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Satellite Internet Service for Macs?
Untimely Ripp'd asks: "Satellite broadband has been available to PC users for half a decade, and still is not trivially available to Mac users. It can be done, but it's always an unsupported hack, or it requires buying expensive extra hardware and software. I cannot understand why Hughes and the other providers would refuse to spend the relatively few dollars necessary to develop a couple of device drivers and glue libraries. Time after time, the vendors have said, 'it's coming,' but it never does, and the promise eventually goes away. (Earthlink's FAQ page no longer says that Mac software is being developed, for example). I'm not gung-ho on conspiracy theories, but the only explanation I can figure is that they're either being paid or bullied. Does anyone know of any serious tech hurdle that would make it cost more than $100K or so to develop the necessary software?" this article mentions one-way Mac service coming online from OWC in a future expansion, along with nationwide service. A comment from that story does mention a simple solution, but why is it that Satellite service, even one way satellite service, depends on Windows-only software? What other solutions have Mac users resorted to when they wanted their Macs connected?
I have both the DirecPC pci card, and the usb modem version. I'm not capable of reverse engineering these myself, but anyone that is, is welcome to mine. I could probably even spare an 18" dish+LNB.
I mean, every time we wait for these fuckers, we end up losing. Maybe you need to decide to write it yourself? It's the only way to be sure it's done right.
PS Anyone that knows the pinout for the power on the DirecPC usb modem (mini-din 8), could you send it to me? I know it's gotta have 14v for the lnb power, in addition to 5v, but last time I tried to deduce this from looking at the pcb, it took me a day and I still fried the device.
According to DirecWay's FAQ bot thingie, they will be selling the DW4020 to consumers "fall of 2002" (read: "any day now").
The DW4020 is pretty much the standard DW4000 satellite modem boxen they currently sell, except it includes a third boxen that eliminates the need for a USB connection and presents 4 Fast Ethernet ports. Supposedly you'll also be able to buy this box separately to upgrade your existing DW4000.
Now the only question is when EarthLink will lower their monthly satellite service fees to match DirecWay through DirecTV. I just dropped BellSouth in favor of EarthLink this past June and I'm not interested in changing ISPs yet again so soon.
This comment is pretty inaccurate. I'm a systems engineer at a major satellite networking provider not unrelated to this story. I'm not working on the current consumer offerings, but on the next-generation system. Of course, I don't speak for said employer.
.1% of the 5% of computer users who have macs and might want satellite internet. If you look at the news, you'll see that the consumer side of the business isn't doing so well anyway - it's a very small take-up rate, so even that .1% estimate is extremely generous.
The DirecWay satellite is pretty much paid for - sure it's a large capital investment up front, but the software side is a constant ongoing expense. The software is constantly under revision by a largeish team of software developers and network engineers. New features are still being added. That's a lot of salaries to pay, and it doesn't stop. Software is never finished. Adding support for another operating system, at least with the current (legacy?) satellite networks, is a large undertaking. All the spoofing for the consumer products is done by software, and it fools with the TCP/IP stack directly. It also needs to be supported. There's at least 10 programmer salaries and about 50 customer service people, just to have a shot at the
Are you a shareholder of Hughes? If you were, would you want them spending 3+ million dollars a year on software that _might_ get 5000 subscribers at under $70 a month? It's hard enough making a profit with 100,000 subscribers on the PC platform. Don't forget that there are a whole host of other costs - installer training, advertising (subscriber acquisition costs are huge), etc.
So my position isn't one where I would know what anyone's future plans are - hell, they could be releasing Mac software tomorrow and I wouldn't know. But you're seriously underestimating the costs of software development and support for adding an OS.
You'll probably be modded down for saying that, but your right. I long ago conceded the fact that Macs were at the very least as good as PCs (in some areas), but Mac users are a whole different story.
I worked the phones in tech support for quite some time for a major ISP. I hated having to get mac calls. Not because they were difficult to troubleshoot; macs are surprisingly easy to fix when there are network issues, and I always liked that.
But the users, as a general rule, were much much worse then PC users. The worst were the imac users. I have dozens of theories about why this is, but the only one I can come up with is mac users simply don't invest the time needed to really understand their own computers, or at least the time needed to properly opperate a PC, but instead just want everything to work right. When it doesn't it's the fault of whoever is on the other end of the phone.
This is not a bash of macs. Macs are so easy to troubleshoot, the computer literate mac user rarely needs to call tech support, so the support folks just get the worst of the worst.
The Internet is generally stupid
Having done a stint or two of technical support, a tour in quality assurance, I can point out several costs of supporting less-used OS's and hardware platforms.
First, it's not quite so easy to provide technical support for more than one environment. Like it or not, it isn't just a case of hitting Command-C instead of Control-C; Windows users expect one set of UI conventions, Mac users expect another, and Unix users want it three different ways, and it should also work from the command line. Each OS requires different tactics to work around existing issues. For technical support departments supporting diverse platforms is a nightmare, since it means they have to either spend most of their time in training, or provide multiple specialized departments, which can easily eat up manpower.
Setting rigid support boundaries is a partial solution, but I have yet to have a customer who knew of the support boundaries and had a problem outside those nicely defined lines who didn't try to cajole and/or threaten me into helping him "just this once." It wastes my time, and his.
For developers, this is similarly a nightmare. I know of one decent cross-platform GUI toolkit that works on X11, Win32 and Mac OS, and on the Mac, it doesn't conform strictly to the Apple User Interface guidelines. Compound that with the highly specialized skillset required to write drivers for a particular operating system, with some exceptions, and to go with your bloated support department, you'll have an increased software development budget, and QA budget.
The only recourse we fringe users have is open standards; encourage your vendors to use published protocols, open standards and to document their API's. Take those documents and write a solution for your environment of choice.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
The company I work for, Spacenet, is the second-largest business satellite ISP out there. We serve *business* customers who have large and small multiple (5-5000+) locations (retailers, food service, energy, financial, services, etc.).
If you have a *business* meeting these criteria and are looking for satellite connectivity that supports Macs, send e-mail to me and I can push for Mac compatibility if there is significant demand.
Don't just say there is no corporate satellite ISP support for Macs and do nothing about it ... if you can genuinely justify large multi-site Mac satellite network support, I can help make it happen.
As a BSD guru-turned-Mac-guru myself, I would love to help this but I do need the numbers to prove it. Right now, we have almost zero requests for this, but an influx of REAL potential customers asking for this could make it happen. I would really, really like to make this available, but I can't do it by telling our MS-oriented development guys to do it without visible justification.
This isn't some random spam for business, this is a real request from a company's senior marketing staff to help build demand and make this happen. In your e-mail, please describe your multi-site business and its needs, and I can use this info to get Mac support for Spacenet's services.
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