When I visit my mom, I normally end up on a regular phone line / modem connection ... not sure what the effective speed is, but probably < 40 Kbps ... which used to seem pretty normal, but is hard to handle now. Recently a group of communities got together and put up some dishes in the middle of their various valleys, then you put a dish on your house and aim it at the nearest central one (every couple of kilometer area needs a new main dish due to all the mountains in her area). You end up with 'high speed' ... but I think we are still talking maybe a few hundred kbps after all the transmission hops. More fun is when a snow storm hits, like it did on my last trip there, and the dishes get knocked out of alignment Smiley

We had to wait for a guy to drive his little 4x4 ATV out to the central dish and realign it.