Cross Country Broadband

kryan1

Hey there. Has anyone any experience with a crowd that do satellite broadband. Only prob is it seems to keep your telephone tied up. but no download limits. start at 30euro a month, for a 256kbs basic package. so just wondering if anyone know anything about these guys or someone better. Here is this crowds website http://www.crosscountrybroadband.com
cheers
kevin

watty

If it uses phone it is just a download accellerator. several companies do real two satellite Internet for about 100 Euro a month.

No satellite package gives exactly real broadband, but some are at least BB speed except with bad ping times.

Cross Country Broadband is NOT a broadband package at all. You still pay for ISP/dialup charges and increasingly expensive line rental. It is the same service as SkyDSL (which is nothing to do with BskyB or DSL).

You would get better speed and save money cancelling phone and getting Wireless Internet @1Mbps about 22 Euro. Or if not available, true Satellite Internet (two way) for about 100 Euro a month.

See
http://mapviewer.broadband.gov.ie/ServiceByLocationSearchWF.aspx for locations See if any Wireless is available. Ring the suppliers too (Clearwire, IBB, Permanet, Lastmile, Digiweb etc) as the Wireless coverage gets out of date quickly.

Go here
http://www.broadband.gov.ie/List+all++Services/Home.htm
And select satellite. IGNORE ALL with 56K or 0 upload. Or that require a phone line These use phone line and are not real satellite Internet.


www.callcosts.ie for prices, motsly DSL.

thebman

I have SkyDSL and it is okay. For 30 Euro a month with SkyDSL you'll get 2Mbs and unlimited bandwidth. Most of what watty says is true about it though. It does tie up the dialup. We use Perlico 180 at about 30 Euro a month for dialup which gives 180 hours of 56K use with SkyDSL.

It is good for downloading files and speeds up browsing image heavy sites and thats about it. If you have any other alternative take it.

However it does have some nice features that remove the pain of using your 56K like if you can copy the URL of the download and then paste it into another program and tell it download it and then disconnect your 56K so your not connected on it when downloading the file which then come from the satellite.

You can also use their email service similarly where they will send the email to you automatically without you having to dial up.

You can also recieve some (poor selection) offline webpages where they transmit them to you via satellite without you being connected so you can view bbc.co.uk for example while not using your 56K line because it gets transmited to you overnight by the satellite and is kept on your hard drive.

One other nice feature is the proxy which allows you to cache images and video so if you were on a site recently, the images are kept on your HDD and you then just load the latest content. This makes browsing even on 56K a good bit faster because you don't have to load images once they are stored locally.

You should avoid if you can but I wouldn't call it a rip off. It is not proper broadband but is better than dialup especially if you download big files. I can easily get content from my friends by email that I wouldn't have been able to before.

The other problem is that really bad weather can effect it. You'll get pretty much the same from Cross Country Broadband I imagine as most satellite providers have the same services as they are all using the same satellite's and when I looked around, they all offered the offline pages etc... aswell.

watty

No SkyDSL is not a ripoff. The eircom line rental though is another story