SkyLink helps rural households compare satellite internet for the addresses fiber and cable crews never reached — from Ely, Nevada to Presque Isle, Maine. Plans are quoted by address, equipment terms are spelled out in plain English, and every speed on this page is an “up to” number, not a promise.
Independent comparison and referral service. SkyLink is not an internet service provider.
All figures are illustrative examples. Speeds are advertised as “up to” and vary by address, equipment, in-home wiring and network congestion.
Rural households do not get burned by slow internet. They get burned by data terms they never read, an equipment lease they did not realize was a lease, and a mount location chosen in a hurry on a February afternoon. The guide is free because the mistakes are expensive.
Almost everyone shops satellite internet by megabits and regrets it in month four. The number that decides whether you are happy is how much priority data you get each month. Pricing below is illustrative and subject to change and terms.
Email, bill pay, weather radar, news, and one HD stream at a time — sized for a one- or two-person household.
A family plan: two or three HD streams, remote school, video calls, and the usual pile of phone and console updates.
Built for households that run a business from the property — shop cameras, cloud backups, large file transfers, daily calls.
Speeds shown are advertised maximums and are not guaranteed. Actual performance varies by address, equipment, in-home wiring and network congestion. After the monthly priority data on a plan is used, speeds may be reduced during busy hours until the next billing cycle. Promotional pricing is illustrative, subject to change, and subject to the provider’s terms.
Satellite is not the right answer everywhere. These are the three situations where rural households tell us it made the biggest difference.
The cable map stops two miles short of your driveway and the fiber build keeps sliding a year to the right. Satellite does not care how long the road is — it cares whether you can see the southern sky.
One dish at the house, a mesh node in the shop. Enough for a card reader at the farm stand, cameras on the equipment yard, and a laptop in the office over the tack room.
Some plans can be paused for the off-season, and plenty of folks in storm country keep satellite as the backup that stays up when the pole line down the hill does not.
Coverage maps are drawn in broad strokes. Service is delivered to one specific roof with one specific view of the sky. Four things decide whether your address works, and only one of them is on the map.
Two houses on the same gravel road can get different answers. Beam capacity is assigned by area and fills up, so a neighbor who signed on last spring tells you nothing certain about today.
In the lower 48 the dish points south and up. A bluff, a barn roof, or one mature ponderosa in the wrong spot can take an otherwise perfect address off the table.
Roof, eave, wall, or a ground pole set roughly 10 to 20 feet from the house. Renters generally need written permission from the owner, and some HOAs have placement rules worth reading first.
The technician runs coax from the dish to the modem, then places the router where the signal reaches the rooms you use. Metal roofs, plaster and log walls all change that plan.
Availability varies by address and is not guaranteed. The only honest way to know is to check your exact address — which costs nothing and takes a few minutes.
No hardware to buy off a shelf, no aiming a dish yourself off a ladder in February. Follow the packet down the line.
Not the ZIP, not the county — the address. Which beams serve it, what capacity is open right now, and whether the terrain around you is a known problem. The check is free, and if the answer is no, we tell you plainly.
Most rural households shop the Mbps number and buy the wrong plan. Start with gigabytes: streaming hours, video calls, cloud backups, console updates. The plan follows from that.
A technician walks the property, finds the clear southern view, mounts the dish on the roof, eave or a ground pole, routes the coax, and sets up the modem and router. Typical window is two to four hours.
Before the truck leaves you see the alignment and the signal readings, and you learn what a normal number looks like on your own equipment. A follow-up call a few weeks later catches anything that drifted.
Every technology trades something. Satellite trades latency and a little weather tolerance for reach that nothing else has. Here is exactly what that feels like at the kitchen table.
A geostationary satellite sits about 22,000 miles up, so a round trip typically lands somewhere near 550–650 ms. Low-earth-orbit systems typically run far lower, often in the 25–60 ms range. Neither one feels like fiber, and no plan upgrade changes the distance.
Heavy rain, wet snow and dense storm cells can slow the link or briefly drop it. It normally clears when the weather does. Snow packed on the dish face does the same thing until somebody sweeps it off.
Roughly 7 to 11 p.m. local is peak. Once the priority data on your plan is used for the month, speeds may be reduced during those busy hours until your next billing cycle starts.
On most plans the dish and modem are leased, not bought, and they go back when service ends. Return windows and non-return fees are written into the agreement before you sign anything.
If competitive online gaming, a low-latency VPN or a storm-proof link is the hard requirement, satellite may be the wrong answer at your address — and we will say so. Fixed wireless and cellular home internet are often better fits, and the comparison worksheet in the free guide walks through both side by side.
Our place is nine miles past where the cable company's map stops. The installer walked the whole property before he unloaded anything and found the one spot with a clear southern view, so the dish went on a pole by the garden fence. First real internet we have ever had at this house.
They told me straight out that heavy wet snow would knock the signal out sometimes. It does — maybe three or four times a winter, and it comes back on its own. I would rather be told that up front than find out in January.
I run payroll for a small outfit from the kitchen table. The comparison worksheet they emailed me is what talked me out of the biggest plan — I was buying speed when what I needed was data. Six months in, the 300 covers us fine.
Testimonials are illustrative composites written for this demo listing and do not describe identifiable customers. Individual experience varies by address, plan and installation.
The Free Rural Internet Guide and the satellite vs. fixed-wireless comparison worksheet land in your inbox in about a minute. Read them, fill in the worksheet for your own address, and walk into the conversation knowing exactly what to ask.
