USVI-On-Line

We live in rural Wisconsin. We have very limited options as far as internet providers. The ones we currently have available are:

Hughesnet: Max Download/Upload Speed*1.0 Mbps/128 Kbps $60/month $250 set up fee (24 hr threshold of 200MB download)

WildBlue: Download 512kbps, Upload 128kbps $50/month $225 set up fee (30 day threshold of 7500MB download, 2300MB upload)

US Cellular tethering w/blackberry: $40/mo 5GB(I think gong on memory of phone conversation) 5GB monthly threshold for downloads.

Have you used any of these services? If yes, what was your experience like? Do you know of any others?

Weird situation, when we first moved to our current house high speed internet was not available, even though we don't live in a rural area AT ALL.

Anyway we went with the directv version of satellite internet at the time. I think its the wildblue in the list here.

My hubby talked them into free install (he does that all the time, just kept calling back till he got someone who would do it - but that was years ago) and it ran us about $70/month.

It was very reliable unless we had a really heavy snow that blocked the satellite or extremely stormy weather.

MIL lives in northern New York; she has Wildblue. It's a lot better than dial-up, that's for sure; however, their customer service doesn't seem to be all that great.

Out here, they ran cable to within a mile of my house and stopped. When I called RoadRunner (time warner) for High Speed internet, they said sure, but it will cost $18,000 to run the cable to my house . I constantly get mailings from verizon for DSL, but it's not offered in my area. (Dear Verizon: Stop mailing "invitations" to folks in areas that don't get your DSL service. You'll probably save millions and spare thousands of trees)

Sorry, I digress. We started getting WildBlue service about 7 years ago. It's much better than dial-up which was abysmal, but still is wicked slow at times. I've literally fallen asleep waiting for a travelocity page to load.

I may try the verizon wireless internet, but things get pricey fast if you go over the 5 gig limit.