Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Jeremy Portzer <jeremyp AT pobox.com>]

geschwin AT email.unc.edu wrote:
> Thank you all for your concern about my ability to browse from Africa. 
> Bandwidth indeed is an issue, as is a reliable connection. For times 
> when I do need to get to pages that are blocked using my primary ISP, I 
> have a backup account with a dial-up ISP (up to 33.6k only - they 
> haven't switched to this advanced 56k technology yet!) that doesn't 
> appear to have its IPs blacklisted. I am also considering dropping the 
> less than reliable DSL that I currently subscribe to and going with a 
> satellite ISP. I talked to a representative of the satellite ISP 
> yesterday and they offer a free one week trial membership for me to 
> test it out. I'm seriously thinking about giving that a try once I'm 
> back from vacation later this month. 

A free trial membership sounds like a great idea.  Keep in mind that 
despite good bandwidth, the latency of a satellite connection is very 
high.  Now, your latency on the DSL may not be ideal but satellite can 
have ping times of 800ms or higher.  I have done some remote support 
work on some servers in remote Alaska and it was *brutal* at 800ms RTT. 
 I was longing to be using a protocol like old-style telnet where you 
could set it up to echo characters locally instead of ssh which doesn't 
show your typing until the remote server sends it back.

--Jeremy