Thank you to everyone who contributed to my questions about Internet service during the past week.

The following is my summation of the info that was contributed as well as more questions. Please correct my mistakes.

OPTIONS FOR INTERNET SERVICE ON THE ISLAND:
1. DSL thru BTL/Coral Cable
2. Satellite thru HughesNet and iDirect
MirrorNet is not currently available in SP but may be a great provider when available

INTERNET SPEED:
DSL (esp. business-level service) is faster than satellite

DEPENDABILITY OF SERVICE:
Satellite is more dependable than DSL

MONTHLY COST OF SERVICE:
Satellite is more expensive than DSL?

INITIAL SETUP COSTS OF INTERNET SERVICE FOR A NONRESIDENT:
DSL is more expensive than satellite?

VOIP:
1. Options for VoIP are Skype and Vonage
2. BTL blocks Internet service of its own DSL customers if they are using VoIP?
3. AnchorFree Hotspot Shield may or may not protect VoIP users who get their Internet service from BTL
4. VoIP can be used with satellite without interference from BTL

ELECTRICAL OUTAGES:
Electrical outages occur weekly? monthly? during hurricane season only?
Do the longest electricity outages last a few hours? a few days?
To work during electrical outages, I will need:
1. A mobile generator and/or
2. Some 12V or 6V batteries connected in series charged by an old UPS or charged by Pedro2's Land Rover :o)

PROTECTION FOR A DESKTOP COMPUTER:
To protect all computer-related equipment when the power is flashing off and on, I will need something like:
1. Belkin 1100VA Enterprise Series:
http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=171958
2. APC Back-UPS RS:
http://www.apc.com/products/family/index.cfm?id=23

For my needs, speed is not as important as service for 6+ hours per day.

Here's a few corrections that I can make:



DSL is through BTL. Coral Cable uses internet delivered over the cable lines.

Coral Cable buys it's service through BTL. For some reason, BTL directly via DSL is more stable than BTL via Coral Cable, but both suffer the BTL blockage of some services.



Actually, Satellite is probably more expensive than DSL, unless you don't have phone lines (or cable lines if cable) running near your residence.



1. There are tons of options. The trick is what tech are they using. Services like Vonage and Packet8 use an open standard called SIP. SIP is easy to block unless ran over a VPN. Skype uses a proprietary protocol that is tougher to block, but BTL seems to have figured out how to do it well enough. Other options using various standard and proprietary protocols are Google Talk, Lingo, ViaTalk, Gizmo, iChat, Jajah, ooVoo, SightSpeed, VoipBuster and tons of others. Google is your friend there.

2. Yes... and of Coral's users too.

3. There are tons of these vpn services out there. Some get more mileage than others. A great alternative is find a friend in the states that has high speed internet and who is willing to run the premium version of Hamachi. You can then configure Skype to call via Hamachi through your friend's computer. What is great about this option is that you are the only computer connecting through your friend. This means that it's much less likely to be caught by BTL as a popular vpn solution.

4. Satellite internet has a very high latency which makes it almost unusable for streaming tcp delivery protocols which are used in VOIP and Gaming. If the voip uses UDP instead of TCP then it has a better shot of getting around the problem, but packet loss is an issue and since UDP is not guaranteed delivery, a lot of resends are required and latency comes into play there too. Basically, it's not usually a good option.

The tech used in the iDirect sattelite service is a ton better than the Hughes service as it was built specifically for network packet delivery instead of piggybacking network traffic on what was originally intended to be tv signals (like Hughes does). Even with the advancements in tech, you still get a minimum of about 700ms latency on iDirect, and that is just to the internet. You then have the latency of getting to the destination machine through the internet. Once you start approaching 750ms to 1000ms latency, your VOIP service is going to be completely unusable. iDirect does advertise their service as VOIP friendly, but honestly, satellite signals have to go a long ass way and energy waves only travel so fast. It will always have huge latency.

The other downside to iDirect is that they have usage caps each month. If you surpass the amount alloted in your plan, they either slow down your service to crawl speeds or charge you 10 cents US per MB.

But to your point, it can be used within those limitations without BTL even knowing you exist.