I work for and with rural telco and utitily companies on broadband deployments. I just got back moderating a panel on the future of wireless backhaul and all the attendees were rural telco or service operators.

In a nutshell, the cost of wire loops of cable from you to where the Internet goes might be a possible reason for slower speeds. Of course there are many factors, but you just want options right? The next concern would be the egress to the Internet from your telco. Those can be addressed as well if there is demand and available capacity to gain transit for subscribers like you.

Many of the other comments so far are correct in that there may be more than one way to get the bandwidth you seek. The challenge comes in when you are on the far end of a 12 mile road with no neighbors and the incumbent is a nameless, faceless, and decidedly non-community oriented corporation.

Let’s hope that isn’t your situation! :-)

Who is your local telco there?

I’d be happy to call on them and talk with their plant manager for you and report back findings.

-Jay

And yes, fixing anything in Alaska in the winter is an exercise in futility.

I took a look at Google Earth, and it seems that Fairbanks is your closest “city” and it’s kind of far, but maybe if a good connection is available in Fairbanks, and you could get a group together in Tok that would share a connection, you might have some success with that route. However, I can imagine fixing Tower #3 in an Alaskan February would not be fun.

I do remote support over the internet and connect to a client who has Satellite and the latency is deadly – seriously you could die while waiting for the screen to refresh or your mouse arrow to catch up to the mouse position.

I’m in the process of adding DSL to my second phone line and bonding the 2 DSL lines using MultiPPP (which my provider supports) to double my speed to 3mb.

You may want to consider this if you provider supports MultiPPP because you’d get double the allowance and double the speed for less than the business plan you quoted.

Also you might want to check your MTU settings as your down speed seems slow compared to your up speed – adjusting some settings may bring your speed up.

See http://www.dslreports.com/drtcp for an MTU tool and info

See fixppp.org for info on turning a consumer router into a MultiPPP router.

Good luck,
John

I tried a Verizon air card. That didn’t work. I am stuck with Hughes satellite and their Indian tech support.

Let’s hope Obama keeps his commitment to bring broad band to rural America.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/16/1442216

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/25/0229240

Off the top of my head, two thoughts come to mind:
1) Reduce your wasteful bandwidth use by running everything through a local proxy that aggressively caches (i.e. does not obey suggested lifetimes) on certain types of content, like images, static video, and other bandwidth hogs.
2) Setup a proxy server someplace with fast/cheap internet access that aggressively compresses the data on the client side (your side) of the proxy before it gets shoved down your slow pipe. Something on your end would need to decompress it. This requires hardware running someplace other than where you are.

Both of these ideas require a high level of technical know-how to get setup. However, considering your prices, it may be worth your while. You might also find a market for your solution in others in your area.

I also have an original iPhone, and the EDGE network on that is pretty widespread…not sure how that compares to their 3G network, but EDGE is definitely more prevalent than Sprint.

When I signed up for Sprint, last summer, there were no monthly limits. Now there are, I believe.

Monthly limits are lame, but I’m particularly surprised that your cable provider (assuming you had cable or DSL) in Anchorage had a limit. I’ve heard of limits in Australia and Europe, but in the 48 continentals, we don’t have limits on our monthly usage. As it should be.

On another note, is it just me or is “WebWorkerDaily” more like “WebWorkerHourly”. Too many puppies, says I before unsubscribing. :(

I use Verizon 3G. I’ve gone over the bandwidth limit several times, but they haven’t done anything about it. I’m very pleased with the service.