I know I have joined quite a few folks on this forum who live in the sticks. After about 35 years in the LA area I bought a house in Warner Springs, California which is about 30 miles up the mountain from Temecula. After coming from LA where anything and everything concerning cable, fiber optic and all that is available, none of that is easily available here.

I want to talk about sat service. For years all I've heard about is HughesNet which is expensive, limited, requires a 5 year contract and is...expensive.

A new old service is now available called ViaSat/Excede. I don't know the history but if you do a search you'll find tons of posts/articles talking about how bad it is, worse than HughesNet. Not any more. Early this year they merged and put up more satellites. I didn't want to post this until I've had it at least a month and it's actually about six weeks.

They have several tiers, mine is the upper tier but not the top tier. I get 25mbs download speed and 60 gigs a month guaranteed to not get throttled down but it is an unlimited data plan, it's just if the network is busy I could get cut back after 60 gigs. It costs $71/month. I can check my account any time to see my usage and I've been averaging about 1.7 gigs a day. I watch a lot of Youtube vids, some streaming but not a whole lot and tons of regular online internet surfing, doing remote login's to my old office, efaxing, etc. So far 60 gigs is plenty.

Every few days I run Speedtest and I've always been between 25 and 30 down and 1-2 up. Surprisingly I've had only minor issues until today when a big thunder thumper was right on top of me for about 45 minutes pouring rain. Those will block sat services so I was offline for a while. ViaSat can be bundled with DirecTv which I also have and I have to say it's worked really well.

I live in a community with 332 homes and there are several folks here who've been using HughesNet for years and have been waiting for me to have this service long enough to say it's pretty good. After six weeks it's pretty good.

Bob

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