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Where I live, I cannot get DSL, and the available land line dial-up is ridiculously slow--usually about 9kbs. So we tried satellite internet for several years. It was OK, but not that fast, expensive to buy the equipment and get started, and expensive every month. And when something went bad with the satellite, the system would not work for a couple of months and we wondered if it ever would work again. And it often would not work if it was stormy and every time it snowed wet, sticky snow, I had to clean off the dish to get it working again. So when we heard about a local microwave based system from a mountain 5 to 10 miles from here, we checked into it. It cost about $10 more per month, but we did not have to buy the equipment. For $200, we were up and running, and they even got our wireless home network going, which we could not figure out with the satellite system. And best of all, the system is lightning fast and much faster than the satellite system ever was. We get almost instantaneous downloads! In the year we have had it, it only went down once, when there was a widespread power outage that affected the mountain where the tower is. Weather does not seem to affect the performance a bit. In short, we are very pleased with the wireless, microwave system. For the system we are on, you have to have a line-of-sight clear path between the tower and the receiver dish, which we mounted on our deck. Many of our neighbors have also signed up with this service. Some of them have had to cut down trees to be able to clear the sight path to the tower from their location. I don't have real experience with DSL, but people I know that have it like it just fine. It probably is less trouble to hook up to than the wireless system, but if your available wireless system is similar to ours, I think you will like either one. We kept our telephone land line, even though each of our family members has cell phones. That way people we know can still reach us, even if they don't know our cell numbers. In our area, I think that if you call 911 from a cell phone, the officials can still tell where you are calling from, but this technology might not be everywhere. Good luck, I bet you will love the speed of your new system.
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