[walrus01]

Yeah, that is going to be a hard location to reach. Took a look at it from Google Earth / satellite view for a few minutes. The best option I can realistically think of is for a group of 7 to 20 people to share the cost for a larger, much more serious geostationary vsat terminal (not some xplornet consumer grade stuff), like a 2.4 meter ku-band dish with 20W BUC and modern iDirect modem, and find a vsat ISP with ku band spot coverage of the area to pay for access.

You'd be looking at like $800 a month for a better chunk of bandwidth. Then divide that by the number of local users in the Egmont town are you can connect through it, building a very small micropop WISP setup. Something like a mimosa a5c on a pole in a central location and c5c CPE radios with 24-30dB gain dishes on the client side. And a small mikrotik router between the mimosa and the vsat modem.

Divided by enough people it could work out to around $80-100 per residence per month. This assumes that somebody with a modicum of networking clue can run the local end for free, a few hours a week for maintenance and monitoring.

[sandworm101]

Yup. Thanks for looking. Getting everyone on board with a 10 to 20-house collective would be very hard. The terrain is really unforgiving. All the houses are by the water, with steep rocky hills behind them. Any maintenance is a big issue. That "somebody with a modicum of networking clue" doesn't live in Egmont.

Atm my parents are paying 100/month for sat internet, and another 50 for sat TV. It suits their needs today but they know that when the grandkids are a little older bandwidth will be an issue. When I visit I bring them thumbdrives full of all TV shows they cannot get.

[walrus01]

The other best possible option would be a single access point, somewhat up on a hill, possibly mounted to a tree with TV white space radio gear, just across the water from Egmont, with sector antennas aimed at the town. Redline and a few others have commercial TVWS band access point radios for the 500 to 800 MHz bands (various models available) which can cut through trees for non line of sight radio pretty effectively. You'd still need to get some kind of semi-decent dedicated broadband connection to the AP site, such as a 20 Mbps x 20 Mbps to Telus in Sechelt or Gibsons.