Wireless Internet Access For Farms

There are many advantages to living and working on a farm, but one of the disadvantages is that broadband Internet access is harder to come by. No, DSL and Cable broadband probably aren’t in your future. But there are options available at reasonable prices right now.

It’s true that DSL and Cable are popular with independent professionals, small businesses and home-based occupations. You get a decent amount of bandwidth at a reasonable cost. The one hitch is that these services are distance limited. DSL signals decrease rapidly as you get a mile to two from the telephone company central office. Cable is a wired service that goes only where the Cable company has decided that there is enough population density to justify stringing the coaxial cable. Unfortunately, those factors keep Cable and DSL within or close to the city limits.

What you really want are either line services that don’t have distance restrictions or wireless services that don’t require stringing or burying cable of any type. There are several options that meet this description.

First is T1. This is a telco digital line service first used between telephone company switching centers. The beauty of T1 is that it is designed to be provisioned on two pair of ordinary telephone wires, available just about everywhere. The second advantage is that it was designed to work with regenerator boxes that clean up and boost the signal so that it can go another mile. You can generally get T1 line service miles from the nearest town, although it gets more expensive as you get farther out in the country.

Second is satellite. Satellite broadband service comes from above and needs no wires. All it requires is AC power that can even come from a gas generator or solar panels and an inverter. Disadvantages include the need to get a professionally installed two-way satellite dish installed on your roof and a half-second or so of latency due to the long path up to the stationary satellite. For many email and Web uses, this slight delay from issuing a command to getting data back is no big deal.

A third option is wireless terrestrial Internet service. Many communities have WISPs or Wireless Internet Service Providers. These tend to be locally owned and have a very limited service area. More often than not, WISPs target rural subdivisions and small towns to get enough customers to justify the cost of the equipment and bandwidth.

One of the most exciting new services is fixed wireless or cellular broadband. This service uses the data channels that every cell phone carrier has available for mobile phones and laptop computers. Accel Networks is a leader in this field and has contracts with the major carriers (AT&T, Verizon and Sprint) to connect with their broadband data channels. By combining the coverage areas of multiple carriers, Accel can pretty much blanket the nation except for mountainous and remote areas of the West where there is no cell phone coverage. If you can get a decent cell phone signal, you can probably get fixed wireless service.

The way this works is that Accel Networks customizes their standard interface box and antenna to optimize the signal strength for your particular location. That gives you a really good chance of getting a solid signal that will deliver decent bandwidth. How much bandwidth? This service is competitive with T1 lines with a minimum rate of 750 Kbps download and 250 Kbps upload, bursting up to 1 Mbps on downloads. This is more than adequate for most farm uses, such as getting agriculture reports, using email, general Web surfing and even watching video clips. It’s not intended for high intensity usage like downloading HD movies or running a server.

What makes fixed wireless broadband service so popular in rural areas is that it is readily available and costs half the price of a T1 line or less. Is this the right service for your farm, ranch or rural business? Get pricing, availability and complete details on fixed wireless broadband now. Installation is fast, often within a matter of days.

Broadband Access Wireless Internet Providers

When we think of wireless Internet, the first thing that comes to mind is WiFi hotspots or 3G & 4G cellular broadband. It’s a mobile Internet technology, right? It is, but did you know that there are also wireless Internet services that are appropriate for fixed business locations like offices and retail stores?

One of the lowest cost wireless broadband services uses the same towers and resources that deliver broadband to your cell phone. Only this wireless service offered by Accel Networks is designed for fixed locations. What Accel has done is contract with major wireless carriers to use their bandwidth. By combining the coverage maps of several carriers, Accel can deliver 3G data rates to most locations that need it. You get similar bandwidth to a T1 line for about half the price. Installation is a matter of days, not weeks or months. Service reliability is 99.9% per the service level agreement.

Who is this service right for? It’s perfect for convenience stores, gas stations and other retail locations that need PCI compliant connection to process credit cards. Traditionally, these stores have ordered DSL, Cable broadband or satellite. When you are not on the path for wireline connections this wireless service can give you the bandwidth you need. You can even order it for temporary holiday locations, conventions and conferences, and construction sites.

Cellular broadband isn’t appropriate for applications where you need large amounts of continuous uploading and downloading. But there are fixed wireless services that are designed for just that. These are dedicated connections using directional antennas on special licensed frequencies for this service. The provider installs a small equipment and antenna box on the outside of your building and runs an Ethernet connection inside for your router. Dedicated fixed wireless can give you DS3 levels of bandwidth (45 Mbps) and replace bonded T1 lines and even lower speed fiber optic connections. The one kicker is that you need to be located near the carriers transmitting location, which is almost always downtown in a major metropolitan area.

Satellite is a two-way wireless service that has been popular with businesses that don’t need high bandwidth levels but do need connectivity in locations that have little to no wireline service and perhaps even no cellular service. These satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, just like the ones that deliver satellite TV service. The difference is that they are providing business broadband service. Satellite has the advantage that you can get service just about anywhere in the US where you have clear view of the southern sky and some way to provide electrical power. It doesn’t even have to be from the grid. Solar and batteries will work just fine.

Satellite and 3G cellular services are bandwidth limited and tend to have caps on the amount of data you can upload or download in a given period of time. They tend to have higher latency than wireline services. Geosynchronous satellites, especially, are unsuitable for such applications as VoIP telephony. But many businesses don’t need a broadband telephone service or video conferencing. What they do need is access to the Internet for email, credit card verification, viewing Web sites, using search engines, reporting inventory and ordering supplies, etc. These activities don’t require massive amounts of capacity or very high speeds.

If you have a business application that needs broadband access to the Internet but haven’t been able to find reasonably priced wireline services that meet your need, get prices and availability on broadband access wireless Internet providers that serve your business location.

Broadband Business Internet Service Options

Nearly every business today is connected to the Internet or soon will be. Even those mom and pop operations that still use the mechanical credit card machines will soon use electronic card verification, email and at least a brochure website. Businesses that are already seasoned users of the Web are looking to upgrade their bandwidth to support a move to cloud services. Let’s compare and contrast the various options you have for a broadband Internet connection.

Business Internet broadband services generally fall into two categories. They are shared and dedicated connections. Shared connections are similar in design to residential broadband services. The fact that the bandwidth is divvied up among many users lowers the cost for all. Dedicated services allocate a certain bandwidth to your connection and it does not vary regardless of what other users are doing. These services also tend to come with SLAs or Service Level Agreements that spell out technical parameters and availability commitments.

Shared bandwidth services include Cable Broadband, DSL, 3G and 4G Wireless, and two-way Satellite Internet. What they all have in common is that the actual bandwidth you’ll see varies with the number of other users and what they are doing. These services are sold as speeds “up to” a certain number of Mbps. That means what it says. You may get the full speed the connection is capable of or you may get a tenth of that at any given time.

These variations may or may not bother you. If you are running enterprise VoIP or bandwidth sensitive business processes, your variable connection may not support the performance you have in mind. On the other hand, if you use the Internet at work the same way you use it at home for email, Web browsing, or accessing pre-recorded audio and video, you may be quite satisfied with the service and delighted with the cost savings. Some services, like 3G wireless and Satellite are often used to support electronic credit card machines in lieu of using a phone line.

Dedicated Internet access connections, such as T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper, have rock solid bandwidth and generally excellent latency, jitter and packet loss characteristics. These are the same lines that you would use to interconnect business connections on a private line service. As Internet connections, they have one termination at your location and the other at your Internet service providers location.

Dedicated Internet access supports Web and email servers. The also support multiple users accessing the Internet and VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). If you are going to stream content to Internet users, you’ll want a DIA (Dedicated Internet Access) connection from the server to the Internet.

Ethernet over Copper (EoC) has become very popular as both a private line and DIA connection. You can often get twice the bandwidth you could with a T1 line costing the same price. Like T1, EoC is provisioned over twisted pair copper telco wiring to keep construction costs down.

Larger companies and those with demanding applications such as video transport move up to fiber optic services, such as OC3 to OC768 SONET and Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet, 1 Gbps GigE and 10 Gbps 10GigE bandwidth services. All of these are dedicated services with service level agreements.

How do you decide which broadband service is right for your business? Perhaps the best way is to compare prices, availability and features for the range of Broadband Business Internet Service options available for your location. Most business grade broadband services are available only for business locations and not residences, despite similarities with consumer Internet services.