable even during winter storms? Anyone know any good satellite providers?
 
Can they get 3g? If so, look at 3gstore.com. Some of the cradlepoint routers they sale can automatically failover to 3g when the primary internet connection is down.
 
Several years ago for my home connection I had two options: satellite, or dial-up. The only good thing I can say about satellite is that it's better than dial-up. Slightly.

Stick with the T1, but get provider to fix the connectivity issues ASAP.
 
I have a customer using Exced (Wild Blue), 12mbps down and 3 up, actual speed test shows about 10 and 2 but thats better than dsl and most cable.
He does have outages in bad weather but never more than a few mins at a time. Also data caps to deal with.
 
If a cloud has water in it or something opaque gets between the dish and the satellite it can disconnect (ask anyone with Dish Network or DirectTV). Given the prevelance of cellphones these days, I'd talk to that Verizon guy and see if they can't offer some kind of 3G solution. Usually more stable.
 
I've never had a good experience with Satellite. One, it's a beast on your pocket book to even get set up, then a pretty high monthly bill. The service is mediocre at best (From what I've experienced). Connection drops are frequent and the speeds are worse than dial-up at times.

Most customers end up dropping them.
 
When I opened up my shop the only option was satellite. I went with Wild Blue and used it for 3+ years before DSL became available. Overall, I didn't have major issues with the service, but there are a few things to be aware of.

1. Latency. This actually was a major factor for both credit card transactions and e-mails. Because the signal goes 22000 miles to the satellite, and then 22000 miles back to ground, and the information takes the same route on the return, there is a delay that occurs. I would find that processing a credit card could literally take 1.5 - 2 minutes. I suspect it's because of the encryption, and I always wondered if they sent each digit, and waited for a reply before sending the next digit. My friend who owned the building used the connection as well, and for his work he would have literally 100 e-mail messages that might download in the morning. He found dial up would actually download them faster than satellite, again because of the latency.

2. Weather - we had very times when weather was actually was issue. Remember, though, that there are TWO places weather may create a problem. At your own location, and at the location of the ISP connection on the ground. There was one time we lost internet because of a hurricane or tropical storm down in the Texas area.

3. Everyone connection is different - my friend who owned the building ended up putting his own Wild Blue connection in at his house - about 500' behind the store. He never got a reliable connection from them.

4. Data Caps - watch out for the data caps issue. We had one time that we went over, and our speeds were throttled WAY back to dial up speeds for about 30 days. Their terms were written to look at a rolling average over 30 days, so on one day when for some reason we went WAY over, we dealt with it for 30 days.

I was quite happy when DSL came and I could finally ditch the satellite, but even that wasn't smooth going - they finally found there was a damaged section of the phone line about 1 mile from our store that was getting water into the line, which they had to repair.

Personally, I would not use satellite unless there were no other options.

Brian.
 
Consider a cellular connection, like a 4G MiFi router.
A true T-1 should have an SLA with it....Earthlink should be all over that to get it up within hours of it going down.
 
robert152 said:
I've never had a good experience with Satellite. One, it's a beast on your pocket book to even get set up, then a pretty high monthly bill. The service is mediocre at best (From what I've experienced). Connection drops are frequent and the speeds are worse than dial-up at times.

Most customers end up dropping them.
Click to expand...

This was my experience as well. If you go over your monthly bandwidth it takes about 30 days to get back to what you should have.
 
A few years back I had satellite at my house because it was the only alternative to dialup. On the first satellite setup I had, the uplink was actually via a dialup connection over a 56K modem, only the downlink was via satellite. They eventually moved to a 2-way satellite setup which eliminated the need for the dialup connection.

I dumped it as soon as there was an alternative in my area (still no cable or DSL) due to latency and data caps (referred to as FAP, "Fair Access Policy"). Weather wasn't an issue but I live in Calif so we don't have snow.

I currently have a wireless connection with no data cap, 4G cellular is available and faster in my area but, has fairly low data cap, usually around 5G/month.

The data cap is usually the limiting factor with cellular but if your customer can doesn't move a lot of data (usually takes something like streaming video to really chew up data) then it can be a viable solution.
 
Considering some credit card machines are 9600 baud modems (some years ago) I don't think your T1 is lacking in bandwidth to make the transaction. My university of 9,000 was run on a T1 from 1994-2004 and I had download speeds of 150KBps easily. A T1 is a 1.5 MBps connection both up and down, which is about 10,000 times more than you need for credit card transactions.

If this is soley for CC transactions, then find a carrier that offers over the phone card readers if cell phone coverage is bad.

Are you sure you are not thinking you have a ISDN connection? I can't believe that Earthlink would allow a T1 to have service that doesn't process a credit card. It's like $600 per month for what NetZero gives away for free.
 
tankman1989 said:
Considering some credit card machines are 9600 baud modems (some years ago) I don't think your T1 is lacking in bandwidth to make the transaction. My university of 9,000 was run on a T1 from 1994-2004 and I had download speeds of 150KBps easily. A T1 is a 1.5 MBps connection both up and down, which is about 10,000 times more than you need for credit card transactions.

If this is soley for CC transactions, then find a carrier that offers over the phone card readers if cell phone coverage is bad.

Are you sure you are not thinking you have a ISDN connection? I can't believe that Earthlink would allow a T1 to have service that doesn't process a credit card. It's like $600 per month for what NetZero gives away for free.
Click to expand...

It's for a whole network of computers including an office PC for emails and POS back office software which connects to the corporate SQL server over VPN. I only stressed the credit card transactions because that's the main problem when connectivity goes down. Back Office software, phones, email, all this stuff can be lived without but CC processing is essential and can never be down. When it goes down they have to break out the knuckle busters and transaction slips get lost. Everything is done over the T1 so when it goes down it's a big problem. Thanks to all the comments here I'm looking into 4G cellular from Sprint; it's a USB card that plugs into a bridge with IP passover which will be connected to the SonicWall and configured as a failover device. It'll only be failover so data caps aren't even much of a concern. Things are looking up!
 
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