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Old 05-14-2004, 09:05 AM   #3
Undertoad
Radical Centrist
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Cottage of Prussia
Posts: 31,423
The reason satellite is never preferred is latency. For every link you click, that signal has to get into outer space and back at the minimum. It takes a long time for it to travel that far and so, in theory, while web pages may snap faster and certainly downloads would be faster, it will still be a worse internet experience than cable or, if even possible, DSL. You couldn't play highly interactive games at all over a satellite connection and something like telnet would be horrible.

Even the slowest DSL would be a better choice if that's offered. (It depends how many miles you are from the local telephone company's switch.) Try going to Earthlink and putting in your local phone number and they might tell you whether they can serve you and how fast the connection might be.

The last, and more expensive option is ISDN. Compared to dialup, 128K ISDN would be a dream to have. You'd still have to put off downloads for overnight, but the browsing experience would be happy.
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