Re: Firefox Tool Bar gone...

["Douglas Handy" <dhandy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dan,

Double ouch.  And is satellite still only one-way  (download)?  So, you're
> still using a phone line anyway?


You can get 2-way satellite and eliminate the phone line.  But you have
pretty high latency (which is bad for things like emulation sessions) and
back when I used satellite due to no other choices, it didn't take much rain
to knock out my signal.  It was better than dial-up for sure, but was pretty
lousy service for what it cost me.  Perhaps things are better now.

However, I can now get both cable and DSL, so I have both.  I have a 6Mbps
DSL connection with static IP, and a 7Mbps cable connection with dynamic
IP.  I have both for high availability and used to use a dual WAN router to
share the load or auto-fallover.  But I haven't found a dual WAN router I
really like yet.

So instead I'm running off just one WAN connection with the other as a hot
spare.  Then because one of my sons lives outside both the DSL and cable
service areas (unless he pays thousands to have the cable strung....), I
setup a wireless link between our places and let him use my other
connection.

I pay for two connections; two households get service; and I have a hot
spare should my service go down.  They aren't out a customer by me doing
this -- he tried to get them to sell him service!  We're only 1 1/3 miles
apart, so would have been a piece of cake except for the foilage between
us.  So we had to go with 900MHz gear made for WISP usage to penetrate the
trees, and I can only get him a 4Mbps download speed.  But his dialup could
only connect at 20-22kbps normally -- never anywhere close to 50k -- and
ping times between us are about 11ms so needless to say it sure beats
satellite service....

Doug