I have been experiencing erratic internet service at the park lately, culminating in four straight days of downtime. I have been in withdrawal pains! I looked at satellite services again. Maxwell sells a tripod system for $1650 with decent service for $70/month. Unfortunately, if you scan the forums, you can find some vitriolic rants about HughesNet's poor customer service and deliberately obscure bandwidth controls. StarBand and WildBlue are smaller companies, so you don't see the same volume of complaints, but they also have constraints. The whole industry is really annoying and has little incentive to improve. I just cannot see signing a long term contract with people like that.
So I went with a more competitive arena. Sprint's EVDO map now claims EVDO Revision A coverage in the areas south of Houston where I have been working. I stopped at a Sprint store this afternoon, bought an AC595U USB card for $100, and signed up for their "unlimited" usage plan for $60/month. It took a couple of tries to get going. Even though it is Mac-compatible, the included CD only carries the Windows software. You have to download the Mac software from the internet. "What? If I had internet service, I wouldn't have bought ... Hey, look at that. The park wireless is working today!" So I downloaded the software which turned out to be a lightweight version of the Windows bloatware (I assume) and cranked it up.
You have to fill out three fields to activate the card. The salesman had given me the information, so I did it, but it took five tries! Every time I started the activation sequence, the dialog box would disappear before I completed the data entry and the status panel would show the card had disconnected and it was trying to reconnect. That finally worked and then I had to run the Data Provisioning routine. Again, the device kept disconnecting before it could really get going.
Then I noticed a little black square in the box: it was a lithium polymer battery. Once I put the battery into the modem, it started keeping its connection. Perhaps the USB port power needs an occasional battery boost?
The service varies depending on where I am standing. In some places I get weak-signal EVDO Revision A. In other places I get 1xRTT. EVDO is not quite as good as DSL/cable, but it is better than dialup. The 1xRTT is like slow dialup, perhaps 28K. Still, even the slow version will stave off the internet-deprivation DTs I guess.
I took the unlimited plan and I am glad I did. Sprint's low-end plan is 40MB for $40/month and $0.001/KB after that. I have burned through over 6MB in the first night and I haven't even started a Usenet reader. That was all e-mail and webcomics!