In the mean time, I've settled on two-way satellite for Internet access. The good news is that that bandwidth is quite decent. I get about 128k upstream on file transfers, and about 512k downstream. The bad news is that every packet has to travel 44,000 miles to get to me (22,000 miles up to the satellite, and then back down). I get the latency to go with this (ping times of 1.5 to 3 seconds).

Starband uses a proprietary, non-TCP/IP technology from Deterministic Networks to massively multiplex transfers and maximize bandwidth. That's fine, but it saddles me with Windows 2000 rather than Linux as the operating system for my gateway machine.

Since we're having a new house put in, I'm taking this opportunity to reconfigure the home network. The new home LAN is mostly wireless, so that I won't have to drill holes and lay cable. Besides, wireless is just cooler.

The core of my wireless setup comes from Linksys, mainly a G54 Wireless Hub. I have a laptop that uses an Orinoco PCMCIA card to connect, a desktop with an ISA board that creates a PCMCIA slot that uses another Orinoco card to connect, and a desktop Linux machine that does regular ethernet to a Linksys WAP11 in client mode (so that I don't have to hassle with finding a PCI wireless card with decent Linux support). Then I have a couple of machines, mostly for file backup and the like, that are land-lined into the network. The whole setup looks something like this: