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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!
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.
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 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."
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
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.
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
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?
BNL, Born on a Pirate Ship (1998)
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.
Actually, this is probably not true. I worked for a satellite network service provider who offered a commercial (site/citywide) version of this for folks who couldn't get a landline to their town for reasonable price.
.5 seconds and it _seemed_ much more responsive. Same for web page loads--no more waiting 5 seconds for each one to start.
Most commonly used network protocols do not consider the minimum 500ms latency involved in communicating via geosynchronous satellite. The signal goes up to the satellite, down to the hub center, out to the Internet, back to the hub center, back up to the satellite, and back down to your dish; light and radio signals can only move so fast.
We "solved" the problem by supplying turnkey Linux servers with TCP proxy software (vendor will remain unnamed, lest I get zapped for disclosure beyond public company documents) and all outgoing traffic was routed through this. It would hijack the TCP connections and use some kind of satellite-specific protocol when talking to our data center. It broke some of the strict semantics of TCP, going to a NAK-based protocol and increasing the window size. By clustering ACKs, using forward error correction, and increasing window size it allowed higher throughput on TCP connections and made terminal sessions just about tolerable, the local echo would start working in
Our optimizing software did NOTHING for UDP, but we hijacked FTP connections and tossed them through a proxy cache hierarchy. I'm sure this software has probably improved since then, and might have the capability to hijack well-known UDP-based protocols and process them the same way--substituting a satellite-efficient protocol in the middle.
If they're selling this product mostly to Windows folks, they've decided to support this optimizing software on Windows only. It might be a poor technical choice, but I assure you that "connection optimizing software" isn't a figment of their imagination.
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.
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
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.
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