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Is Starband's Satellite Internet Service Palatable?
George Thomas asks: "Since Centurytel bought out my local teleco, my internet access has been limited to about 14k compared to the 48k I previously enjoyed. I am interested in reader experiences and/or comments about internet access by satelite dish, specifically Dish Networks, because they offer 128k up and 350k down. I live in a rural area and cable is not a viable option. I am currently running Red Hat 7.2 on an old Supermicro LX series dual PII MB. I have USB ports native to the board, but don't have a clue whether they will work with the USB modem supplied with the hardware package. Also I can boot to Windows95 with LiLo, but my copy of Windows doesn't support USB. I can replace the MB if necessary, but would rather not if I can avoid doing that. Any help will be gratefully appreciated." Of course, Dish Network used to be a reseller for Starband. Now, it appears that things have flip-flopped and Starband is now offering 'upgrades' for Dish Network service. So are any of you Slashdot readers current Starband customers? If so, please share your thoughts on the service.
The CW I was handed when I looked into satelite ISP services is that the high latency of the connection makes it useless for gaming.
If you want to surf the net or read email you're fine. Try anything which requires a low ping time and you're hosed.
YMMV but I steered clear. (Then again I can still at least manage a 45k connection.)
getting a good signal is like pulling teeth, if the moon, sun, trees, and mars are not aligned correctly, you lose signal strength. I always seem to be operating at 50% of what they say I should be. Pure crap!
Ok... Well if The modem is USB 2.0 and you have 1.0 then it wont work. If The modem is USB 1.0 and you have 1.0 then it should work... Is the question more along the lines of will this work with linux Becuase if you upgrade to any newer version of windows you should have no problem. As for linux dont know.
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
Holy Shit. This board isn't used for tech support questions.
i was consulting for a company that was interested in sat connectivity. it was the best option, until the tech support informed me that it had to connect to a Microsoft box, but they told me from there i could route to a linux firewall then to my network. that wasn t very long ago.
I'm curious about how cable is not a "viable" option. Does your cable service charge a $600 equipment fee? (last I checked, that's where StarBand is at). Is it not a viable option, or just not an option?
I've heard of problems with Dish Network setups before. If your a power user and love to suck down MP3's, Divx and porn.. umm I mean demo's. They will eventually throttle your bandwith back to 'balance' the usage. Of course this means it might eventually be faster to keep the 14kbps. Of course they may have changed there policies since then to.
Anyone wanna verify this?
---
Go ahead, hit me, no ones looking.
According to the Starband website (PC requirements section), Starband can work with either USB or Ethernet. I would think that an Ethernet-based model would work fine.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
I don't see how a company simply changing hands could cause that. My parents are stuck with a tiny phone company with horribly outdated equipment, and even they get better connects than you. You need to make a service call! Tell them there's noise on your line... with a 14.4 connect, I don't see how you can't hear it yourself!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I installed Starband for a company on long island. The service isnt horrible, but it does have some problems.
Large downloads usually max out at 60kb/s with uploads being in the 5-10kb/s range. Web browsing feels much slower, with waits of a couple seconds before the page even starts to load.
The USB modem is huge, around the size of a flatbed scanner. (this was a year ago, maybe it's smaller now)
Weather also plays a factor.. clouds hurt and rain basically kills the connection.
google search on "starband linux hack" revealed the following: "No, I never did, because it turns out it's a lot easier to just remove the USB daughter board in the satmodem, and just use it with a straight 10BaseT ethernet connection instead of the stupid USB connection. We are using the Starband service with the external Gilat Satmodem 180, which has both a USB jack and an RJ-45 ethernet jack on the back of the case. The USB daughterboard is easily identified and is clearly labeled with a "Warning: this card is not removable" marking. All you do is unscrew the screws holding the USB card to the back of the case, pry up the double-sided tape that's holding it down, and slide the USB card out the back of the satmodem case. I recommend installing some duct tape over the hole left by the absence of the USB daughterboard. :)
The satmodem becomes a 10BaseT ethernet DHCP server and router after that procedure is done, just like a cable modem or DSL modem.
That way you don't have to use any special drivers or kernel modifi-cations to use the Starband system. You can use a standard ethernet
card which is properly supported in the Linux kernel."
the 360 model modem has both USB and ethernet interfaces (connection w/crossover cable). the problem isn't with the hardware and line of sight crap - even with a shitty signal i still pull in at damn fast speeds. it runs over a proprietary packet control protocol that combines multiple requests into a single big request sent to the starband gateway. unfortunately, no drivers for this have been released for linux so you're stuck using windows. if you DON'T directly connect the starband modem to a windows machine you'll get really shitty speeds like others have been posting. using their proprietary software, however, speeds stuff up TREMENDOUSLY (6 KB/s without and unreliable - steady 300 KB/s with!)
What is it with these damn USB modems? They're a pain in the rear arse. I assume they're cheaper than ethernet ones. But is that the real reason, or is it because it makes it harder to share an internet connection? Yes, I know it probably can be done, but that means having to keep a computer online.
As an owner of a Netgear RT314, I firmly believe in this cheap-o internet gateway routers that hide in the corner using very little power or attention. None of them that I've seen have USB ports though.
Finally, driver support for USB modems seems crap and restrictive, and still relatively immature. Ethernet modems enjoy true plug and play, and very mature drivers in most operating systems. I can only think of one thing worse than a USB modem: a PCI one.
I've been a starband user for over a year. It STINKS! Starband ONLY SUPPORTS WIN9x, ME, XP, and 2000. NO WindowsNT, Mac, Solaris, or Linux. This is just since the move to the 360 modem modem. IT used to work GREAT with Linux with the model 180 which is no longer supported.
I stay with starband only because I have no other economical choice.
krsears@starband.net
I've tried Starband under Linux about 9 months ago and discovered that ping times are around 7 seconds on average which makes telnet and ssh sessions unbearable. Starband also uses propietary compression/decompression software (that doesn't work under Linux, of course)... the result is speeds are about that of dial up with greatly increased ping latencies. I did find that the service performed well for streaming audio and video under windows, but that a duplex dial-up line is both less expensive and faster for any other work... you might also try pricing out ISDN in your area (I have tried this service in other areas and found it to be acceptable, if a little pricey). Good luck.
High ping times, large blackout periods, and absurd hardware prices make starband a BAD BAD idea for internet. If anything its a wireless equivalent of an ISDN connection, and thats being nice.
If it works for you, go for it.
Throwing down ~$1000 for less than mediocre connection is not a good idea.
OMG BIG PENIS ATE MY SOUP
If you live anywhere in what can be loosely called the "midwest" or the "east" you need a clear line of sight to the southwest. I've been told that the US satellites are both approximately over Arizona - my dish (in Minnesota) is just barely aimed above the horizon, but I have 97% signal strength and have only once lost the signal, and then briefly, during a thunderstorm. It's fine through Minnesota blizzards even. A professionally-aimed dish (or very carefully amateur-aimed) should never get lower than 80% signal strength - just watch out for trees.
Latency can be an issue if you need fast ping times - expect no better than 200ms, best-case. But of course for web-browsing, email, and file downloads, it's fine. I now just have dish for TV though, because I qualify for 1Mbit synch. DSL. But Dish would certainly be a good choice in a rural setting.
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
A comany named "Draytek" (http://www.draytek.com.tw) in Taiwan has a USB router that will work with some of these satellite systems as well as other USB DSL modems. It's cheap and supports IPSEC. Check out the U.S. distributor: http://www.bestsystemsdirect.com/Products/2200USB/ 2200usb.html
I had to use one of these for an employee that I have in Denver, as he is a Qwest to MSN migration sufferer and MSN can't get him an Ethernet capable DSL modem. (They claim service isn't available to him even though he already has it!)
I had it...I hated it. The service went down every single day for up to 2 hours. I actually saw good speeds but in bursts. It is horrible for P2P and useless for gaming like some of you have already stated. But if you want to sign up I have a shiny new modem and dish for you 1/2 price.
The one friend I have who *had* a StarBand setup cancelled it. For these reasons: - *Constant* disconnections. I'm talking about a dozen times a day. - Sub-5k upload speeds. Tech support said that his speed was 'normal', despite the promises of 25k upstream when he signed up. - Latency from hell. You will not be able to play any online games without being at a *major* disadvantage. He was happier back when he had a DirecPC dish and had his upstream going through a modem. If you only want to web-surf or read usenet, and you don't mind outages, isn't a dial-up cheaper?
That's all I got to say about that.
and he has to have a proprietary driver package running on a Windows box in order to access the system. Otherwise we would have put a Linux box in for him. This could have changed in the past year, however.
As far as speed is concerned, his downloads are pretty fast but getting a download started is laggy. He does not do any gaming either.
Jerry Pournelle (www.byte.com) has a satellite connection and writes frequently about his experiences in a column. I recommend that you check the archives to see whether he has some advice that fits your situation.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
From their FAQ: ... StarBand Model 360 satellite modem that connects to an Ethernet or USB port on your existing PC.
As with most broadband modems this has an ethernet port, which generally connect directly to your ethernet card. Don't use USB. Use LILO to boot to windows, get it set up in your USB-less version of windows, then steal the settings (which most likely is a simple DHCP setup). It's far easier for them to put the smarts into the modem and configure windows as little as possible than it is to field tech support and keep configuration programs and drivers up to date on all versions of windows. You will likely find that the USB driver is a simple USB ethernet driver anyway, and you may even be able to find generic linux drivers for whatever chipset it's using - but you may have to 'research' the innards of the modem to determine the chipset since they probably don't advertise it in the USB strings.
Therefore you'll most likely find that it'll be easy to set up in windows, easy to set up in linux, and easy to set up with a gateway.
Make sure you find a service provider that has a money back gurantee or free month or something, though, just in case.
Please note the gratuitious use of "likely" and "may" in this post. I've not used them.
-Adam
I have a friend here at work that came in a couple months ago and was livid. Starband/DishNetwork decided to filter out all of the ports used by the major P2P file sharing services. Apparently in the fine print they don't have to let you use the service for anything but web sufring and e-mail. Not only having extremely restrictive ToS, the speeds aren't that great, and they lock you into huge service contracts. But if you can't survive on a modem and you live in the boonies, I guess it is better than two soup cans and string.
Here is how I have my Starband setup.
My Starband PC is a G333 Gateway PC running Windoze 2000. SB's software will not work with Linux. The old 180 modem that I had (before forced upgrade to 360 modem) you could hack for an ethernet connection. I loved this, as I was able to use Linux as the gateway. No more.
I've got 3 WinME's, One Mac, 2 W2K, and One Linux box all networked together and using Starband.
I am in the same boat as you - in the stix, with no hope of cable or DSL. Starband was my only option over dialup. Given that, Starband ain't bad. I would not go by their rated speed. I'll get 100kb download speeds, and since I never upload, I can't state what that would be. If you don't mind the occasional outages due to snow, fog, or heavy rain it's not a bad deal. I know that some complain about slower speeds on occasion, but given the alternative it does not bother me much.
Quote from site:
The StarBand Board of Directors includes Yoel Gat, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Gilat Satellite Networks Ltd.,
John Devaan, Senior Vice President of Microsoft, Mark Jackson, Senior Vice President of Echostar Communications
Corporation and Brian Friedman, President of ING Asset Management.
"Never give up, never surrender!"
I've used Starband satellite internet service for a little over a year now (ok, so six months of that I wasn't using it because I lived out of the country, but my family was). My experience is when it works, it rocks (as far as download times go...gaming is, as they say, completely impossible). Upload, download - great speeds. Those are the pros. Now, however, there are some caveats.
The service goes down fairly often.
This was my experience at the beginning, but it seems to be doing much better. Now it only goes down when there's a big, nasty, thick storm (i.e. - when the satellite tv is down as well). This is okay, and it's not too often that it's down now. At first, however, they were just putting their service down for days at the time with no warning, no discounts (20 days out of 30 that we had internet access, and we paid the full amount. Sheesh.
Broken images
I don't know if this has to do with my D-Link network switch or what (the old one had a corrupt table inside it on one of the PROMs, screwed up our network. I have a strong feeling this is the case again). All I know is most of the time I have 20-75% of webpages with broken images. I have to right click, h for show images (Internet Exploder), just to see the images. Again, YMMV.
Now, as for linux connectivity, I don't really see why it should be that hard. Maybe the USB side would only work with Windows, and maybe they only support Windows, but the newer version of their hardware (and I think the only one you can get, now) has both USB and ethernet (RJ-45). It should be a plug-and-play affair on any sort of router, but I can't vouch for this.
Hope I've been of some help,
-knewter
I'm not sure why you are worrying about issues involving USB and the like with your motherboard. You are signing up for a service that is going to cost you a large, large amount of money over the course of a year. If you can't afford to spend 150 dollars on a new motherboard/chip combo, I simply don't see how you can afford to have the service. This is definately a situation where someone is buying $1200 dollar rims for their Geo Metro.
I've used a competing product (Direcway) for a year now (two-way 128/400+). It has a horrible latency (800ms+) almost unusable for telnet/gaming but is fabulous for downloads and webbing. Like you note, they only supply Windoze drivers so what I ended up doing was using an ultracheap box running Win2K+BlackIce+ICS with the satellite modem. Ran a crosscable from that to a Linux box+modem (2 multilink) with routing rules so that packets were routed to modem or sat-box based on destination/type. The Linux box was NAT'd so that my private network (kids, wife, etc) got to the world from behind that.
The result works fairly well -- I have DAoC/EQ/etc routed through the modems, webbery and email through the satellite.
Like you I live in an area abandoned by telco (Verizon scum for me) and cable. The aggravating part is that I'm less than 3 miles from an Intel campus which has TXXX running every which way. My particular phone lines are some 19th century coil-loaded hamster crap that won't even support ISDN or higher than 26.4kbps (so I have to use both of them to even get marginal low-ping bandwidth). Verizon won't work with me *at all*, the last rep told me if it was really that important I should move... I told her the instant I find another solution I'm going to have them rip their copper off my property and they can go to hell.
I'd recommend you read the Starband website again. It specifically states that it is not for Linux (or Mac, or...).
A year or so back, when I was looking in to this, I remember reading that Windows is required because they use some software compression voodoo to get their published speeds. And, of course, that software is only available for Windoze.
1) Latency is insane. Don't even *consider* it for any type of gaming.
2) It will work if you plug it directly into your switch, apparently (The modem has an Ethernet port in the back, as well). HOWEVER...the software (Internet Page Accelerator) that keeps file from being chewed in Win95/98/2K is really needed. Graphics on sites get eaten in transit, and it's just ugly. We used their suggested proxy package (WinProxy) to allow our mostly-mac network to connect using the IPA on the proxy machine, and it worked, (downloads 30-40k on average) with a fair number of errors (page won't load, hit reload, it's fine, that type of thing).
3) Starband technical support is totally, totally useless -- even if you're using the systems they recommend and support. They keep buying JD Powers & Associates ratings every year, but it's horrible.
4) Upload over the proxy was stupid. We had 40-60% of our larger ftp and mail chewed in transit, and rendered useless. And, it was a total bitch to get it working right -- it just "started" working one time, after using the same settings for over a week.
I wouldn't recommend it unless you have no other option, and need fast download speeds.
On a side note, I don't think the submitter did much looking into the task at hand before the article was posted. There is a *wealth* of information out there on this topic. Try Starband Users, for starts. And, Macworld has a very comprehensive article that outlines some of the problems I mentioned above, which I would assume also apply (partially, anyways) to a Linux setup.
What does it mean to wake out of a dream
and be wearing someone else's shorts?
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You can get support for usb with Win95, as you can get drivers, although limited, that work well. To get more info follow this link.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
Ok, I'll start by saying that if you can't get anything else then Starband is ok as a last resort.
A company that I do work for got the Starband service a year ago when they were still shipping their 180 model modems, and at that time it worked quite well. Then Starband switched everyone over to their 360 model modems, and the service went downhill from there when the new modem was installed. My technical evaluation of the model 360 modems is that they suck, and that makes the Starband connection suck.
With all that said, if you can stand the high lag times (a 'good' ping return is around 700ms, but more often 1400ms and higher), and if nothing else is available in your area then it's ok because it beats the crap out of using a modem on a phone line with multiple D/A conversions.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
What exactly ARE you getting at?
;-)
1: Will your (unnamed) USB modem work with linux?
1: Should you replace your motherboard?
2: Should you install Win98? (for USB support)
4: Is Starband service "Palatable"?
When you figure out what the hell you are talking about, I will share my experiences.
From their FAQ:
PLEASE NOTE: Networking the StarBand service via a router or other hardware device connected directly to the StarBand satellite modem is expressly forbidden. A Windows-based PC running the StarBand software must be the interface with the StarBand satellite modem as it converts Internet requests into a protocol optimized for satellite-based Internet connectivity. Circumventing this optimization software creates excessive and unauthorized traffic on the StarBand network and may result in a measurable decrease in transmission speed or complete service outage.
What? Windows knows how to slow down my Internet connection? Imagine. I take "converts...into a protocol optimized" to mean that the Starband software is sitting there in the background going, "A packet? What's this? He wants a download? HA! I'll just stick this in a buffer for 5 minutes and then send it on. That'll keep his pr0n addiction in check."
I....think I'll stay with modem, thanks. (as painful as it might be, at least I get low-latency, if slow, pr0n.)
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Well I'll admit not to knowing that much about satellite connections and have read many good posts here on the subject. But Linux and USB support right now have still a ways to go. Its true you can get USB modems to work as long as you have a Linux compatible modem. Even the popular Alcatel Speedtouch finally got on the bandwagon with producing a driver so Linux users could hack their distro to get it to work ( of course with a LOT of sweat and knowledge. ) Of which, utilizing the HOWTO's on that matter really sux, ONLY because I personally haven't enjoyed that success as of this posting. With many hours of hard work and pulling my hair out, I've relegated myself to only connecting up using my External Modem 56K! Until I can afford a Ethernet Modem. Ethernet, truly is the way to go for a modem for high speed transmissions.. won't infringe upon your CPU usage or blatantly drop you due to the early stages of Linux USB support. Good luck!
there can be some minor bandwith problems durring peak useage hours. and I know for sure that DirecTV's direcway/directpc does have a "fair access" policy where some power user types get capped from time to time. supposedly at random
The greatest right given is the right to be wrong...
I have starband, and I, too, live in an extremely rural area. I'm satisfied with it. I haven't seen the reliability issues that others complain about and I get anywhere from ~150kbs to >600kbs download times depending on the time of day, etc. Web surfing feels pretty snappy modulo the initial start time (due to satellite latency). I also have never seen any bandwith throttling by the providers, (and I've downloaded a couple .iso's).
Having said all of that, you need to realize the following facts:
- You can't beat physics. The signal has to travel 45,000 miles. Your ping times will never be below 600ms. Therefore, this cannot be used for real-time, reaction-based gaming.
- Heavy rain kills the connection.
- PtP stuff seems to only work marginally (I have had some success with it, but also, I haven't experimented extensively).
- The 360 modem (the only option) does have both USB and ethernet connection, HOWEVER all of its acceleration is done by Windows drivers and the modem must be DIRECTLY CONNECTED to the windows box. If you want to home network, you have to install a second network card and use the windoze box as your gateway. Therefore, linux boxes can be on your network, but you have to have a windoze box to drive the modem.
Hope this help.
Don Roberts
roberts@refactory.com
The Simplest Consultant That Could Possibly Work
The main problem is latency. If you are downloading iso's it's great. 0.5 seconds to initiate the download, then it just comes roaring in. A site with lots of graphics, frames, and associated files that have to be downloaded individually sucks because there's that high latency on every file.
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My dad uses it and constantly has problems. The first problem is that the modem has to be plugged into a Microsoft windows machine. No routers or linux. Then, from the microsoft machine you can do connection sharing. The service goes down often. With our setup it goes down whenever it gets the least bit stormy. In addition to this we have repeatedly found the tech support to be unhelpful, and downright rude. The cost is too high for that many problems. But, then again what are your options if you live out in the boonies. If you can wait about 6 months I bet they will have a better option for the reciever. I know that right now their parent company is selling a reciever similar to the starband one that supports linux and routers. Hope this helps.
The current consensus over at DSLReports doesnt seems too good. http://www.dslreports.com/comments/1652
I used to work for an ISP that covered most of rural montana. Even in the worst cases, we could ALWAYS squeeze out 28.8. If there was ever a case of bad connections like that, we didn't wait a second to jump all over u.s. worst's (local telco, now qworst) back. We quote the tarrifs for the state (you can usally find them on line), and tell them to get out there and fix it now, not tomorrow, NOW.
As to answer 'what changed', I can envision one situation that would cause that to happen, even though it would make no sense. Perhaps the new company dropped their PRI's and set up some modem bank or some such. I can't imagine why, but v.90 modems pretty much can only go above 28.8 when they are analog only on one side. If you connection goes analog, digitial, and finally analog on the ISP's end, the best you will ever get is 28.8 - period.
Also check to see if the local telco dude did sometime to effect the lines in the neighborhood. It's best not to call, but wait until you see the van ot ask the guy personally. I've found that they're usally no further than one hour away from getting stoned. If you have good timing and play your cards right, and a bag of Herbal Essence, you can usally get anything you want and it'll be done faster, better and cheaper.
By the way, when did this turn into supportdot?
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
Also I can boot to Windows95 with LiLo, but my copy of Windows doesn't support USB. I can replace the MB if necessary, but would rather not if I can avoid doing that.
Hang on here...
I know that this might not be the most slashdot-correct thing to say but you would replace your mobo before upgrading to a version of Windows that supports USB? In all seriousness, Windows 2K doesn't suck much at all. Just don't make a habit of it.
If you don't want to *buy* a copy, then I guess you could always use your Tivo to *steal* a copy.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I do tech support for Starband, Direcway (Direct TVs version of 2-way satellite), DSL, Cable, 2.4 Ghz wireless,and Dial-up. I also have telco return satellite at home. Here's the low down:
IMHO, Starband is the better of the two "2-way satellite" flavors. If you want it for pure download speed, you will be happy. The claims they make on speeds are pretty on target. Ping times, however are the Achilles heel of 2-way satellit. The problem comes from there geosynchronous orbit. The satellites are 28,000 miles above the earth. For the signal to go up to the satellite, down to noc, noc to sat, sat to you is a 600 ms baseline round trip. Light only goes so fast. So if you plan on doing any online gaming, forget it.
Not to bad mouth Direcway, but there speeds are...lacking. Nuf said.
I have a telco return satellite for two reasons.
1. Money. Instead of $79 (or whatever the current promo is)per month, I pay $40/month.
2. The ping times are still, high, but I can routinely get into the upper 300 ms range.
Also, a few more things. The 2-way satellite upstreams are very slow. Don't expect to run a server. Look for anywhere from 30-50 KBps. Those speeds are also kind of misleading, as the software that comes with the satellite runs an acceleration program jsut for port 80 traffic. So if you want to do FTP, expect slower speeds.
To sum up, these satellite are not very mature yet. They do work, but are aimed at the web browsing home user. I personally like the telco return variety, but if you want a connection that doesn't tie up a phone line, don't play games (like Quake, etc),and you want to add satellite tv on for a slight additional charge, go for the Starband. I know a lot of people that love it.
The major problems with starband service:
Bandwidth throttling. If I pay 600 bucks for equipment and install and another 70 bucks per month, I want *premium* service. No hassles, no throttling, no nothing. Pipe, Pure Pipe.
Latency Not just for gamers, if you want to video or voice conference, it's terrible. Not a chance. No voIP, no nothing.
There is a company called Skynet that is on a LEO system. Low Earth Orbit. meaning less latency, and a truckload more of bandwidth. It's vapor so far, since the fiber on earth is not utilized much, but wait a couple years and it'll rock.
The biggest caveat is that Skynet is supported by Bill Gates. You can look at this as a plus or a minus. The minus is that Microsoft has its finger in every pie. The plus is that Microsoft has a inherent interest in getting broadband to everyone, if only to stuff those bloated apps down the pipe.
Starband stinks. Use ISDN
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
The rain issue may just be with your LNA getting wet. Try cutting the bottom out of a one-liter pop bottle and splitting it down the side. Then snap it over the LNA, with the big end pointing to the dish and the split on the bottom. This has worked wonders for me on a different sat antenna. I haven't see a StarBand antenna, so its physical configuration may prevent this exact solution. But anything you can do to keep the LNA dry should help.
I was a starband customer for about 1 year. I say "about" 1 year since just before my year contract was up, they forced an upgrade to their new and improved model-360 modem.
The service was "ok". I don't think I EVER got to their advertized up OR down speeds, but the service was OK. With the 1-2 SECOND latency, it was definitely NOT for gaming, nor was it all that good for remote ssh logins (my primary mission). Other than that, it was decent for 'surfing', especially with my local squid cache server.
Their forced 'upgrade' came with what I considered to be an unacceptable condition. The condition was that now, I could NOT use my little 486 Linux firewall to connect to the Internet any longer. I would have to use a machine running microsoft windows 98/nt/xp/2k, and load some of their proprietary software to talk to the USB-only connection to the satellite modem. In the past, I was able to remove the USB daughterboard from the model-180 modem, which activated the standard ethernet port which then interfaced quite well to my linux firewall.
I told them that forcing me to use an insecure, unstable, proprietary operating system to act as my primary connection to the Internet was unacceptable, and to cancel my contract.
I made sure to tell them exactly WHY I was cancelling, and asked the rep to relay my reasons to the people higher in the food chain at Starband.
Not sure how far it got, or if it made any difference, but I feel a little better knowing that I spoke my mind so they know exactly why I am no longer a customer.
YMMV (especially if using a microsoft box as your firewall is acceptable to you)
Windows is not the answer.
Windows is the question.
The answer is "NO."
I don't have the Dish system but I do have a Hughes DIRECWAY system on my motorhome with a MotoSat Datastorm mount.
It works very well, but you have to keep in mind there is some latency as the signal has to travel up to the satellite in the Clarke belt and back down both ways in addition to the latency in the ground network. I have the business service with a static IP address and have seen as much as 2 Mbit/sec download. But the upload is slow--usually around 64 kbit/sec and sometimes as high as 100 kbit/sec but never any higher. It would suck for gaming.
The "modems" require a USB connection and a PC running Windows--you have to use the DIRECWAY software/drivers and it only works on Windows. I run Windows 2000 on the satellite access machine and it works well. Other folks are on XP and 98 but a variety of problems do crop up on the "consumer" versions of Windows I hear.
To let other operating systems access the satellite network you can use Windows' Internet Connection Sharing (ICS). I'm using this and share the connection via Ethernet to an Apple Airport base station and allow my Macs and Linux machines access the network via the wireless connection. It works very well.
BTW, last I heard, EchoStar (the parent of Dish and Starband) were getting out of the Internet access business and leaving DIRECWAY as the sole comsumer satellite Internet provider as part of their yet-to-be-approved takeover of Hughes Electronics (parent of DIRECTV and DIRECWAY).
YMMV.
I have a Starband setup Linux WILL NOT work with the new 360 model because you need the netgain client which is not availible in linux you can read up on it at http://www.starbandusers.com .
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As for the service itself
Web isn't much faster then on a modem because of the wait.
IRC works but dcc sucks because its not
accelerated like the web.
FTP Download works great I can get close to 1mbits in the evening but during the day I am lucky to get half that.
last time I checked Telnet sucked too
uploads suck and when in progress most other stuff is slow and I get disconnected for FTP dl and IRC
Outages are rare now a days unless you have alot of bad weather.
Kazaa and such services generaly do not work or are very slow ( slower then on a modem)
Support suck until you get up to like leavel 3
Hope this helps.
And if you look into DirecPCs 2way option be aware that they have a Fair Access Policy that limits your daily downlows to like 235mb .
For pure DL speed its awsome, but for browsing its a bit sluggish. pages with lots of graphics tend to be ALOT slower. ping times are on the lowside of 800ms so you better forget about online games. But i have been able to pull 20Mb files down in less than a minute before, although upload speeds are on the side of 20 kbs. A big down side is that the main machine thats hooked up to it has to be a windows machine. I tried the win98 connection sharing and that totaly failed and was forced to buy winproxy, but past that it was fine.
All in all its great for country users that pull large files or want to DL alot, but for casual browsing its not a big winner.
JMHO
BTW if you want to buy one let me know, i recently moved and dont need my dish anymore could sell it to you.
End Transmission....
Try Win98 or newer. I had no idea that Win95 does not support USB until I went to order my VisorPro (check my journal for that story), Handspring mentions that Win95 does not support USB and they do nopt support connectivity with Win95. Have not investigated further, but they sound like they know what they are talking about.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
The Pros of Starband:
Fast internet for those without hope of DSL or Cable.
I've seen downloads of 300K/sec. K not k!
AIM and other programs do work through the proxy server, provided you specify the correct ports. The proxy server is actually faster than the netgear router was too.
The Cons:
High ping times 600-1200 ms. No Games for you!
Filesharing is limited. Some things do work, but they have bandwidth police I'm told.
I don't fully trust the company after they made their modem only work with winproxy. That bothered me a little bit. They essentially have a monopoly at this time, and they know it. Our router is now a paperweight.
You must have win98 or 2k. I won't ever upgrade to Me or XP, so I don't know or care about them. No official Linux support as of yet. I doubt there will be for some time. It *might* work, but I haven't had time to meddle with it. Their mission control software is somewhat usless and windows only. I tried installing it to run a proxy server off of a
windows 95 box and it didn't work.
The mixed blessings:
The hardware setup fee is a hefty initial cost, but the money we saved from canceling our extra phone lines paid for it quickly.
The bottom line:
We are saving time and money because of this service. It is worth it if you use the internet a lot and live in a rural area beyond DSL or cable. If you can get DSL or cable get it, otherwise starband is a decent option.
do NOT get starband. i had it at an office it used to work at, and it was terrible. i couldn't ping google in under 800ms, and when i did, it average at about 25% packet loss.
I needed to make a similar decision and decided to go with DirecWay instead. There seems to be less problems with DirecWay (not that it doesn't have problems). Make sure you get service directly from DirecWay, as resellers such as Earthlink and Pegasus seem to have more problems (as an example, DirecWay customers get software upgrades much quicker).
A good site for info is DirecPC Uncensored.
- I can't imagine why, but v.90 modems pretty much can only go above 28.8 when they are analog only on one side.
Then you clearly have no understanding of how modems (modern modems) work.The whole "56k" thing is just an inventive trick. It works only because the ISP end is digital. That means the ISP hardware is transmitting pure digital crap to your modem in the form of discrete PCM codes which it knows will equal a specific analog value at the receiving modem -- and within some tolerance, it's consistant. It doesn't work in the other direction because the analog end cannot be sure of the exact PCM code to which it's analog output will coorespond and the conversion is highly inconsistant.
Gaming is not the only thing affected by high latency, as Jerry Pournelle wrote on his website:
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"View" Tuesday, October 2, 2001
I am now willing to believe that Microsoft and Earthlink and the Hughes satellite people all worked together to create the most frustrating system possible, guaranteed to drive everyone insane.
There is no other explanation of why this imbecility works the way it does. Clearly no one really tried to make this work and did any testing. Why should they?
The MSN home page, for instance, is designed for maximum problems with high latency systems: it wants about 50 requests for little files, and since there is a delay for each one, it takes literally about 4 minutes to download the MSN home page. Updates are just as bad. I suppose there is going to be some magical fix for all this when things are adequately cached, but I wouldn't count on it.
I have no choice but to sit there and wait for Microsoft to deliver its stupid home page with all the stupid little files, but once I get my updates I can be certain I will not go THERE again. Ye gods!
All right. Once it works it works fine. But ye flipping gods , the contortions I have to go through to get it going.
I don't know if the problems are hardware or software so I am going to get an Intel D815 system to install this on and try again.
A geosync satellite can't be "over Arizona". Such satellites can only be over the equator.
Being out in the boonies, I gave Starband a try. I struggled with it for a couple of months. It doesn't work.
My biggest complaint was the constant disconnections. I would disconnect around 10-20 times per day from 30 seconds to 4 hours. The best ping time I ever recorded was around 650 ms, making telnet and gaming unbearable. The customer support was useless.
When I cancelled the service, I was charged $499 just for canceling, not counting the many hundreds I paid for the installation and equipment! I refused to pay the cancellation fee. After 3-4 months and letters back and forth, VISA reversed the charge.
Hopefully fixed wireless or low-earth orbit satellites will be available someday. Until then, I'm paying through the nose for a T1.
Not sure about Starband, but I've been investigating DirecPC (DirecWay) and the best way to explain their FAP is the "leaky bucket" analogy.
Basically, a Satellite connection is essentially a 56k connection that's burstable to 350k. OK, it's not really that simple.
You have a water bucket, and you can get water out of it at 350k, but water is only trickling in at 56k. After the bucket is empty, you're only getting data as fast as the bucket is being refilled. If you wait 8 or 9 hours, your bucket is full again. If you use Satellite return, instead of phone-line return stream, your upstream bandwidth also counts toward your FAP.
DirecWay I think has a 180MB "bucket" during peak times. I've also seen DirecWay users, with properly tweaked connections, getting 1.5 megabit or greater download speeds (meaning that FAP will approach quickly!) rather than only 350k.
Go to www.broadbandreports.com and visit the satellite forums. People are constantly posting their current speeds, settings, etc, as well as their thoughts on the service.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
I live in an area without DSL, Cable or anything. So about a year or so ago when StarBand was first offered I made the plung. Initially it was kinda buggy and the latency was horrible, but I was able to hack the equipment and get a ethernet connection and share it amoung my systems. About 5 months or so ago they came out with a hardware upgrade that seems to keep signal a lot better, the latency doesn't seem as bad (cacheing? TCP param tuned). So to answer your question, yes it is good if you have no other alterantives, it beats modem connections, but isn't great for console functions or VPN (it works, just has some nasty clocking).
I had Starband installed last January. After they installed it I tested it and it was slower than my AT&T dial-up. I told them I was an engineer and could scientifically prove this was the case, so they should take it away. The installers refused, muttering something about the weather causing problems occasionally. The company that installed it refused to refund my money or uninstall it, so I complained to my bank - who contacted Visa and the Connecticut Consumer Protection agency. The company that installed the system wrote letters saying how I was committing fraud and intended to use the system for business illegally, etc. On advice from my bank, I just stated that I had asked to return the system after testing it and they refused to take it back. After 6 months of arguing, Visa decided in my favor and returned all my money. The whole process restored a little of my lost faith in the system, but it was torture. I highly recommend you don't install the system, but if you do pay with Visa and tell them in writing to take it back if it doesn't meet specifications the first day. Thank goodness we've got Comcast in my area now.
The web accelerator proxy service that runs on your windows machine to deal a little bit with the latency issues (800-900 ms ping times), also stops functioning on a regular basis and needs to be restarted manually.
Given the cost of the services (roughly $900 to start up given installation costs) and $69 a month, the only reason I use it is because I thought it was reliable before I signed up and I'm in a rural community. If I had know how spotty it was, I would have saved the money and just downloaded things from work instead.
About this time last year I was developing a driver for a popular Satellite Internet card. By accident, I discovered that large number of ISPs are not encrypting their customers' traffic. By dumping the MPE (DVB Multi Protocol Encapsulation) stream to a file and reading it with a hex editor (or just simply using 'strings') it was possible to read the contents of Web pages that people downloaded. That would include Email (MSN hotmail).
There's also an unencrypted Usenet feed on the Sirius satellite. It uses UDP multicasts and it's fairly easy to figure out the protocol (the text is in the clear).
I'm not a physicist, so I take your word for it. Probably the vector between most of the midwest and the satellite crosses over Arizona so it's an easy simplification. It works for me though, I knew how to aim my dish.
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
I know the wired internet isn't exactly secure, either, but this kind of thing seems like it would be an especially inviting target for snoopers.
Please note that bad latency does not only affect gaming. I used to have DirectPC and it made ssh sessions all but unusable. To experience this, try typing each shell command with your eyes closed until you hit enter, and only open them after you see the output.
Not only that, many modern webpages are riddled with many small images. Depending on how your browser parllelizes image requests, the latency can even affect your browsing experience too.
Seriously. Windows 95 was not designed with USB compatibility in mind.
(I have heard that there are third-party cards/soft that can make it work with USB, but I have never seen nor heard of a computer in which they worked.)
I went thru something similar some years back when my brother got me a USB webcam and I ended up upgrading all my win95 boxen to win98. It is by far the easiest solution, especially if you plan to ever purchase more USB devices.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
There's no two ways about it. All of the satellite systems suck. Don't take my word for it. Check the newsgroups alt.satellite.direcpc and alt.satellite.starband to see the comments of all the shiny happy people.
Basically, satellite bandwidth is too expensive to sell at a consumer-friendly price and make money. They put more effort into limiting their customers data volume as they put into improving their product. And even limiting people to 100 megs/session doesn't help DirecPC much. (Don't believe the 169 megs or whatever it is they've got listed on their website this week.) Prime time speeds are abysmal. You can plot a pretty nice curve. Fast as lightning at 3am, slow as molasses at 7pm.
Starband is far less straightforward with their restrictions. The P2P flavor of the month generally gets cut off at the knees as soon as they notice that people are sucking up bandwidth. If you really piss them off, they'll cut your speed until you call tech support to complain. Then you get a lecture about being a hog and have to promise to change your evil ways.
You'd be better off convincing a local ISP to start offering terrestrial wireless service.
Scot Finnie, who used to be on the winmag.com team (which got shut down last year) continues to send out a newsletter on which he has been reporting on his experience with Starband for nearly a year now. It is definitely worth checking out his newsletter archives http://www.scotfinnie.com/newsletter/backissu.htm to see what he has to say about the service, equipement, etc. If I remember correctly, he tried to test Pegasus (broadband satellite from DirectTV) but like most DirectTV customers was blown off.
Nebulink works with linux and supports most any DVB card (USB, PCI, ISA, whatever you want). If you are looking for an open solution (hey, this is slashdot!), that would fit the bill.
Also, unlike most other satellite internet services, Nebulink is upfront with their limitations. You'll get 8 gigs transfer maximum for $55 US/month at whatever speed is available on their satellite, whereas most other satellite services randomly throttle your speed. Not to mention the hardware costs are generally significantly lower (used take-away BUD $FREE, DVB adapter $199).
Your return trip times (read: web browsing) on Nebulink are faster since a modem uplink is lower latency than a satellite uplink.
I'm not advertising (well, maybe I am indirectly), I'm just a satisfied customer who wrote an onofficial (and badly in need of fixing) how-to!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
That's www.nebulink.net. :-(
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
If all you want to do is browse, StarBand is great. The bandwidth down is high, and up is ok. You can get it set up much faster than any other broadband solution (took me about 2 days to get a tech out).
The downside is that the latency is high (about 400 ms round trip) because the signal has to go from you to the satellite, down to their station, back up to the satellite, then back down to you. Games will not work.
You also must run a windows box with the StarBand software (this was not the case before the 360 model). In fact, you can only run Windows 98, ME, or 2000. Now you can probably use XP but they didn't support it at first. You could set up a Windows box to be a proxy server for other boxes, but the satellite modem doesn't work unless you have a windows box connected directly to it.
You also cannot run any type of server. That would violate the service agreement. The service is strictly for casual residential use.
You cannot run any VPN client or anything that uses IPSec (this was not the case with the model 180). You cannot use any port other than 80. They have no intention of changing this anytime soon.
I had very few outtages, and the service was rarely affected by the weather.
Once the use of the Model 360 was mandatory, and I couldn't use my VPN software, and I was running NT, and I have a server, I bailed and got ISDN. I did have to finish the remaining months of my 12 month contract.
So if you only want to browse, I say go for it. If you are a Slashdot reader, I would say that is unlikely, so go with something else. You should be able to ISDN anywhere.
Since CenturyTel is your new phone provider, you should go with their DSL service. They offer 512 kbps/256 kbps for about $40 per month.
I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and I am using their DSL service. It seems to be very reliable and I've hadn't had any major problems with it.
Since all geostationary satellites are over the equator, their positions are given by one simple longitude value. Therefore, when someone says that the position is "over Arizona", a reasonable interpretation is that it is at the same longitude as Arizona.
However, this turns out not to be true. Starband satellites are at 101 and 129 degrees West longitude. Referred to US geography, these longitudes correspond to the middle of Texas, and to a point in the Pacific ocean about 600 miles West of Los Angeles.
Ughgh.
I live in the hills above Riverside, California. We can't get DSL, cable or really anything useful. Technically we can get ISDN, but PacBell was a major pain in the butt about it.
We had 160K iDSL service for a few years until our provider (Zyan communications) went tits-up. Nobody else offers iDSL service in this area.
So, we got Starband.
I wouldn't recommend this thing to my worst enemy.
Download speeds can vary a great deal. Sometimes I get 100K/second, sometimes I get 2. Sometimes it can vary by that much in just a five minute period for accessing the same site.
Upload speeds suck. We are lucky to get 5k/second.
It goes down constantly, although usually just for a little bit here and a little bit there. Very annoying.
Gaming? Forget about it. P2P? Forget about it (they block it).
To clear up some of the misconceptions that have been spreading here... The only modem they support on the network now is the 360-series. The 360 has a USB and an ethernet port. Don't touch the USB with a ten foot pole. Using their USB port resulted in all kinds of short delays and needs to reboot the machine.
There are a bunch of "hacks" running around for modifying the old 180-series modem. Forget about it. The 180's are not allowed on the network anymore.
Just because it has ethernet, do not think of the ethernet port as anything other than a fast serial cable. In order to utilize the product, you *must* run their windows-based software.
If you just hook up to it and DHCP your way into supposed bliss, it is slower than a dial-up modem.
They use proprietary TCP/IP extensions (GRE and tunneling related stuff).
Normal internet sharing does not work properly. The NAT included with 2000 Server will kind of work, but it can be really flakey (I have run this same NAT with a cable modem and it worked flawlessly).
The starband edition of WinProxy is the only reliable way to share the connection. If you try anything else, you will just be unhappy.
Sending files via FTP will often result in the file to be corrupt on the receiving side. I don't know why, but it has a tendency to cut the first character of a file when I transmit it. When I take this machine to the office, I ftp with the same machine with no problems.
Using any sort of remote control software will make you want to off yourself. X through it sucks, as does VNC, terminal services, and Citrix. Citrix worked the best out of those (it has some built in latency-correction via local echo'ing, etc.).
The "real world" latency is often far worse than the theoretical sat latency. Don't even get me started on that.
Support is useless and rude and looks for excuses to not help you, since they simply want to get you off the line.
Whatever you are looking for, this isn't it. Stick with dial-up until hell freezes over and you can get something better.
I thought this was a news source. I had no idea it could be used for those that are to lazy to do a little research thier own. To find out if Linux supports your new device should take no more than 10 minutes on google. There are better locations for the lazy to get this info...... newsgoups would be a good start.
Instead of getting crappy sat service I would upgrade my local service to the business version. Every cable modem provider and DSL provider in my area offers faster upload and download speeds if you pay more. Sometimes it's a lot, but usually it's not too bad in comparison with the headaches you'd get from switch to sat service.
if you are in minnesota and point towards arazona you are pointing towards the equator.
I live in a rural area where DSL and cable aren't available (therefore not viable), and I researched both StarBand and DirecPC. Starband was my first choice because of the two way system (DirecPC was only one-way at the time). However, StarBand required a one year contract whereas DirecPC required no contract.
DirecPC has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I went from 2.4K per second on my dialup modem to an average of 80K per second on the download (the upload still requires a dialup modem, and we have peaked at 125K per second on very large downloads).
Via home networking, I was able to replace two separate ISP subscriptions (at $21.95 each) into one subscription ($50). We got a local ISP subscription for the uplink ($14.95) because DirecPC doesn't have a local dialup for our area. Our third user had to have his own dialup account anyway, so we didn't incur extra cost for this; it was already a fixed cost.
So in essence, we spend an extra $6 for broadband opposed to what we were spending on dialup. This part was a no brainer for our household. The equipment was $200, and the installation fee was waived (DirecPC was running a special).
On the downside, we do sometimes lose our satellite signal during severe weather or during extremely thick (think flash-flood-level torrents) rain. We unplug everything during severe weather anyway, so that's not an issue, and we've only lost the signal once in two months. Not too shabby.
By far the worst part of this is that DirecPC requires a Windows computer to connect to the satellite (read below for the exception). This is because of the proprietary USB signal used by the satellite modem. Since we have only one Windows user in the house, his Win98 computer acts as the server. And it does so very poorly. I typically have to resume a 5-6 megabyte download 30-40 times before getting it all, and some web pages fail to download completely on the first attempt. I have narrowed the problem down to Win98's ability to forward packets in a network.
There is a (slight) silver lining to this, and is the exception to requiring Windows. Helius.com provides a Red Hat 7.0 driver for $200 (one time expense), so I'm building a Red Hat server to replace the absolutely awful Windows server. Helius offers a free trial download for the driver so I can test it out before plunking down the money.
Aside from those two drawbacks, DirecPC has been well worth the money as opposed to complete dialup.
I was an "early adopter" of Starband, getting mine installed in Janurary of 2001 with a 180 modem. I switched over to the 360 when they dropped the requirement to extend service, and very thankful for that.
We (my son and I) wanted gaming, and as mentioned countless times, it definitely is NOT for that... not that some luckless gamers didn't try to join Serious Sam games I served up on my machine for home lan play.
Other shortcomings include packet loss which often causes hangs during downloading. The 360 effectively doubled my data rates, though, and greatly reduced the packet loss. It really depended on which satellite and hub you were on.
All in all, it's GREAT if you don't have alternatives, but as soon as cablemodems became available, we switched. Just don't get tied down with an obligation of more than a year. Also, take advantage of the tie-ins with Dish Network; I kept my satTV service, only getting "lifeline" cable (which worked out well, because I actually get full analog cable now - they had to remove the channel filters for the cablemodem service) for $15/month in addition to the $40 for 1.5mbs.
I've had Starband for about a year. Recently any P2P filesharing software is not working. Every time it rains I lose my connection. However, it's the only "broadband" available where I live.
I do not recommend ingesting Starband. However, if you must, heavy amounts of ketchup and/or other condiments may help improve the taste. I would also suggest nutritional supplements to help fulfill your dietary needs.
I do developement work out of my house in a very rural area over Starband, it seems to work fairly well. I get up t0 200kbs down and 50-60kbs up. I seem to get good signal quality in any weather. I am able to host an instance of a development web application using the static IP address of the satellite modem, Starband blocks port 80 in, but I use other ports. Also I am able to use VPN with the static IP so I can access my clients networks. In general I find the Starband fine for telecommuting work.
Pro's
- Works anywhere.
- easily networked with proxy server.
- static IP address.
Con's
- Latency, no VOIP or gaming.
- port 80 blocked by Starband.
I think Starband is great since the phone companies and cable companies have no interest in providing high speed access in rural areas, Starband gives me freedom from the city.
Mark
While it's not usually the cheapest option, and you sometimes have to be persistent to get it, I blissfully used BellSouth ISDN for years (when it was my only real option). It was simply worth the cost to have the quality connection. Universally availible, 64Kbps or 128Kbps, low-latency, instant-on connection all the time, every time. Generally no operating system restriction. I actually used one 64Kbps channel for data, and the other one for my home office line and wrote off the cost of the connection on my taxes. When I had a really big download, I would bring up the second 64Kbps channel, but for basic email & web browsing, a single channel was usually sufficient.
BTW...Cisco did me the greatest favour in the world by having a special on the Cisco 804 ISDN router for $250 a few years back; you can usually find these cheap on eBay, etc. With NAT and IOS ACLs, it was a reasonable firewall/gateway for the home network.
Seems to me that this would be better that a moderately faster connection that you cannot count on.
I am living in a bandwidth-challenged community, and looked into Starband as an alternative, and luckily had a customer who subscribed so I could see it in practical use. My beef with it was as followed:
:), at least no more than your average DSL connection.
1. High, unpredictable latency. Forget gaming.
2. $700 price tag. $500 for the gear, and $200 for the FCC monkey to point it at the satellite. Forget doing it yourself, the pointing is simply too precise to be able to eyeball it.
3. USB interface only. This makes it difficult to share access with other computers on your network, short of using the lame Internet Sharing from M$.
4. Flaky connectivity, packet loss, and web page timeouts.
5. All for $70/mo, last I checked.
In other words, no way.
Earlier, I made a post here on Slashdot about a project I was planning on setting up between here and where I work. Well, it works. At a distance of 4.5 miles away I am able to leech off the company's T1 at full speed, with only 2.2ms of latencty point to point between the dishes. It was built entirely from off-the-shelf gear, like Orinoco cards, a couple of junker Pentiums running Linux acting as wireless routers, and two run of the mill 2.4GHz high gain parabolic grid antennas (the same type they use for wireless cable service in rural areas, I hear), all for just under $1000. It has been surprisingly reliable with virtually no dropouts and almost no packet loss (unless a bird lands on my transmitter
If you are within sight of an area that can get DSL or cable, I highly recommend looking into this option. The up front cost may be a little prohibitive, but you would be pretty deep in the hole as it is if you went with satellite.
-R
My house is half a mile up a dirt road up in the Sierra Nevadas in rural California. DSL and cable are just never going to happen here. I'm so far from the telco CO switch that even dial-up sucks. I cannot even get a consistent 28.8 dial-up connection; 21k-24k is more typical.
I have a Starband 360, which is their latest model "modem". This comes with an option for either ethernet or USB connection to your computer, and I opted for ethernet because I was told, off the record by the installer, that Linux might work with the ethernet connection.
And indeed Linux does work with it, kind of. As far as Linux is concerned, the Starband modem looks just like a DHCP server on the other end of an ethernet interface. There's really nothing to configure other than plugging in your ethernet line and running dhcpcd (or pump, for you Debian users).
This setup works, but very slowly. Ping times are anywhere from 1.5 to 3 seconds, and this kind of default Linux setup does nothing to either deal with the latency issues or take advantage of the fat pipe offered by the connection.
Over a period of months I tried numerous strategies to compensate. I installed Smoothwall as my gateway machine, and turned on proxy serving to take advantage of squid as a caching server. I tried fiddling with some basic network configurations, like window size. None of these things made more than an incremental difference.
After several months I realized that I was always going to have high latency, and under Linux I was never going to achieve transfer speeds above 2k per second. What I basically had was a dedicated connection to the Internet that behaved like a sluggish 14.4 modem.
As much as I love Linux and Open Source, I am above all a pragmatist. I'm not shy about using Windows when it's the right tool for the job. And in this situation, Windows has an advantage.
Starband licenses a software package from Netgain that provides so-called "TCP/IP acceleration". Frankly I'm not sure what it does, but there are a number of possibilities I can imagine (extreme window sizes, multi-plexed downloads, etc.). The point is that it does it in a proprietary fashion, and it's available only for Windows. You can't beat the latency; nothing gets around the fact that every packet must travel 44,000 miles. But you can take advantage of the capacity with the right software.
The best approach is to run Windows 2000 as your gateway machine, and to use the Starband software (which in turn uses Netgain's software). If Netgain could be persuaded to support Linux, things might be different, but right now Windows 2000 is the way to go.
So my current configuration has a home network of 5 computers routed to the Internet through a 6th computer, which is running Windows 2000 and Starband's software. By the way, setting up a gateway server under Windows 2000 is trivial. Under the "properties" tab for the outbound network interface you simply turn network connection sharing on. Then Windows 2000 autmoaticaly runs a dhcp server on the internal interface.
The latency is still there. And that pretty much knocks out online gaming. I'm a big fan of "Age of Empires/Kings/Conquerors". That gaming system is set up to check ping times for network gaming, and throw everyone into a "wait for the connection to return" mode whenever ping times are above a certain level. Combined with satellite latency, that makes the game pretty much unplayable over the Internet. I'm sure other games would be similar.
And using ssh is pretty painful. I'm always typing several words ahead of what I see on the screen, or several vi commands ahead of what has been rendered, when using ssh this way.
Web browsing is not particularly fast. What matters is not the size of a web page, but the number of files on a web page. Each file is a session that must be initiated, and latency kills you on session initiation. So ironically a page with a few really huge graphics will load faster than a page with lots of little tiny graphics. Still, web browsing isn't any slower than it would be over, say, 28.8 dial-up. In other words it's better than any of my alternatives.
Tranfer rates rock. On downloads I'm getting anywhere from 20k per second to 80k per second. I have no qualms about downloading anything just because of size. The largest thing I've downloaded is Red Hat 7.2 iso's, and while it took a while it was reasonable. Upstream my experience isn't quite as good, but it's more than adequate. I'm often uploading batches of digital photos to my website, and on large file transfers I'm getting 10k - 20k per second. More than enough to keep me happy.
Whatever packet mangling Netgain does occaisionally causes problems. I've had sites that I can't access because of this. That's a rare problem, however, and using an external proxy like Anonymizer seems to take care of the problem.
There are also times with the latency foils secure connections. I've had SSL sessions fail because, presumably, the server on the other end is looking for a speedier response than my client is capable of giving over satellite.
Oh, and there are of course the weather problems. There's nothing quite like getting up on the ladder in the morning in the freezing cold to brush snow off of the satellite dish so that I can restore my Internet connection.
So I keep a dial-up account as a fall-back. It's good for those bad weather days, those fiesty SSL connections that just won't work over satellite, and the occaisional urge for online gaming.
Overall it's a pretty good value. The monthly Starband charge is $69.99 a month, but if you're going to go to the trouble of using Starband you might as well get satellite TV as well; it's all one installation visit and all one installation charge.
So for around $100 a month I'm getting an adequate web browsing connection, a great file transfer connection, 150 channels of TV, and 12 channels of audio (one of the best parts: no commercials, no DJ, just music). Add $15 a month for a backup dial-up account. That's a total of $115 a month. Even in an urban area with solid DSL I'd probably be paying $75+ a month for comparable Internet and cable TV services.
Personally, I'm willing to pay the $40 a month with slightly degraded service, and being forced to run a Windows 2000 server, for the privelege of living where I do. I work from home most of the time, and I'm not going to complain too loudly about a technology that allows me to maintain a high tech professional position from such a remote location. For all the gripes we might have, we have to have some sense of perspective: I'm doing what would have been unthinkable 5 years ago, and unimaginable 10 years ago.
-Mark Stone
s t r i d e r _a_t_ s t a r b a n d _d_o_t n e t
I'm paying $400 per month for my ISDN. ISDN sucks.
The above is not worth reading.
I'm sure most of you have already thought of this but what the hell. Go toDSL reports satellite forum.
It used to work quite well plugged right into your router via Ethernet. Then they switched to the "new, improved" model 360 router, which would, as far as I could tell, randomly screw with packets. TCP/IP handled this gracefully, of course, but it brought the performance back down to roughly modem speed with the added bonus of extra-terrestrial latency times.
But then, a few months ago, they decided that they would stop allowing packets that didn't go through their Windows-only proxy software at all. So we completely lost network connectivity for a week or so while we cobbled together the spare parts around the house to set up a Windows box.
So if you want to use Linux, MacOS, Solaris, or basically anything not Windows, keep on looking.
Oh, and high latency is a bitch when trying to use telnet. Damn speed of light.
--AC
You might try calling your TelCo and tell them you can't send faxes on your phone line. Telephone companies don't seem to care about modem speeds but they seem to care about fax machines. Having a tech come out and fix my "fax machine" brought me up from 26.4k to 45k.
I've been a Starband user for over a year. Given that I bought some acreage out in the middle of no man's land a couple of years ago, this was the only solution outside of dial-up.
... run!!! Keep in mind that for the uplink to work your small dish is having to hit a spec in the sky many miles up. Most of the discussions that I have seen from disgruntalled users has been the result of poor installations.
.... until I remember that it isn't everyone who can be hitting the Internet while sitting by a campfire and watching the stars overhead .
Like any option, this has its benefits as well as its drawbacks. For me the benfits were pretty simple. 1) It allowed me to avoid some terrible dial-up options. 2) It has allowed me to place my home 'network' on the Internet with out much difficulty, 3) there is a Proxy/Firewall (WinProxy) that is affordable and reasonably functional and keeps my kids off of content that I want them to avoid.
There have been two 'modems' that have been used with this service. The first was the 180 model that I actually liked. It allowed me to throw a Linksys router in the loop to get my network on the net. With the newer 360, the only option (for me) is to have it connected to a Windows box that is pretty well dedicated to that function. All of my other boxes router through there. I was just about ready to drop the service after my horrible experience upgrading from a well functioning model 180 to the 360. After fighting with it for two months (almost a year ago) the system is now reliable.
If you need the system for Interactive work (gaming, chats, etc.) then the service will annoy you to no end. If most of your work can be done in batched modes (off-line mail retrieval throughout the day while you are at clients, or large FTP dumps) then you will be happy.
My biggest suggestion is that during installation make sure you get someone who is testing the sat signal strength with some decent equipment while during the line-up. If they are doing it with line-of-site or just looking at meters off the web
Overall, when compared to my alternate choice this Starband is a no brainer. However, I do miss the response time of my 500K+ async DSL
If you guys want to see a system thats way cooler than this ... and totaly standards based check out these guys ... www.aramiska.net ... the european but still way cool ...
For those interested in the experiences others with DirecWay/PC the forums on http://www.copperhead.cc are pretty good.
I have it on the wife's Windows box and use ICS to share across the network.
The biggest problem I have with it though is that connections seem to hang constantly on Linux, and I've tryed multiple Linux distros to no avail. I've tryed alternatives to ICS on 3 different versions of Windows with no luck
FreeBSD sped along fine but Linux is horrible. Its based on the site your viewing not the content in the page. About 25 percent of the pages I visit daily load only halfway and never load completely. Some of these pages are only 15k!
As far as speed, I'm a 2nd shifter in EST, but I can typically get 50KB to 150KB download speeds unless the connection hangs on Linux.
It is not possible that it MUST be directly connected. The nature of the ethernet standard ensures this is not necessary.
There is no way for the computer or modem to tell if it is directly connected, or connected via several switches/bridges/etc.
It seems a lot of people are claiming problems with disconnection/weather/etc.
Solutions: This is satellite folks. It's radio. There is a wealth of knowledge out there about how to get new amplifiers/bigger dish/etc. I'm not suggesting you go outside any legal limits, or try to overpower things... but as with all satellite stuff.. if you are having trouble getting through weather, or with weak signal, you need to amplify and/or get a bigger dish.
Satellite Internet usually provides respectable speeds, but the latency is terrible. Speed is the raw bandwidth number (usually measured in megabits per second) while latency is your ping time, for example. There's plenty of bandwidth on those birds but regardless of how fast they run, you still have to send every packet into space and back down to earth. Since the satellite is over 20,000 miles away, that's a pretty long delay (many hundreds of milliseconds).
If you need the connection for file transfer (FTP, Gnutella, etc.) you'll be fine because you're doing big streaming transfers -- it doesn't really make a difference if your multi-megabyte download starts and ends half a second later than it would using a terrestrial connection. Email is no problem because it happens in the background. Web pages will be a little sluggish because you have to wait for all the HTTP transactions to complete. If you do any amount of interactive work, though -- such as telnet or SSH, where you're sending and receiving one character at a time while you type -- the lag will be absolutely unbearable.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
You were the "First" customer just like me, and yes, at first it did blow. The 180 was horrible. That's why Dish Networks replaced EVERY SINGLE SYSTEM it made with the newer, better one (Model 360).
They never "stopped making you buy a PC w/it". That was the Skyblaster model sold exclusively at Radio Shack (or Radio CRAP! as you would no doubt call it). And, they introduced the models at the same time.
And Dish does not own it and is not "selling" it back to Starband, it was a joint partnership. Dish is just backing out of the partnership, and not selling the Starband. This will get Tech Support back to Starband, where it will no doubt improve.
With the latest software, and the latest hardware, both of which are given to you free of charge, Starband is a great solution for those who are looking for high speed web surfing, which is what it advertises.
If you are a "power user", want to do mucho P2P, hack your high school, or spam a ton of people with get rich schemes, I would agree with Mr. Coward and suggest getting a local wireless solution. I don't live in the range of any Wireless, so I have to use Starband.
In the future, do some more research before flipping a lid. I can't believe you got modded *up* for that post... And if you want to flame something, go ahead and flame the fact that there aren't any Linux drivers for Starband yet, even though it's "supported"...
I have been using DirecPC for about 1 year. Lookups take a long time so it makes things kind of sluggish. Mostly download times are pretty decent. Upload times are advertised at 128 KB/sec. I get about 40kb up. Other than that, the major issue is Linux. With DirecPC, they do not support Linux. This is because their proprietary software (which authenticates you to their system) runs only on windows 98, 2K, and ME. This sucks bad, but if you want high (well, higher than dial-up) in the rural areas, you have to go with it. It beats all other options, but the price is high.
This seems like an appropriate place to ask a question that's been rattling around in my head for a while...
;)
How would one go about setting up two connections from the same linux box, then specifying which one to use for which connections.. ie: A 14.4 modem for low-bandwidth, low-latency, plus a dish for high bandwith high latency. Unfortunately the best use of this would be browsing of course but that uses a bi-directional connection, which would make life a serious pain.
In essence, it'd be nice to 'telnet-eth0 machine.work.com' or 'ftp-eth1 games.downloads.org'.. obviously that's not the synatx, but how would you set it up.. it's got to be hackable SomeHow...
Two ideas which spring to mind are use of a package-splitting protocol (ATM springs to mind, but I know zilch about it, it just sounds familiar) and/or a friendly remote server on a high-bandwidth line which has a intermediary-server (this could theoretically solve the http-send/recv dilemma, I think)..
Ok, enough rambling.. anyone actually know what they're talking about re: this?
Cheers,
DMG
I tried this, and my eyes are still closed! How do you see the output with your eyes closed?
I used to use DirecPC, which is like Starband, before I got something faster.
It worked really well, but there was a second or so lag time between request and the page loading. It doesn't work at all with games or VPNs, but for regular browsing and downloading, it sure beats a modem.
If it is all you have access to, I would recommend it.
my brother was using Starband through a Linux firewall I set up for him when Starband shut down his connection. they claimed that they detected "uncompressed" traffic across his uplink. this was because the Linux firewall was not running their proprietary Windows network driver. now he's had to replace the Linux firewall with a Windows firewall to regain access. pity. he's 40 miles from the nearest city and has no alternative for high-speed internet.
...and that's about it. I can't get Cable OR DSL where I live, so my only remaining choices were ISDN (yeah, right), satellite, or a second phone line.
My experience is that Starband rocks at web pages and sucks at almost everything else. Download speeds are awesome. Upload speeds are disappointing, but better than phone. Web-surfing isn't quite as fast as I expected, but it IS fast. Images on web-pages constantly refuse to load, but only when my firewall is running, so I'm assuming that the problem is with the firewall and not Starband. I don't game, so I can't address that issue.
I have heard that there are bandwidth restrictions/monitoring. Look into it if you consistantly do more than just web-surf. But then, you should look into that with ANY service you consider (that's how I discovered that ISDN is a cruel joke...).
And when it rains heavily... go find a book to read. But then, if there is a heavy storm in the area, should you be on the computer anyway?
Dark Icon
The latency is horrible. It has to travel over 44 thousand miles before it gets to the POP. They are seriously oversubscribed, so my requests for web pages time out half of the time. Thank God I'm getting my cable modem this afternoon. I currently have my sat modem connected to an ethernet port with internet connection sharing enabled. It works well, but it is ungodly slow, even taking into account the latency. There are times I get pissed and just use a dial-up.
Good News! There has been a USB update and support package for Win95 That supports USB fully. I thought this might be helpful!!
You can always update Windows as well to something like Me, 2000 Pro, or XP Pro. Getting the USB package is the cheapest way though. Try it.
http://directv.direcway.com/main/index.html I have been using this service for 1 month now with mix results. I have seen the latencies that many have mentioned, although those can partially be mitigated through the use of a Caching DNS Server on the client side. Download speeds have been pretty good 400 kb/s - 1800 kb/s. The FAP (Fair Access Policy) also seems less aggressive/punitive than Starband's policy.
We all know that with normal networks the phrase "requires windows98..." in conjunction with a standard ethernet connection usually means "To run our idiot software that sets up your TCP/IP settings correctly". So all of us Unix users can just throw that disc in the trash and configure the TCP/IP settings manually because a) we actually know what we're doing and b) we prefer to do it ourselves anyways.
Well, THIS IS NOT THE CASE WITH STARBAND!! The actual satellite transmission rate (at least for downstream bandwidth) is actually 50K. Starband requires Windows98 in order to run some sort of compression software that is able to get the 350K downstream rates.
So what I discovered (thankfully not too late) is that yes you can use linux with Starband but:
I wound up cancelling my order and going with PacBell DSL instead which has horrible rates and took three months to correct an arial wiring problem.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
The decrease in speeds on your dialup could be the results of a DAML (Digital Added Main Line) being placed on the line.
DAMLs are used to split a single copper pair to handle more than one phone line. LECs use this when it's too expensive to run new copper into an area. This absolutely kills any DSL variant and will significantly decrease dialup speeds. You many want to contact your local repair and have them test the line.
What we've run into is that most ILECs will tell you they only have to provide voice quaility service and you're TSOL.
You may be able to request a clean copper pair to be run by your telco but the price may be high. Though from what I've seen on the satalite costs it may be a reasonable expenditure.
After that, you should look at multilink or "shotgunning". Your ISP may not offer it but it's worth the phone call to check.
DirecPC has an everchanging latency. depending on the kind of modem you use, you can use either an ethernet port or USB. some of the USB ones can be modified to use Ethernet (there's a port inside that the USB part plugs into)
best ping time you're going to see over satellite is about 500ms, more like 800ms average. pages load quickly, but there's that pause with every click. games dont work very well over it, but some games are actually playable. the user experience isnt very good though. I've seen 80k sustained downloads over the standard package.
downside as previously mentioned is that you are limited to a certain amount of data for certain parts of the day before they chop your download speeds considerably.
We have a client who uses Starband for internet access since it is their only option. The ping to the gateway is about 750ms on a good day, and every tenth packet or so drops. The client tries to pickup email via pop3 but the software will timeout the connection 9 of 10 times. Yes, it literally takes 10 tries to get it to *start* picking up email. The downlink has been as high as 300KB/s, but during peak usage hours has also been as low as 900b/s, if you can get on at all. If you use too much bandwidth, as defined by Starband, they will "FAP" your connection. FAP is fair access protocol. Basically they cut your connection if you download too much in so much time. I am pretty sure that "too much" and "so much time" are different depending on the day and/or hour of use, or rather, that is how it seems. --g33k
Heh.. you should pseudo-contract to people to set this up for them.. if I didn't have cable available I'd pay you $100+cost to buy the parts and set it up for me (and yeah, I'd sign a piece of paper saying if whoever I've got it pointed at got mad, it's my problem not yours ;)...hell, I'd pay 150$ if you let me watch and learn. Sounds like a beauty of a hack, and you could make a pretty penny doing it for people who don't have the time to pick up the know-how.
DMG
Obhack: Old Garage-Door opener innards+ screwdriver/soldering iron + coffee-pot = wireless wakeup self-bribe... god I hate mornings.
Everyone here is talking about alternatives to DSL and cable. There ARE other alternatives! You'd be surprised how many rural areas have ISP's throwing wireless repeaters on the tops of grain silos or whatever else they can find. Latency will be WAYYYYYYYYYYY lower. On our wireless network, we have around 20-30ms to anywhere in our network. Max of 200 on bad days.
We've upgraded a few people from Starband, and from what I can gather, the equipment cost is about the same.
I'd shop around for a local ISP doing wireless (and doing it right, i.e. has an RF guy on staff and not a bunch of cat5 jockeys trying to crimp rp-tnc connectors on lmr-400) before I settled with Starband.
Now we have a T1, and it's sure a lot better. Heck, my DSL at HOME is better. So if you _must_ have a dish connection, be prepared to have lossy connections. Almost any other high-speed solution would be better.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
If you're in a rural area (as I am), you don't have IP over cable, your telco sucks, ISDN is too expensive, and you'll never get DSL. In that case satellite is your ONLY option for any kind of broadband access.
I've had Starband for about two years now, and I'm happy with it. You'll be happy with it, too, if you resign yourself to the following:
1. Satellite's bane, high latency. No real-time gaming!
2. Slow https/ssl/vpn connections. VPN is very nearly useless over Starband. They claim they will "support VPN shortly", but that just means they will support VPN using their chosen single brand of VPN hardware, which of course means that whatever VPN server you're connecting to still won't work.
3. You will REQUIRE a Windows PC (preferably running W2K for any kind of stability) in order to run Starband's special software, and to run WinProxy as a transparent proxy for your other machines. Until someone gets around to reverse-engineering the protocol of Starband's software, you CANNOT hook it up directly to a Linux machine. If you do, it will be about as slow as a phone line. You will also want to put VNC (free!) on the PC to be able to administer the software from your Linux box.
That's about all. Like I said, if you're in a rural area, you have no other choice, and you can be happy as long as you realize the limitations.
Actually, this is a valid question. Try getting a straight answer from Starband/DirecTV about anything pre-purchase and you'll be given whatever answer will get you to buy the system.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
In order to get all of your web traffic accelerated, one could use port forwarding software to map all of the incoming traffic onto port 80. http://nucleo.freeservers.com/portfwd/tools.html contains a list of several programs that will do this, including several availible under the GPL.
I'm looking into piggybacking off a cable or DSL connection, since it is available in an area about 8 miles away. All I need to do is find someone who will let me set up service to their home, and then work out the wireless networking part. Don't know squat about wireless yet, but this might be an option if you are in an area like mine.
I used StarBand for quite a few months. All I had was problems with it. A cloud would move in the way, and I lose my access. Most of the time is was timeouts due to the length of time it took to transmit across it. If you just want to quickly receive large files, it may be for you. If you plan on using it for web surfing, or god forbid any programs that require a constant connection, then it is not for you.
Why are you using a fairly new Linux OS and still using a 7 year old and outdated MS OS. Spend the 50 bucks for an upgrade to WIN98, and get better USB support.
There is no problem at all with the compression (really an acceleration proxy) under Windows 2000. The only problem is that it's an application program, rather than a service, so you need to make sure someone is logged on if you're using Win2k box as a NAT router (which also works fine as long as you set the proxy server on the client boxes correctly). See Starband Users for more info.
My experience with CenturyTel has been great. I live in rural western Oregon, in a town of 1500 people, and last year they brought DSL in here and to surrounding towns, even to a town of 100 people about 10 miles away. $40 per month for 512/256 which works great, high quality service.
Before giving up and going with the satellite, call the local office and ask them if they have plans to bring DSL to your area, or at least have a service guy come out and check out your connection. At least here, they do a great job of checking/repairing lines and upgrading equipment and services.
I guess you mean this board is only for Microsoft bashing...? Fuck that, let people ask valid tech questions that they need answers to, especially if it might save others time/frustration...Anything so that I don't have to see Buffalo Bill mentioned every god damn day...
They're getting 12km hops using solar powered relay stations.
You don't need many neighbors cooperating with you to hop all the way to a T3 or better with this.
Seastead this.
but my copy of Windows doesn't support USB
I think you mean your computer doesn't support USB, I know of no version of win9x and up that don't support or atleast can't be made to support usb.
Try to find anyone but starband for service...
Cons: Their billing department sucks, they somehow claim they where not billing me for 6 months. So what do they do they bill me 7 times in one day, overdrew the shit out of my checking account. I call to talk to billing, of course they could provide no explanation.
The web accellerator bullshit they have you load does not work so I cannot really get maximum through put.
Only support windows, big drawback
Most software will not work at full speed due to the use of a proxy.
I am moving to a location soon that has cable and wireless available so I will be ridding myself of it. I can honestly say I am not going to miss it.
Got Code?
I'm an IT consultant. I've helped install/oversaw at least 6 of these installations. Here is what I can tell you:
1. It has a high latency. 900-2000 ms. It depends more on your geographic location than you think. This number is for kentucky installations.
2. It only has about 24 outgoing channels. This means that you can only maintain about 24 concurrent TCP sessions. This is why business users randomly get "This page cannot be displayed." when they are using the ethernet connection off the Starband 360. This problem was much worse using ethernet on the 180. this is perhaps why they chose USB instead of ethernet -- their software seems to try to deal with it, and it does help.
3. Tech support is clueless.
Software works best on W2k, with USB. Its just plain more stable with USB drivers and their software.
4. Running even modest services (WWW, FTP, etc) is a no-no. At least one client has had their service turned off for days because they were running IIS.
5. You *will* have strange problems at some point or another, but (5 out of the 6) have had the problems resolved in 1-2 days. You spend about 5-10 hours doing what they ask, only to find out it was something on their end. Happens about once every six months for most of my clients that use this service.
It is my overall impression that its just not a very good service. It "feels" like a modem, but at least you can get apt-get update done in a reasonable amount of time. The pricetag is also a little hefty for my taste.
Wendell
In some states ISDN is extremely expensive. Here in Michigan my partner has an ISDN circuit in his house and stays connected 24x7 for days at a time. The bill $ 60.00 per month. Not cheap but not too expensive either. BTW that does not include the ISP account (since we own it). But remember that the ISDN circuit can replace your voice phone line too if you want it too so that may lower the additional money per month. Anyway LOL it's not too fun. I can also vouch for the latency as I am talking to someone who right now is looking at paying me a lot of money to get rid of the latency from their sat connection.
Cringely covered this in an article /. covered a while back. Basically, once installed with the Windows software, he was able to move it over to a Linksys router with no problems.
It is an awful internet service, provided with lousy customer service, tecnical support, and lame software... Even professionally installed, it is intermittent @ best... considering things like, clouds, rain or their ability to provide reliable anything... I just finished paying out a contact for 12 months, after deciding to not use their service after a few months. Why do they suck though??? I mean really suck???? Well, in a nutshell, I wouldn't sign an additional (extending service) 12-month contract to comply with a required upgrade so they turned off the service!! I simply couldn't agree to a new contract for 12 months, after using the service for a bit... I still had to pay for the full year though. It was cheaper to pay it then to have the attorney deal with it, or let it effect my credit. I have the dish and the modem and the dish network box that I actually own sitting in the garage... If you can't get DSL, Cable, or ISDN, I still wouldn't recommend starband. Smoke signals are more reliable, and 56 k is simply less of a hassle. The dish network itself wasn't too bad though, basically the same as cable, not much of a difference in price. Keep in mind that when it's raining is when you might sit around watching movies or surfing the net!!!
They are one of the few I know of who provide a linux router with a tcp acceleration layer. (IP/SkyX they call it)
If centurytel offers DSL in the area at all, get 6 people around you to sign up for it for 1 year. You have to sign a contract, but they will bring you DSL service if you have 6 people that want to do the same. I have used Centurytel for DSL for the past year and a half, and well, haven't had any problems. My parents moved 6 miles outside of city limits last month, and Centurytel told them that they will need to find 6 people to sign up with them to get DSL in their area. They found the 6 people 2 weeks ago, and guess what, they get DSL starting Monday morning. Check around, you should be able to get faster service from them. I found that even with their dial-up services, I was able to get quite a bit of customer support from them and they brought me back from a 28.8 connection to upwards of 49 and 50K.
Just my 2c worth of assistance
Their are only 2 satelite providers offering broadband access. Dishnetwork is one, DirectPC(a.k.a DirecTV/Hughes)as the other. Technically they are virtually the same. The only problem(s) with satelite broadband are the cost of equipment($300-400+, install add'l) and the inherent latency.(for gaming, this is waay bad). Broadband satelite dishes must be mounted 6' or higher due to risk from microwaves. Good Luck
(and no i'm not a coward, just lazy)
I am one of the original 'pilot users' for the starband system since September 2000. For an initial lump sum they sent me a Dell 500 MHz Celeron system complete with two pci cards installed for the satellite dish. For the first several months it was fantastic, except for the upload speeds (2-3k). As soon as they started to develop their 180 modem for the system things started going a bit downhill, speeds got slower, connection was inconsistent etc. Rumor was that we'd get the offer to upgrade to the 180 modem...that rumor floated until they started to develop the 360 modem. Then the rumor was that we were going to be the beta testers for those, we were the guinea pigs after all. Well, the average new subscriber was being issued the new 360 modem and the network started slowing down a bit further. We were told that we would be getting upgraded sometime this past winter and the network became nearly useless. Outdated cluster software was blamed, so they moved us to a new cluster. The network became comepletely useless, couldn't even download an entire weather radar jpg. Well, somehow one of the other testers wrestled a new server address from tech support. Several of us jumped immediately to the new server. That was about 8 weeks ago and things have been somewhat stable again. A few important points: I am still using the PCI cards, I am still not getting good upload speeds. The upload speeds are better than they used to be, but nowhere near 150k, hell, nowhere near 56k even.
Things you won't do with starband:
VPN
Voice/Video conferencing
Surf during a heavy thunderstorm
Anything fast other than ports 80 and 119 traffic
Online games
Get good tech-support
Run an Microsoft-free network.
There is no Linux support whatever. I run Linux on the 'big' conmputer and the Dell is still the server running Windows.
What you *CAN* do with Starband:
Surf like a madman
Download (from http) like a madman
Stream Audio (via http) like a madman
Cruise high-speed usenet until your eyes bug out
You've guessed it, I'm a bug-eyed madman now. That being said, am I unhappy with Starband? I am happy enough that I am still using it at a discounted 'pilot user' rate now. When it is working, it's a whole lot better than a dialup. I have no other options here at all, and the phone lines are even nasty here. Overall, Starband has been good to me. But at times it has been very, very bad to me.
Moonelf
Give me ambiguity, or give me something else!
I bought starband one year ago. I had lots of installation problems. Once it finally got working (no thanks to starband) it was reliable, but performance was so poor that I can only recommend it for those who have no other choice.
The big killer is the latency. Telnet is almost unuseable. I was unable to get Microsoft VPN to work at all. SMTP and POP just crawled, several minutes to see if your mailbox is empty.
HTTP is the only service that works, and it relies on some software accelleration kludges that intermittently fail, and just don't work at all on certain sites. Secure sites (with https) often fail. More than half of my favorite merchant sites were unuseable.
Their customer relations is truly abominable. I have never experienced such bad treatment. They sent me an email offer of an optional upgrade to a new modem. When I did not accept this offer I got a second email that accused me of failing to comply with the contract and threatened to disconnect my service if I did not upgrade to the new modem immediately. When I went to the website to request the new modem be shipped, I found I was required to agree to an involuntary 1 year extension of the term of my contract. My complaints and emails were not answered.
If you have any choice at all, stay away from Starband.
... if there was any way for me to get a cable or ISDN connection I'd have gone for that instead. I really had no choice, other than the blazingly slow 14.4 connection I can get out here with dial-up.
Pluses:High bandwidth, cool looking dish on the roof.
Minuses: Rather expensive, extra high latency, slow FTP, brief outages when the sun gets behind the satellite at certain times of the year, occasional server problems at Starband, max connection speed may depend on which cluster you're assigned to.
I've used SecureCRT under X with Wine before... has anyone tried their 'optimization' software in X with Wine before?
-io
Well, Echosphere actually, but that's academic. I have an opinion on starband service. But first, let me clarify.
Dishnetwork still owns Starband, but they have made a change in how it's marketed and sold. We do not currently sell or install the systems. We refer all starband sales to retailers.
Let me give you the basics on how this works. The starband equipment costs $549. A professional installation is required for $199. No, you can't even buy the hardware unless you're willing to pay for professional installation and sign a one year contract. Disconnect before your one year is up, you owe Dishnetwork $240.
The starband service costs $69, plus a $5.00 access fee if you don't have any basic Dishnetwork package. If you sign up for the America's Top 150 programming package ($40.99/month) you get the starband service for $60.00.
The official transfer rates are "up to 400 kbps" downstream and "up to 50 kbps" upstream. The problem is with the latency, the Clarke band, where the Satellite is located, is 22,500 miles up. Your request for data has to travel up to the satellite and back down to the uplink center where the internet gateway is, the site reponds and sends the information back to the uplink center where it is sent up to the satellite and then back down to your computer. 22,500 miles, 4 times, you have a minimum latency of 483 ms. If you're searching the web, or chatting, there's no real problem, but for most types of online gaming, this is not acceptable. You might as well have a string with two tincans on it.
Unless you're in the boondocks you will have a better, and cheaper option available. Your own personal batcave, out in the Mojave desert might be the ideal spot to get starband. If you live in a city, get cable or dsl.
Trust me. I know of what I speak.
No, I completely understand how modern modems work -- I just type too fast and never proofread. I was alluding to this with the situation of dropping the PRI circuit, thus making calls analog, digital, analog. Sorry for the inconvienence.
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