If you have a business, it does not really matter if the the business is an office, store or you are working out of your home you really need to have internet access and that access pretty much must be something other than dial up. I know there are large areas of the country particularly rural areas where high speed internet access is just not available and dial up may be the only choice. Or is it?? Here are the options.

There are two basic ways you can get to the internet from your business be it an office, store or your home. The first is DSL; this service comes from your telephone company. Actually I should say your wired (landline) telephone company. The phone companies are continuing to extend the “reach” of DSL, in other words making it available further and further away from the towns or cities. Even if you have checked with your phone company in the past to see if DSL is available and you have been told it is not, keep checking with them. Call your phone companies DSL provider number and continue to call. Ask if DSL is available and when might it become available. Get people living or working close to you to do the same thing. Numbers matter, if the phone company is aware that there are a number of people in an area wanting DSL they will “upgrade” those areas that will bring them the most new business first.

DSL has a serious limitation it can be only a certain distance – a few miles – from the DSL equipment. We had and still have that situation where I live. The people at the very tiny town of Oxford could get DSL the people living 2-3 miles away could not. We actually got together and kept calling AT&T our local phone company, asking about DSL. On each call we each told the DSL people that there were at least 30 people in our immediate area who would buy DSL service today if AT&T would make it available. It took a couple of years but finally AT&T did upgrade their equipment and they did make DSL available in my rural area. (they got 45 new customers within days after the upgrade) There are however people on up the road (further away from the phone company equipment) that are still too far away and they cannot get DSL.

The phone company just recently put in a new underground phone cable on up the road and so once they connect the new lines those neighbors will also get DSL access. With DSL the physical phone lines must be there and they must be able to handle DSL. Old phone lines often will not work.

The next option for high speed internet access is cable. If you live in an area where cable TV is available the chances are High Speed Internet is available from your cable TV company. Of course in most cases if you have high speed internet available from your local cable TV provider you will also have High Speed internet available from you phone company via DSL.

In this case you will have two choices – DSL and Cable TV to give you High Speed access. Ask your neighbors what they use for internet access and what they think of the services provided. While Cable TV access is in general faster than DSL, it does you no good if your cable company is in the habit of not fixing a cable outage quickly. (phone companies can do this also – take a day or two to fix the phone if it goes out) The thing to know is that with most Cable and Phone companies you will sign a contract for internet service and that means you are stuck with with you get for a certain time period and that time period is often two years. Before you sign for internet access make sure you know what is in the contract. How much will it cost, what services are provided, how reliable is the service and the company. There is nothing more painful than high speed internet service that sometimes works and sometimes does not work which costs you money every month working or not. Occasional failures can and do happen – you may loose your internet service for a few hours sometimes. Loosing your internet service for more than a day is totally unacceptable, so be sure to ask your neighbors about what they are using for internet access and about the providers service and support.

What if there is no cable TV and there is no DSL service? Does this mean that the only thing available is dial up? Actually no, there are several more choices.

An interesting choice for sort of high speed internet is cellular phone services. Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and other cellular services have high speed internet services available. You can get something called an Air Card on your computer that can get to the internet using cell phone providers. The most common way this is done is with laptops although you can get wireless and wired modems that work with the cellular services and Air Cards.

How in the world do you find out if this will work in your house or business? Actually it is pretty easy, do you have a smart phone? Do you know people that have smart phones? (iPhones, Blackberry, Droid, and so on) Have people that have smart phones come to your business or house and see if they can connect to the internet and at what speed. Find out which cellular provider seems to work the best. Most of the smart phones have a so called data plan and smart phone users are on the internet with their phones.

The thing to know with cellular service as your internet provider is the cellar services have different levels of data service. I use an iPhone which means I have only one choice of cellular provider and that is AT&T. AT&T has two levels of cellular data service – EDGE and 3G. The other carriers are similar, they just have different names for their levels of service. The highest speed service tends to be available only in cities and urban areas and along the interstate highways. In my case I will be talking about AT&T 3G, however the same applies to all of the cellular providers. 3G is available in cities, in and near urban areas and along most interstate highways. If you go a mile or two away from the city or urban area or interstate you will loose 3G service and go to EDGE. EDGE will connect to the internet however it is slow, actually not much faster than dial up. In your house or business you might have areas where 3G works and other areas where it does not and you can get only EDGE and still other places where there is no cellar service at all. With the iPhone there is an app called Speed Test and with other smart phones there are probably similar apps. Get this app if you use the iPhone or iPad 3G it will tell you if and how well your smart phone will work. It will also tell you if you can use you device when you travel.

So if cable or DSL are not available to you check you smart phone and see how well it works at you business or home. Get other people with different smart phones to come to your house or business and have them check the internet access-make certain you get people using different cellular providers. A major hint here – get to know the young people IE high school age, college age or young adults, they will have smart phones and will know how to really use them and they can tell you if their device works at you home or place of business. Choose the company that works the best at your location.

What you are attempting to learn is if there is cellular high speed internet available and which cellular provider works best. Each of the major cellular providers has coverage maps on their websites, you need to find the data coverage map on their web sites, the phone coverage map is not helpful. There are lots of places where your cell phone will work just fine but the data part (the internet) does not work at all. Here is the AT&T cell phone coverage for my area – Notice the 3G Voice and Mobile Broadband Coverage and box just below the map? Check that box – this will tell you what 3G data coverage is available. Whether or not it will work for you is a different story – at least will know if you have a chance using cellular internet with your business. Here is the same area with the data map AT&T data coverage – be sure to zoom out on these types of maps to understand what is possible around you. In my case the AT&T map is totally blue which indicates high speed 3G cellular service is available at my business and at my house. The reality is 3G does in fact work at my store and Speed Test on my iPhone shows it is actually pretty good. It also works at my house most of the time in every room, however at my machine shed which is down the hill 100 feet from the house I get either EDGE very poorly or no cellular date service at all and the cell phone is really marginal – even though on the map it is solid bright blue. Also at the house Speed test is usually slower than at the store (the store is close to an urban area – the house is rural)

So if you are considering using a cellular service for your internet connection at your business or home check it with smart phones. With cellular data you will be paying for the Air Card service and you will be in a contract with the cell phone company. This charge is over and above or totally separate from your wireless phone billing. Make sure you understand how they bill. If you use an Air Card with your computer you can very quickly use a lot of data and if you go over what is available on your plan this can get very expensive very quickly.

You can get an Air card that will work with your laptop and there are devices that you can get that allow you to plug your air card into a router so you can set up a wired or wireless network at your business for more than one computer that connects to the cellular service and internet.

With some phones and smart phones it is also possible to “tether” your phone to your computer. You often will have to pay your cellular service extra to do this and again you may have limits as to how much data you can use without getting charged more.

Something to know about tethering – your cell phone is connected to internet and your computer is connected to your cell phone. That means in most cases you WILL NOT be able to use your cell phone at all and if you do elect to tether your computer to your phone make certain you do not loose the ability to charge your phone while it is tethered. The batteries will die on your cell phone in about an hour if you are not able to recharge it while tethered.

So with cellular I am talking about two different things here. First using your cell phone to connect to the internet then and tethering it to your computer or router. While this can and does work it is really a temporary connection to the internet.

The second way is with an Air Card – a device that plugs into your computer that allows it to connect to the internet. Here I am talking about laptops primarily. There are devices that you can plug your Air Card into called routers (these are special air card routers – not the router that you would use to connect to DSL or Cable) these routers are normally wireless and will have at least one wired port so you can set up both a wired and a wireless network at you home or business.

Using cellular services as your internet provider will work as long as you can get reliable cellular high speed service. In the case of AT&T this is called 3G. If all you can get is EDGE the cellular solution is not worth messing with. EDGE is a little faster than dial up but not that much. Remember that the fastest cellular internet service at its best will be a lot slower than the slowest DSL.

OK so what if you are in an area where there is no cable, no DSL and no high speed cellular service? If you have a clear view of the southern sky and or if you use Direct TV or Dish network for television, there is another choice – there are satellite Internet service available. You will need a special satellite dish – Your Direct or Dish network dish for television will not work. You will need some special equipment and you will need to learn how to maintain this equipment. You can get high speed internet via satellite. You need to know that quite often the equipment is costly, the monthly charge is higher than other internet services and you have to know how to re aim your satellite internet dish. If it is your only choice it does in fact work and thousands of people use satellite to get to the internet. You can connect a router to the satellite modem and set up a network at your home or business so you can use more than one computer.

A final thing that is available in some areas and starting to appear in other areas is called broadband internet. This is wireless, the providers have transmitters and receivers called transceivers set up on high places, you have a transceiver at your home or business. This way is very directional, your transceiver must be in direct line of sight to the providers transceiver on a high place or tower. They are able to get people connected at 8 miles or less from where they put up their transceivers. I used a service like this at home for several years while waiting for AT&T to extend DSL to my house. Broadband is not as fast in general than the other internet services such as cable or DLS or even cellular it is a whole lot faster than dial up and is usable. In my case the broadband provider put a couple of antennas in my attic and a broadband transceiver which I connected to my wireless router which gave me internet all through my house.

QUICK NOTE and this is really IMPORTANT!!!! If you have wireless internet at your home or business – WIFI – make certain that you “lock” your wireless router. WIFI normally only goes 300 feet or so – it can go further. If your WIFI is open anyone can use your WIFI by simply having a laptop or other WIFI device in their car and parking close to your house or place of business. You ask what is wrong with that? Very simple – if you have an open wireless network that others can use with WIFI from their laptop or other WIFI device they could be involved with illegal activity through your internet connection. When illegal activity is tracked the authorities will “see” your internet connection this is called your IP address. The enforcement people will come to your house or business because to them it looks like the illegal activity is coming from your computer(s) and you will get arrested and they will take every computer you own for analysis. The person using your open wireless connection from their car and doing the illegal activity will not be there. This is especially true if you live in an apartment house, or any area where there are other homes nearby. LOCK DOWN your wireless router, put in a hard to guess KEY – DO NOT use these things open EVER.

Two examples, when I had the broadband connection at my house and a WIFI wireless network one of my neighbors more than a half mile away was actually able to get on the internet with his laptop from the upstairs bedroom of his house, actually it was OK with me that he was using my wireless network however I did lock down my router at that point and gave him the key so he could use it. The problem was if he could use my WIFI at that distance than others could use it from nearby “parking places” in fields and driveways.

The other example, a good friend of mine with a business had an open WIFI network-he simply had no clue, he went bought a WiFi router and just turn it on and it worked. Turned out was easy to access from a parking lot across the street as well as a fast food place. Some people were coming to this parking lot at night after his business was closed and were using his open WIFI network for illegal activity. The authorities became aware of the illegal activity, they “busted” him, it got into the newspapers and on local television news, they took every computer he had to the state forensic lab and took him to jail. After several weeks the state lab could find nothing on any of his computers but he still had to go to court. He had to get a lawyer that knew how computer work. It was dismissed – it cost him thousands of dollars in legal fees and he spent time in jail because of the press he actually lost his business and reputations and had to move and start over. They never caught the person or persons that were using his open WIFI network for illegal activities on the internet.

Finally if dial up is your only option or you have no options at all for internet access there is always BFS – (Business Form Starbucks). Get a laptop that has WIFI – these days I think every laptop or netbook does have WIFI. Do all of the work you can from your business, office or home including answering emails and go to someplace with internet access. The coffee shop, the fast food place, the library, wherever you can connect to the internet, download your email, upload your email and do what ever business work you need to do that requires the internet, get the updates current on your computer and software, in other words get all your internet work done while on public access. Then go back to your office. While going someplace with internet access is not a great solution it is a far better solution than dial up. With all the updates to your operating system, software and security these days dial up can literally take days to get these updates to you. It can take hours and hours to just get your email. Sometime BFS is the only efficient way.