Internet Access on St John

We live on STT and have been telecommuting since 1995. If speed is a concern, then your best bet is BroadbandVI, formerly known as Ackley. Their service requires line-of-sight to one of their towers, something you need to be cognizant of when looking at rentals. Their cost for residential service is $99/month; their business rates are substantially higher. Their service is the most reliable and their speed is the best of the available services, though their speed is not the same as high speed stateside.

For reliability, your best bet is satellite, which you can get almost anywhere you live on the island. Contact Sloop Jones (sloopjones.com), who recently took over the franchise on STJ -- don't know the name of that business, but his art site contact will work. Installation starts at around $1200, monthly fees in the $100 range for fast data.

As a backup, get an aircard (this will let you connect on the beach!!). AT&T and Sprint work with varying degrees of success on much of the island (western end/south side especially). Price depends on your contract.

I have DSL through Innovative ($100/mo), which is quite good on speed, but I'm leery of its reliability -- so far so good, but time will tell.

Free WiFi you can get at the Tap Room, Quiet Mon, and Compass Rose/Pastory Gardens. You can also buy Internet time on machines at Connections ($10/hr) or Deli Grotto ($8/hr).

More frequent than Internet outages, in my experience, are power outages. If it's critical that you be online at all times, you will need a serious UPS backup unit that allows you enough time to power up a generator (if your house doesn't have one, you will need it). Or, you'll need to be prepared to run into Cruz Bay (power is more stable there due to island generator backups usually available) to connect there when the power goes out. Your drive time will determine your downtime.

St. John isn't quite "there" for easy telecommuting -- right now it still takes a bunch of $$$ to ensure constant connectivity -- but it's feasible.

Also, make sure your company is OK with forwarding your work phone to a VI phone number (don't rely on cellular; too dicey) -- some long-distance plans consider VI calls "international", increasing the expense.

Good luck! If you decide to make the move, let us know how it turns out.

I agree, you'll need a serious UPS backup and generator. We have both and they are used frequently!

Sounds like DSL or an Aircard is probably the best option for what I need/could afford.

Don't need to be online all the time, just need to be able to put in 30-40 hours worth of work a week, sounds like the boss will be pretty flexible about my schedule in terms of when I am actually working.

How frequent are power outages? Like are we talking everyday or what?

Thanks for the tips and I will let you know how it works out for me -
Curious to hear what you guys do as well

Matt

Outages: sometimes every day. Sometimes not. Sometimes there will be power somewhere else on the island when yours goes out. Sometimes not. On the south shore, we just made it through all those days of heavy rains without losing power once (it did flicker, late last night), and our phone lines stayed up, too. That was nothing short of a miracle.

If you've got a flexible schedule, you should be in good shape. My work demands that I be connected during certain hours, so I have to invest more in backup systems and services than you would.

Good luck with the move!

Get satellite internet as a last resort. We had HughesNet for 3 years, and it got slower every month, presumably because of shared bandwidth with other customers. We finally gave up and got Broadband VI this year. I can tolerate their occasional outages in exchange for much faster response the rest of the time, vs. satellite. This is on STX.

I have had Direcway Satelitte Internet (Hughesnet) since 2004. I have not experienced any slowdown of transmit or receive. I check my speed regularly. It is always about 900 down and 200 up, which is the max speed for the service plan i am on.

Perhaps STXBob had a bad installer? or his dish moved? or a defective piece of equipment?

Over here on STJ, the biggest compliant people have is about service interruption. I hear people complaining all the time about Surf Coral Bay Choice and VIPowernet.

The only time my satellite service goes down is when we torrential rains.

WeBDey

We and our neighbors had HughesNet (separate installations), and we had similar slow service. It didn't matter which computer or which house, it was slow. If it was isolated to us, good. I hope everybody else has good experiences with them.

One more issue with HughesNet is their FAP (Fair Access Protocol). If you exceed a certain download rate (like 100Mb in 24 hours or something, which varies by service level), they choke you down to sub-dial-up speed for 24 hours. At that point, you may as well shut off your computer and go do some gardening. 100Mb is a lot, but I would occasionally exceed it when downloading big software packages. If you like movies, photos, audio files, etc., you may run into the same problem.

I have only been fapped once in 4 years. My daily download limit is 325MB. The FAP limit is determined by the service level you choose. I agree this can be a problem. There is no FAP btw. 3AM and 6AM, so I schedule large files for then. Latency is another problem, so VIOP has a delay.

When Hughesnet first started to appear here, there were a number of vendors. I have spoken to people on ST.John who had their install done by a different vendor than mine, and they had slow speed complaints too. On the other hand, people who used my vendor (Telcom, STT)are generally happy. Telcom is no longer in business. Sloop Jones has taken over the Hughesnet franchise for STT and SJ.

WeBDey