Free the Net???

San Francisco's "Free the Net" program isn't working so well. It's supposed to blanket the whole city in Wi-Fi, but it's horribly slow and unreliable.

But luckily, most of my friends' apartments have wireless or at least a network cable i can use to stay connected on the go... which makes me wonder, how would you get on the internet in the middle of the desert?

Well, you'd need a satellite, and also a satellite internet provider... but there are some inherent problems with satellite communications... rain fade, where the signal gets beaten off it's path to your dish by shattering rainfall, or latency, which is a delay (of any duration) between the sender and the receiver of the satellite signal. Sure, 3 or 4 ms of latency is no big problem, but if you start having to wait 30 seconds to a minute for a page to load, that's going to sap your productivity. That's why a good satellite internet provider will make sure to use the highest-quality routers and connectors to keep latency at bay, and large satellite dishes to help diminish the effects of rain fade.