'Tis generally more expensive than terrestrial broadband...also the ping is stupidly high, which will be a pain if you're a gamer, from what I've seen here in Ireland download limits and speeds are alot less as well. Try searching for wireless providors in your area....or even check out your mobile network, you can get pretty good 4g speeds in most places. I guess it depends where you're located though.
I think of the landline charge as like as an unavoidable road tax. You can't broadband without the landline charge but you can drive without paying road tax. Although sooner or later your car will be clamped! If you have a very good relationship with neighbours (who even knows them these days?) you could share a router and cost.
It bugs me that each individual living space (house, flat etc) is sold its own landline and router, when a block of apts or a street could easily share a connection and share the cost so that it becomes virtually free to each individual user. But that's not the most profitable way of providing internet (or tv for that matter - which could be distributed similarly). I hear something called the meshnet will be with us in the future, where myriad access points exists all around us and the concept of a single user-single isp will be history.
Thanks for the replies. Was mainly curious about outages. We have Sat TV and only get an outage during really bad weather, and it usu only lasts a short while. Was hoping an internet signal would be tougher for cloud cover to interrupt.
From what I've seen, the SAT ISP is more expensive in its own right, but actually cheaper when I dump the landline.
I'll have to look into how to channel a wireless signal to multiple devices (as many as 5 at a time, ugh)
i had sat internet for a few years. it was awful to be frank. it was very expensive and slow. we could not have netflix because if we went over a certain amount of data, they dropped us down to dial up speeds for the rest of the month. when we first go it, we hit that limit with about 45 mins of pandora radio. we had satellite tv as well, but through a different provider, and the sat internet went out much more often that the tv. the tv rarely went out whereas the net would go out if there was too many clouds in the sky.
i also ran into many issues with torn with satellite internet. supposedly the satellite internet would try to guess the pages before they loaded to cut down on data usage (it was explained to me once, but i dont remember the exact process). this used to lead to me being automatically traveled and double clicking on attacks, which would lead to tons of wasted energy.
like i said, i had satellite internet for maybe 3 years, simply because where i was living, we could not get cable or dsl. it was dreadful lol.
Thanks...they are definitely advertising a 'come-on' rate touting up/download speed...for a fixed amount of data transfer. After which like you said, the connection speed drops significantly.