USVI-On-Line

Hello All!

This question is mainly for current residents. I have been looking into relocating to the USVI, but the nature of my job is rooted in providing technical support via IP Phone and having a solid internet connection to my office in San Antonio during work hours. One realtor told me that power outages were daily, and that internet connectivity was not reliable enough for that. Can anyone verify whether or not power outages really occur that often, or close to it, and possibly what a decent connection speed would be for "high speed internet" on St Thomas? Also, are internet connections fairly reliable, or are there regular outages as well? Thanks!

A Prospective Future Resident,

Josh

Josh: Your three options are DSL through Innovative (the slowest option), with about 500kbps download and ~50 Kbps upload, Wireless WIMAX through Choice at a nominal 1 or 3 Mbps download and ~100 Kbps upload, and BroadbandVI, with either 1Mbbs or 3Mbps download, and 512Kbps or 1Mbps upload. Choice is $45 or $57 a month, and BroadbandVI is $50 or $100 a month for its two plans. The Choice option can bog down substantially during at times, although they claim to be upgrading their network. BroadbandVI is very consistent at delivering what they promise, and generally crushes Choice in throughput in both directions. Both Choice and BroadbandVI require line of sight to a transmitter, so where you live matters a lot. The local AC power does go down from time to time, but hardly daily; I find it only an occasional irritation. Here are some web links:

http://www.broadband.vi/residential.php
http://vi.choice-wireless.com/en/intern ... -internet/#
http://www.innovativevi.net/internet/about-us

Hope this helps.

Kevin

Thanks for that! That helps a lot, I appreciate it! While that sounds more promising than what the realtor told me, it does make house-hunting for a good residential rental more challenging given that the connection speeds rely on wireless service, and my job definitely depends on a solid connection (it doesn't help that we have 3 dogs and a cat!). But the info you provided was very helpful! Thank you!

Are you a current resident, or former? I see your profile says you are in the US Northeast for your location...

Josh

Josh: Glad to be of help. The line of sight element of the wireless services can be tricky, depending on where you live. My wife and I own Coconuts, a rental villa on Gifft Hill with line of sight to the WIMAX tower in Redhook. We get down six to eight weeks a year. We switched from Innovative DSL to WIMAX when we were down early this month, but I then noticed that the speed varied a lot, depending on the time of day. We will probably switch again to BroadbandVI.

Kevin

I relocated to St Thomas and work mostly online. I can confirm the answers the other person gave you.

Power outages were usually brief, no more than a hour at the time and usually reflected work on a generator. You can buy a backup power unit, put it directly for your computer, and have up to 2 hours battery life during a outage. They can be purchase din St Thomas.

I also had an ATT air card and that was often a better connection than wifi. You will find that the service is too slow for streaming videos, etc.

Also note that the islands do not use daylight savings time so you will be one hour ahead of EST when it is over in the states.

A generator would take care of the time when power goes down.

Although we do have power outages, you can get around it by having a battery back up or a generator. If a lot of speed is important for the internet... well... we don't have a lot of that, but we do have options. I have the Choice MAX and I also have the Choice LITE services. The LITE service is pretty slow, but it almost never goes down where my MAX service does go down for 10-15 minutes sometimes several times a day.

I don't think any of this is going to be a problem though... three dogs and a cat!!! If you are planning on renting, that is going to be your real problem.

There is another forum that is a relocation forum that you may want to check out. A lot of people from STX on it, but there are also plenty from STT and STJ that frequent it. vimovingcenter.com