Dropping My Satellite
For those of you who may not know, I live in the boonies as they say. Actually I don’t live THAT far from civilization but due to some hinkey rules around where the local DSL company will or will not run their lines I was forced to get HughesNet (aka DirectTV) for my high speed (yeah right!) Internet access when I built my house five years ago. Fast forward to today and once again my satellite is down and after two hours on the phone with the support group I find that unlike the last five times I had this issue and got my modem replaced, this time apparently the satellite transmitter has gone bad.
Ok I said how much, here is the fun part. $125 just to get the repair company to come look at it, then whatever the charge is for them to replace / repair the transmitter. The support person was nice enough to tell me it would probably be in the range of $400 - $500 for a new dish / transmitter. Then of course I am on the hook for another 24 months with them. Nope not this time.
So I was stuck trying to figure out the best way to get connected at a decent speed without breaking the bank. I could always put up the funds for a cellular card but I have multiple machines that need connectivity and none of them are laptops so that creates an issue. After looking at when I spend my time online, mostly post 7 pm local time during the week and all weekend it hit me, those times happen to coincide perfectly with my unlimited minutes on my cell phone. Whooo Hoo :). So a quick Google on how to get my cell phone and my Mac playing nice and I connected right up.
For those of you who have true high speed the speed will of course seem terribly slow but the service is dependable and you can’t beat the price. Now I am not saying drop your satellite for the cell phone but so far no complaints on my part and I am a $130+ a month richer 
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:54 pm
It makes you wonder why there are not more commercials pushing the profitability of satellite companies to investors.
March 5th, 2008 at 12:36 am
Unlimited cell phone minutes and unlimited data use are not the same thing. You better make sure you know what you’re doing before you end up with a multiple hundred dollar (if not thousand dollar) cell phone bill. They usually charge something crazy like $.10 per kilobyte. Even if you have a data plan for your phone connecting it via cable to a PC may be counted differently and actually cost you. Be careful, many people have been burned this way.
March 5th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Buck,
You are correct they are not the same. I have been testing this over the last few months (when bad weather made my satellite unusable) and luckily at least with my carrier it is seen as a regular phone call so it uses my minutes versus kilobyte usage.