My mother in law has had a stroke and the family is working out how to get her home and roster ourselves to look after her. Having basic broadband suddenly becomes important so the family can be with her for reasonable periods of time while still staying in touch with all their responsibilities in town.
Our options are Satellite and ADSL (RBI not available in our area on Auckland's west coast).
ADSL is on a waiting list and we are hearing stories of 1 year waiting lists (as well as lots of problems with relaibility, cabinet needing to be rebooted, not to mention the farmhouse is a looong way from the cabinet, as well as the basic phone (POTS) having outages reasonably regularly).
So satellite seems to have the benefit of being reasonably quick to install, and offers some redundancy in terms of communications if the phone line is out of action (if it isn't raining too hard).
The consistent feedback from locals is that rain fade is a real problem.
- Is that to be expected or is it poor installation ?
- Can it be improved with a bigger dish (I see WirelessNation promotes a bigger dish) ?
- Should we just go with wireless nation and pay a bit more ?
We think we understand all the other issues in terms of low data caps, latency etc but figure we can live with those, as well as the cost, but we do want to know that it will work consistently.
Love to hear from anyone who knows
