Is it legal for me to have explained here?, and bank accounts? How to start? Can I move my existing business offshore

Thanks

EDIT: tethering only as option : another 30 Euros per month

USA is a sick country :D

A $2.00/GB overlimit fee is outrageous. If you plan to go over, you can buy one of their “bandwidth packs” in pre-set increments, but that pre-supposes you:

a) know you are going to go over before you do;
b) will consume all of that extra pack to avoid letting any go to waste from being unconsumed.

Anyway you look at it, that sunflower is going to cost you more than a dozen roses in other communities.

Lawrence Free-net is a wi-fi proposition at this point, which has been stuck with older technology and signal issues. It’s not really a comparable competitor in any meaningful way, at least until it can upgrade its technology. AT&T is currently deploying DSL in Lawrence, which is always dependent on distance from the central switching office (or remote equipment nearby).

If you sit around and read e-mail and look at web pages and do little more, any plan from any provider is going to be fine. If you start getting interested in transferring files or watching a lot of online video, Sunflower may be faster, but it’s a whole lot more restrictive and potentially obscenely expensive.

Comcast does not throttle speeds — they were slapped by the FCC for trying a few years ago. They have a 250GB maximum usage limit, and informally tell customers if they want more than that, buy a second account. Compared to the egregious pricing of Sunflower, that’s online nirvana.

I am sure any company will be friendly and responsive to a request to add gigabyte packs to your account, because they aren’t free. That’s money in their pocket.

Should AT&T bring U-verse to Lawrence, they’ll mow down the sunflower at current pricing and terms.

#1: Golde, CO
Comcast is what everyone uses. They’re relatively fast, reliable, a bit expensive and have a reasonable (250GB) cap. The competition is Qwest, significantly slower, cheaper and uncapped. Qwest may or may not give advertised speeds (or 85% of advertised speeds) depending on system loading; fortunately Comcast gives ‘em all the time. So while I’d like to do online backup (which would probably put me over my 250GB limit…I do my BitTorrent elsewhere) I’d much rather have 2 Mbit of upload speed vs. 700k, so I stick with Comcast. I recommended Qwest to friends who use BitTorrent and they’re fine with it.

#2 – Fredericksburg, TX
Most places can’t get DSL, and the places that can have one tier – 1.5/512 for $50 per month, minus 15% on speed due to ATM/etc. overhead. So if you’re in town and aren’t a cost-conscious business (cable business rates are e-freaking-xspensive) then you get Time Warner Cable. At the moment, speeds and pricing are decent (768/128 download/upload for $20, 5/384 for $35, 7/512 for $40, 15/2 for $5, top two tiers have download PowerBoost) however they could cap usage at any time and people would have nowhere to go. The only alternatives have lower caps than TWC has proposed (40GB on the top tier). The alternatives are as follows: local overloaded wireless rovider with 25 or 35 GB caps and low speeds, cellular broadband with decent speeds but 5GB caps, satellite internet with high latency, low speeds and caps topping out under 25GB.

Now I’m as much against disgustingly low bandwidth caps as the next guy, but Lawrence does have competition that’s not capped (AT&T DSL) and SFB’s overages, when purchased in blocks, aren’t too ridiculous (50¢ per GB when you buy a $25 addon).

Plus, 3GB is more than enough for operating system updates and such, plus light web surfing and e-mail, which that tier is made for. 15GB is enough for some more stuff. 50GB can even do online video in some capacity, etc. Though you have to remember that online video is a competitor to SFB’s cable TV service, so it’s in their interest to make all online video pay-per-view in some way or other.

As a bit of light at the end of the tunnel, AT&T will eventually launch U-Verse in most of their areas. Granted, they’ve tested caps as well, but AT&T’s caps top out at 150GB on U-Verse tiers, which is greatly preferable to 50GB on SUnflower Broadband. AT&T also has some decent speed tiers on U-Verse (12/1.5 Mbit/s or 18/1.5 iif you want to pay a little extra).

In short, if you have decent-speed uncapped competition and don’t like SUnflower Broadband’s caps, use the competition.

So far it hasn’t really bothered me that it’s a little slower.

When people take issue with capped plans I wonder where the issue lies. You need 250G in a month? So you can watch YouTube in Hi-Def? Hardly anything on there warrants that anyway. So you can torrent movies illegaly? Hardly a reason to demand uncapped plans. If illegal purposes are negated, how much bandwidth can someone actually need? The problem with uncapped plans is that people will simply grab everything and anything without cursory engagement as to whether its needed simply because ‘it’s free.’

As per the article, it’s an unsustainable model for everyone to simply expect – automagically – for bandwidth to increase since by its very nature there is no single owner for the internet and hence each company simply premises adequate bandwidth to support their needs as a given.

I probably download a gigabyte a day, mostly because of the video podcasts. Seems like a lot to some, maybe, but that may be less than the use of cable tv viewers. If you leave your tv on all the time, that has to eat up a lot of bandwidth. Given what I pay to Comcast, it seems I’m getting a good deal.

The limit Sunflower imposes means they’re stuck in the numbers from the dial-up days. Back when I had a phone modem, I could not conceive using 3 gb a month.

Anyway, I don’t want to rag on the local cable ISP, this guy’s blog post was more general then that, about bandwidth caps around the country…if they end up being a necessary evil, they should be set high enough that regular users don’t run into them (Comcast’s 250 GB limit sounds about right for now, or how about a sliding limit that is the 99th percentile of average users)

PS…I just checked Sunflower’s web site, and they bill extra bandwidth at $2.00 per gigabyte, not 25 cents … if it was really only 25 cents less people would complain for sure :-)

http://www.sunflowerbroadband.com/internet/

There is more to this story those of you who have lived somewhere besides Lawrence, KS might want to know. There are 3 providers here and Sunflower is the only one who meters. I had Sunflower’s mid-grade service ($29.95 for 7 Mbit with 15GB) and I hated the metering so I left and went to Lawrence Freenet ($23.98 mo. for 7 Mbit ) who competes against Sunflower as not having any overage charges. When Freenet’s service worked, my best speeds were 256k and average was 128k. I found out later Freenet was throttling my speeds until the end of the month whenever I hit 1 GB of transfer in a month. I left them and went to AT&T who speeds on their high-end service ($44.95 for 6 Mbit) were, on average, about half of what I had with Sunflower’s mid-grade service. I ended up back to Sunflower for better pricing and faster speed. I also forced myself to grow up and be responsible with my transfer habit. I monitor my usage on their website and if I have a heavy month of downloads or if I watch a lot of HD on my Macbook I email and have them add GBs to my account. They have never questioned me doing this and they are always friendly in their response.

I moved here from Chicago where I had Comcast’s unlimited, slow, expensive, throttled service. I have to say now that I prefer managing my usage and having Sunflower’s cheap, fast, metered service.