The weather outside is frightful…and my satellite service is cutting out…
With the storm hitting the eastern and central parts of Canada and US we thought it would be a good time to address a question that is asked of us frequently: “what is the difference between Satellite and Internet IP services?”
Let’s compare the hardware and technology.
When it comes to satellite, the setup-up is more expensive. The satellite dish must be mounted outside your establishment, or if it’s an antennae, it must be mounted inside under a skylight or near a southern facing window. Wires need to be fished through the walls to the receiver that plugs into your sound system. Depending on the layout of your business, this type of setup might be complicated and you might need to pay someone to do the setup for you. Some setup and activation costs can get up to close to $1000 dollars.
Weather conditions can have an adverse effect on a satellite music service.
In winter, the piling up of ice and snow can throw the dish out of alignment and can even warp the dish itself. Heavy rain and winds can cause reception problems resulting in the music cutting-out intermittently. Cloudy conditions can cause intermittent problems too.
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| Snow piling can cause signal fade |
Most satellite services are only available in the contiguous United States and Canada.
A new way of distributing audio to your business is with IP technology through the internet. You simply connect an encoder box to your high-speed internet router and then connect it to your store’s sound system. That’s it! The encoder box comes to you configured so that as soon as you plug it in toy our system you get your music coming through the speakers.
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| plug internet cable and the right and white cables into your sound system! |
The encoder recieves the music through the internet connection so weather has no effect!
In the next posting , we’ll compare the music service between Satellite, Internet and CDs!
