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Experiences with DirecWay Satellite Internet
Since moving outside Ann Arbor almost 2 years ago, I've had only a 56k modem to tether my home to the net. Cable, DSL and ISDN are impossible in my location. DirecWay now offers the DW6000, which appears to be an operating system agnostic router for satellite internet access. I already use DirecTV, so this might work well.
I'm aware of the game crippling latency, but that's not a huge deal to me. The monthly price seems reasonable, but is there a catch? I'm abusing my power as Slashdot editor to ask for experiences with this (or similiar) services.
Does it bog down during the day? Not work with common hardware? Hidden costs? Does it cost a fortune for the required professional installation? Is ssh completely unusable?
WTF.. the editor of Slashdot is on dialup?
a remote co-worker has it up in prince edward's island and it seems to work pretty well for her
And, no, I should not have used the goddamn Preview mode first.
Features: Space age technology Really means your ping times will be comparable to that of the mars rover.
That the only guy on Slashdot with a 56k is the guy that started it
why he doesn't read his own site ;-)
-anonymous 56k user
The only thing I would be worried about is if weather affected it as it does Direct TV.
Everyone I know with Direct TV is basically screwed when any amount of rain or snow is falling.
"Always double-clickin' on my mizzouse"
It might not be that expensive to drop a real T1.
Fellowship 9/11
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The main problem I found was installing a linksys router I had behind the DW6000.
The DW modem acts as a outer/firewall too. It will assign IPs and the only thing you need is a switch to connect multiple computers to it.
The problem is you can't really configure the modem/router. So you can't disable the router feature for example. If you want that kind of control, you'll need the pro version which is quite pricy (although it gives you a static IP).
Here's a forum I found that addresses the DW6000 and linksys router problems.
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. - Rene Descartes (1637)
I'm not familiar with DirecWay service, but I have done quite a bit of remote work using SSH over satellite. It's rather painful, but it is usable. I usually get about 1/2 second of latency and it is irritating, but you can still get stuff done if you have to.
If you're expecting to do hours upon hours of work this way though, I imagine it will drive you nuts.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
It sounds from their site like the DirecWay is a two-way system. While in theory that might sound more convenient than the older downstream-only satellite systems that used 56k dial-up for upstream, I'd imagine the latency would be substantially worse, with two satellite hops in the round-trip. Is this the case in practice? Honestly, how much upstream bandwidth do you really need for casual use, given that you aren't going to be doing any serving or gaming on a sat link anyway? Is the subjective experience better or worse with this system?
I am also considering this. Has anyone used Terminal Services Manager or SSH over this, and is it something that you could do day-in/day-out without throwing your keyboard out the window?
They have a policy which basically allows you to download at high speeds up to a point (600MB or so I think), after which you are throttled to sub-56K speeds for 18-24 hours. This was the main reason for me cancelling the service. The limit is slightly higher if you sign up for 'Commercial' service.
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
The topics come by so fast, that you don't have time to realize it....
wait..... you're on a *slow* speed connection....
Well, guess the dupes are still a mystery!!!
Is this the same type of setup used in tricked out semi tractors? I've had a few people (automobile accident assessors, etc.) ask me what they should get so that they may have internet access that's truly mobile. Satellite is the easy answer, but beyond that all I could say was, "Uh, figure out what truck drivers use."
I'm abusing my power as Slashdot editor to ask for experiences with this (or similiar) services.
I agree completely Taco. Notwithstanding the fact that many similar (do the research yourself) questions make their way to Ask Slashdot, at least I'd think you'd not set this to appear as a front-page story -- it would have been better (less abuse, on your part), I think, to just let it pop up only in the Ask Slashdot section.
Oh well.
I had it when i was living in tuba city, arizona. expect lag to be awful, when pages need several requests to the server to load properly, it will take a *long* time to load. once you start downloading something, that goes by quickly though. alos, since the uplink is on the east coast, if they experience bad weather, you will experience zero internet, even when it's sunny for you. useful service i guess if you want to up your max download speed, but i would definately reccommend a dialup backup service for when it craps out.
The next front-page article needs to be
"Slashdot Editor-in-Chief is a 56k-er"
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
The thing about satellite internet is that there is no reason to ever get it unless you have no other options. It is more expensive than DSL or cable, yet slower. And the higher latency as you mentioned. But it sounds like your kinda situation is the semi-niche market satellite internet aims at. As far as installion goes, since you already have a dish on your roof, any half-competent installer will be able to do the job in a half-hour.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
What is the price of the sat service per month, exclusive of the equipment cost?
What would the cost be of buying a dry pair from the phone company and having them terminate a T1 at your house?
After all Rob, you could very easily write off the cost of a T1 at home as a business expense on your taxes, and worst case, I would think that even if the phone company won't terminate a data connection on it, your could route it to the cage and have it on the back end of the Slashdot router - just think, direct access to your servers from behind the firewall!
www.eFax.com are spammers
With a dialup for the outgoing packets, incoming packets still have a round-trip-time of 200 ms to get from the ground station to the geosynchronous sattelite and back.
I don't know about you, but an extra 200 ms of latency kills my typing skills.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I was interested in this several years ago, altho I think it was directpc. I wouldn't be surprised if things are the same, or even that they are the same company and/or equipment.
This was just after they came out with new equipment that was satellite in both directions. Before that, satellite was for downlink only, you still needed a modem for uplink.
The outstanding complaint was crap customer support. In general, for just about any complaint you had, they blamed it on the weather. A single cloud in the northern sky? Well, wait until it fails on a clear day and call back, buster.
Even those who liked the service otherwise had nothing good to say about the support. It was enough to persaude me to keep my slow modem.
Infuriate left and right
My girlfriend has this service at her house, and my experience with it is that the latencies are very noticeable. Web sites certainly load faster than dial up, but not as quickly as the slow (400K) DSL service I have at my house. I have not run ssh over it, but running xterms over my employers VPN service is fairly painful. In fact, the standard Nortel VPN service did not work at all as it timed out - the IT guys had to put me on a beta Cisco server. We have also had a couple of outages over the last 2 months, where the whole service went down for a few hours, and their tech support acknowledged a system wide problem. This service is only worth it if your only alternative is dial up.
We had a Remote Worker that was in or near the spokane area, he had to Admin our Network here in Seattle during a Family Crisis. He was able to complete his work without any shortcomings, time of did not matter, it worked well for the remote admin work that needed to be done. And as you already stated this type of setup is not for gaming, but Admin stuff it works. SSH, PHP, Remote Admin, all worked without any problems.
If firefighters fight fire and crime fighters fight crime, what do Freedom fighters fight?
Distance to geostationary satellite: 22,000 miles (44,000 total round trip)
Speed of Light: 186,000 miles/second
Total delay: 44/186 = 0.23 sec = 0.46 for response a two way conversation
Unacceptable
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
a dupe.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
So that explains all the dupes... He must not be seeing the articles until 6 hours after they are posted.
In all seriousness though satellite isn't the greatest but it's good and a ton better then dial up. I've had to use it before and if that is all they have in your area then I'd go for it. The latency is not too bad and you get used to it quick.
Regards,
Steve
I believe the telcos are still obligated by regulations to provide ISDN no matter where you are.
ISDN is great if your not downloading loads of stuff. Great ping times below 40ms if you use a router.
recently i moved to a small town about an hour north of denver. No cable here, and dsl wasnt availible until last month (slightly off topic rant: qwest you suck balls). Surprisingly all the neighbors had microwave based internet access. For about $50 a month, they get 1mbps up and down, with 10 gigs a traffic per month. You may want to see if that is availible in your neck of the woods.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
I work for, well, for now work for, Earthlink. We sell the DirecWay product and I supported it on the TS end. BAD!%$ DirecWay is evil beamed into space. Its extremly latent, 20% packetloss is typical, and everything is cached through proxies. Oh, and it breaks more often then its up. Just my 2c.
I live in east texas and I got it a while ago. Other then the latency of almost a second (don't even think of gaming and terminal sessions are
It's not bad considering the only alternative is dialup. The latencies are noticed in things other than games, web browsing has a noticeable lag between the link click and the page loading. But the page comes down almost complete in one big burst, so the total time for page load probably averages out close to DSL, you just notice the gap more on the satellite. Our version has a USB connection that hooks the modem to the computer and appears as a USB Ethernet connection. We had to run W2k Server to share this connection out using Routing and Remote Access, but that works pretty well. I'm not sure about the newer hardware, we've been on satellite close to 2.5 years.
From what I understand, there is currently a download limit (150 MB I think) for a 4 hour period. I hear they are working on repealing this policy due to customer backlash..
A friend of mine had sattelite Internet for a while, whatever DirecTV's old service was called. It was really bad, even for Web browsing. The latency doesn't seem like it would get that annoying, but it does. It seemed there was an extra wait for every image loaded, and normal browsing of the Internet felt slower than on dialup.
On the other hand, this may have gotten better. Browsers may be better about using HTTP pipelining so everything in a page can be loaded at once, and part of the problem may have been DirecTV's network. A way to experiment with it would be to use one of the various kernel modules for doing packet modification, and cause every packet to be delayed for 1 full second going out.
I always thought an interesting combination would be a proxy that routed everything over dialup until the connection was full, then started using the sattelite. The most likely scenario would be the HTML itself is fetched over the low-latency low-bandwidth dialup link, and the images are loaded over the high-latency high-bandwidth sattelite link. ssh would use the dialup link, so latency wouldn't be as bad. It seems to me like this would be the best of both worlds. Unfortunately DirecTV's old infrastructure was very closed, making it impossible (or close to it) to experiment with this sort of thing. If this new service is more open, maybe it would be possible to tune it to give quite good performance.
My Web Page
Find some slashdot fanboy in Ann Arbor, buy him a can 'o pringles, and set up a wireless link to you house.
/.'s acquisition, couldn't you find a house a little closer to civilization?
By the way, with assloads of money from
Just get a t1 Usually you can get hooked up for about $500/month for everything you need.
AcmeShells.com The cheapest Eggdrop
A neighbor of ours had the service for two months. Every time the neighbor on the other side left his radar detector on in his car (forgetting to turn it off), the directway internet wouldn't work.
Temporary solution was the neighbor leaving the car unlocked so he could go turn off the radar detector when the neighbor forgot. Passing cars with radar is another problem tho. Overall it seems it doesn't work more than it does. For the price and the slowness I'd probably put up with dialup instead.
I'm not sure which model we're using, but I had my boss setup DirecWay satellite at his night club, as it was the only broadband option available. The service goes down several hours every night, but we never lose our link. Since the actual ISP is earthlink, you can expect at least a 30 minute hold time for technical support, although that may be a little optomistic. If you can get something else, I would recommend it, unless your rig works out drastically different from ours.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
You can route interactive traffic out a dialup link to reduce latency, and all other traffic over the satelite link. See http://www.lartc.org .. Simply use netfilter to mark packets, and policy routing to pick which interface to NAT the traffic out of. Not for newbies, but I'm sure the editor of /. can handle it ;)
They keep a moving average of your bandwidth utilization. Exceeding the unspecified caps results in your downstream bandwidth being halved, (ie 100%->50%->25%->12.5%) and eventually cut off.
My parents used this with the previous generation hardware, downloading a Java SDK & Eclipse runtime (say 100MB) resulted in a noticeable decrease in bandwidth.
It is also way to slow for me to use ssh interactively.
Here's some snippets of the AUP, from http://legal.direcway.com/index.html#agree:
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I think that you'll have a problem with VPN as well, due to the latency. I was using DirecPC, which was an asymmetric architecture with a phone line return. I saw an increase of about 500 msec in ping times using DirecPC over phone modem. For two-way satellite, the latency will probably be about 1 second. This kind of latency killed my VPN connectivity or at best made it unreliable. As an alternative, why don't you set up a neighborhood wireless cooperative sharing a T-1 line. See for example: http://www.magnoliaroad.net.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
Seriously though, I was shocked. But it may explain something that I was musing about a few days ago - Slashdot's avoidance of huge graphics, the evil JavaScript and vile Flash. Maybe we need to keep TACO at 56K.
...DW is the way to go until the next wireless tech is embraced.
56k?! Let's show him the slashdot effect boys ;) Talking about a taste of your own medicine...
I assisted a friend of mine in setting up his DirecWay system about a year ago. I am not sure what the "professional installation costs" were, but they had no satellite service of any kind prior to the install. I know that at that time, you had to purchase all the hardware, which ran about $600.00.
Aside from that, the equipment at that time had to be plugged into a computer via. USB and setup via Windows only software. If you wanted any kind of routing done, it had to be done through Windows.
The hardware/software may have changed since then and they may now offer an ethernet port and a more OS friendly configuration.
Aside from those things, the speed was nice for web browsing and any other low impact services. I do recall using ssh and it seemed to work ok. The latency isn't as noticable as it would be playing a game.
That's my experience...
~.Evanrude
Fair Access Policy. Learn them, love them, leave them. Here is one war story.
There are sites dedicated to the incredible level of FAP abuse that is piled on customers.
Here is a place for you to study.
This may be more relevant to your needs, here.
I went through several storms and was surfing the net quite well, while airports and road were closed.
The only problem I had was when snow got in the actual dish, then I had to get it out. I only had to do that once though. Most of the time the wind blows the snow away.
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. - Rene Descartes (1637)
That's what I did when I graduated and got the hell out of A2
I have no experience with the DirecWay service, but I had used StarBand when they were still around.
Honestly - I would prefer 56K dialup. You just don't understand how bad the latency is on satellite service until you've used it. I would wait 14+ seconds at times for responses. It's like the tortoise vs. the hare. Slow and steady beats fast with long naps between laps.
Stick with your dial-up or try convincing someone to start a good wireless ISP near you.
I'm in the same boat, no DSL or Cable. I tried DirecWay dial return service. The latency is pretty horrible (500ms and up) making things like ssh excruciatingly painful. The 2 way DirecWay sat is supposedly even slower in temrs of latency, since you pay the 22,000 mile up-and-down penalty twice. Web browsing as well can be slow due to this latency, since multiple requests get made per page load. You can fiddle with the settings on your browser and packet sizes etc to help this, but to me browsing felt slower than on a reliable 56k line. Things that require bigger downloads like flash animations are faster, though. If it's bandwidth you are after, then you have to worry about FAP - the Fair Access Policy. This limits your BW usage by throttling you down once you exceed some magic threshold for some period of time. If you web browse only, you may not see it but if you download stuff, you'll probably hit it. I also had problems due to trees. DirecTV is an order of magnitude less finicky than DirecWay in terms of positioning, and I struggled to get a good signal when my DirecTV was just fine. Could have been by location though. If you get the Dual dish, you will have to play fancy games with dish rotation to pull in both internet and TV. I'd recommend pro installation unless you really enjoy mucking with setting up dishes, etc.
I've had the misfortune to use satellite internet. Here's a quick summary on how it behaves:
- ssh sessions or terminal server are unusable so if you do any remote access of any machines, forget it.
- web browsing is about the speed of a dialup unless you're looking at pages that are one huge chunk of html with no images. Most pages these days are lots of little images which totally lags on satellite. Note that you may reduce the pain with caching proxies and/or HTTP keepalive/pipelining but it's a lot of work, and at least one of your daily reads will not improve with this.
Anyways, unless you're out in the middle of the jungle, I'd just stick with cheap dialup. You can save your money up and build a long range wifi link.
and I doubt with all that cmf money that Rusty Foster has to settle for dialup access.
I've been using it for about 4 months now.
:)
It pretty much sucks, but until there's a better option, it's usually better than dial-up.
You'll probably find a more informed discussion at broadbandreports.com forums. Also check out their Satellite FAQ
SSH sessions are pretty bad. However, in pinches they are possible by "typing blind". ie. typing your slew of commands and waiting for them to appear/happen. Can be a bit dangerous.
Reliability is pretty bad. We have regular snow and rain storms which usually knocks it out of service.
Speeds, http download is alright, although there is always a slight delay before things happen due to latency. Other download speeds suck, especially anything is encrypted. Upload speed is as slow as if not slower than modem.
But, we don't have any other options at the moment (come on airships!)
BTW our setup two way direcway using a dedicated w2k box with crappy internet connection sharing.
Everyone ignores ISDN and leap frogs to other technologies. Dual-channel ISDN is quite usable for what it sounds like you need.
Can you get that at least?
We got it so my wife could work from home. As for just surfing the net it seemed to work OK (better than dialup). But we found that VPN speed was the same as if she dialed up to work and the main application she used didn't work at all. And when the wind blew the signal went to crap. (could be how the dish was mounted but it is a larger dish than what is used by direcTV). So since we couldn't justify the cost we cancelled it. (we had to eat the installation cost ~$200).
All generalities are dangerous except ones that start with "All
My dad lives near Bay City and they are set up with something simular called Speed Net (http://www.speednetllc.com/) Seems to work quite well.
I have had Speednet for almost a year and a half. If you live anywhere near Saginaw I would highly recommend it. It blows away the Satillite service I had before it. www.speednetllc.com
Brian
That's About It!
I almost bought a house (put an offer on) in an area with no cable and no DSL. I went to work researching DirecWay, and all I got from DSLreports was complaint after complaint. Well, I thought, no one ever writes in about how GREAT their service is, right?
/that/ bad, it's not something I'd look forward to.
.ISO's and it takes a day), blam, you're cut off. You have to call in and get them to undo it, which can take days. I wasn't prepared to call someone else when I was on call and say "hey, I know it's 1:30 am, but would you mind going on and fixing this server, DirecTV cut me off, again".
So I looked at all the literature from DirecTV, and it didn't look much better from that angle. $600 UP FRONT fee for equipment, plus $60/month for a service which MIGHT give you 500kbps downstream and ~100 up. I do a lot of remote administration using Windows apps, and although I've done it on dialup, and it's not
Plus, and here's where your problem would come in, they have TOC enforced caps. If you pass your given download quota for a given period (ie you transfer down a set of Debian
In the end I was going to just get dialup, maybe get 2 accounts and team 'em up to get a bit more speed, rather than deal with the flakiness I saw inherent in DirecWay and its competition. I looked HARD for any answer, and the best I could do was dual-dialup. (unless I wanted to spend $175/month on ISDN, or several hundred more for a full T).
I like music
I have the professional version of direcway so that I could get a static ip and a large bucket ( 350 MB I think ) before I get fapped as they call it. For the most part it's ok, my downloads average between 100K and 150K ( Kilobytes ) using internet explorer and if I use one of those download accelerators I've hit 500K a sec. Uploads are pathetic... about modem speeds. If you don't get a static ip, your stuck behind their NAT.
HTTPS is really really slow. I still use the older DW4000 which requires a PC to run their software. I put together a mini-itx system with windows xp running winroute. It looks like a router to the rest of my network. I have not upgraded to the newer DW6000 systems.
Consider locating others with your same problem in your neighborhood or area.
All pool together in a T1 line (or convince a local business to do it).
Then use radio links (which can reach kilometers these days with the right antenna) to connect the members of the group to the T1 owner.
Might be well worth the effort / coordination, you'd all get high speed, the T1 owner would become a mini-ISP.
My stepson and I seriously thought about this before we finally got Roadrunner (and now DSL).
Also, latency is terrible. we're talking 600-100ms. SSH would not be fun.
And it's expensive too.
I'd say look for a wireless provider in your area, if there is one. Or maybe (and I don't know if it is even available anymore), if speed is less of an issue but you need good latency, ISDN service? The speed isn't great (11.5kb/s), but it's better than nothing..
I live about an hour out of Minneapolis, and for a long time satellite was the only option we had other than dial-up. We used the direcway two-way satellite system for about two months, and I gotta tell you, it was a truly horrific experience. For starters, there's the speed. Not only is the ping terrible (quarter to half a second), but the speed was only double or triple what we were getting over our free 56k modem connection. Now, for some people that modest speed increase is worth $100 per month, and I was willing to tough it out at least until the one-year contract expired and I could quit without paying the $600 early contract cancellation fee. That was until the damned thing simply stopped working. It was pretty intermittant to start off, being down for a few hours every day, but one day it just died. I called tech support to try and figure it out, and that was when I learned about download caps. I'm pretty sure you won't find anything about this in any of their literature, but if you download more than 200 megabytes over any 4 hour period, they severely restrict your bandwidth. If you manage to download more than 250 megabytes over any 5 hour period, they simply cut you off for a few days. So basically, you're paying $100 a month for bandwidth that you're not allowed to use. So, I found myself with no service for a few days. Then for a week. I called tech support back, and they told me there was no reason why my connection shouldn't work. I spent 12 hours on the phone with tech support over the course of 3 days until I finally decided to just cancel my "service." After all of that I still had to pay the $600, just to cancel my service that I wasn't getting.
By the way, I also have DirecTV, which works fine, so that shouldn't be any indicator for how well the satellite internet will work.
They have a download limit of 169MB every 4 hours, and the best speed I've ever gotten off them was about 90KB/s. I'd highly recommend cable service if you could get that instead. In the same rural Colorado town, I get 3Mbit down and 256K up from my cable line.
The customer service was HORRIBLE. They hired people with almost no english language experience, and NO technical experience. They just read off a computer screen, with no clue as to what they're doing.
Please note this is just in my little town, but I figured that the customer service is off a 1-800 number, so it's most likely the same everywhere in the US.
"I'm abusing my power as Slashdot editor to ask for experiences with this (or similiar) services."
YES YOU ARE.
You should have submitted your "Ask Slashdot" article to another editor to be reviewed and accepted or rejected.
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
I had 2 neighbors that had it and cancled, both are looking to get rid of their equipment, not the newest stuff, but it was not much faster than dialup, and it was very laggy. I would not and did not purchase it becuase of their experineces.
-- Tim
TKrabec Pahh
I have a neighbor that has this, and I was not at all impressed. At least once a day they have to shutdown their computer, disconnect the terminals from the dish and the modem, touch the ends to ground it out, put them back in, and turn the computer back on. Their signal strength is only at a 60. They should have much more, just poor installation, and because it is working, DirectWay will not come out to fix it without them paying them to do it.
I do however know someone else down the street that has it, and does not have that problem. Their signal strength is much higher.
Also, keep in mind that they put you behind their firewall and NAT. You get a 10. addy, so you will not be able to host anything or connect to your computer from the outside at all.
You also are limited to your bandwidth for the day! Its not like cable where you have a cap, and you can go all day using as much as the cap allows you to. DirectWay (sorry, don't have the exact numbers) will shutdown your connection for the entire day once you use up your allowed bandwidth. It is set lower during the day than it is at night, but personally for what you are paying, I don't think thats worth it. If you use anything like KaZaA (for legal reasons of course) you will have to pay attention to how much bandwidth you are pulling so they don't shut you off for the rest of the day.
I myself will not be getting DSL or Cable anytime soon, and thanks to wonderfully old Verizon phone lines, I get 26.4 connection speeds with a modem. I will not go with d to use SSH to often, the lag is not the best with that either.
"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they AREN'T after you."
Route the ssh over the modem, and use the web, ftp, etc over the satelite. There are several toolkits that do this.
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
We used DirectWay in our remote site for similar reasons. We had it a year and a half, and it worked 24 hours constant I think once or twice during that time. Every day when the kids got home from school/job/college/etc. the connection would be there, but the latency made it unusable. We ended up buying the local telco service a remote office on our site, so we could get DSL. Big bucks, solved our problem. If you don't have that kind of money, or even if you do, my advice to you is rid yourself of all computers, move to Mexico, and plant lots of potatoes.
A few years ago I got StarBand at my house due to the same rural limitations you suffer. We ended up using our 2 dialup connections along with the satellite and eventually just got rid of the satellite. It was terribly slow during peak hours (anything not midnight to 8am). During the off hours we could get download speeds of up to 2megabits/sec. Secure webpages just didn't work. I don't know if that was due to restrictions by StarBand or not. (to boost performance, they limited a lot of things you could do) The ~800ms latency made things like Telnet and SSH almost unusable. E-mail via Outlook also didn't work as it would time out too quickly. IMHO, it isn't worth the grief, unless you keep your dialup connection and use them simultaneously. With a proxyserver we were able to do the undoable-over-satellite via dialup.
Free iPod -- http://free.pawireless.org/
You send packet --- up from you and down to them.
You get reply --- up from them and down to you.
Four trips. Twice as slow.
Infuriate left and right
I have a friend in an high-speed inaccessible area of Nova Scotia and he just signed up with Direc. The area has been getting a lot of wind and snow lately and his connection seems really intermittent while that's going on. He also complained that the router crashed at least once for no apparent reason requiring a power cycle to correct it.
He told me it cost him $1200 for installation and $90 a month for unlimited use. (That's in Canadian currency).
It doesn't seem like an ideal solution but it's better than nothing (or dialup). One thing he hasn't complained about is the speed, so I'd guess that's pretty good when it's working.
University - a box of academia nuts.
If I were Taco - I would have posted this under another name. Up next: a story asking if the products in those "enlargement" spams really work ;)
Water is a conductor*, so when the water coats the face of the dish it alters the focus of the dish by altering the shape the RF "sees". Screw the focus of the dish up, and you go from many tens of decibels of gain to as low as 0 dBi.
Keep the dish dry, and the focus stays sharp, and the only effect the rain has is a minor attenuation in the path from the bird to the dish.
(*Pure water is an insulator, of course, but given dirt in the air and on the dish and you will have enough ions in the water to make it a reasonably good conductor - enough to alter the dish's focus.)
www.eFax.com are spammers
Straight from the horse's mouth: Downspeed is 500 kbps, upspeed is 50. Service costs $59.99 or $99.99 a month, depending on your setup. If you opt for the 59.99 plan, you'll have to pay $399 for hardware, $100 for installation, and $100 for setup. The $99 a month plan subsidizes the cost of installation and equipment so you'll only pay the $100 steup fee up front. Both plans require a 15 month contract.
Having Direct TV is not a boon, since the dish required is a separate one. Professional installation is mandatory because setting these thin gs up requires a lot more precision than a simple sat. TV system. Reliability is better these days than it has been, but servicxe is still prone to interruptions caused by atmospheric consitions. The router is OS-agnostic and accounts come with a single dynamic IP addy.
Hope this helps.
I want the fire back.
I have direcway two -way, had one way back in the day, just upgraded recently. It's better than a 56k modem, but not by much. If you want to browse you and edit slashdot then you will likely be better with some sort of accelerated dial-up. If you want to download a 50mb file in a reasonable amount of time use direcway. If you want to download anything larger than 200MB, do it in chunks. FAP will get you (an I hope the lowsey cable users someday to). It's worth the $54.99 a month (I think that's it) if you are a geek. Don't try and do VPN over it. Unless you go "pro" version ($120 a month?) then it may work....may that is.
If this is anything like DirecPC was/is, the FAP makes it almost unusable. If you do much downloading at all, you'll find yourself back to modem speed in short order, and paying about 3x as much for the privilege. Cleaning snow off the dish is always fun too, it is much more sensitive to weather than DirecTV. I won't get into the Mind-Numbing tech support (I swear it was prison labor).
Maybe they've improved it since I had DirecPC four years ago, but be very certain of what you'll receive before you get locked into a contract.
Honestly, I'd build a yagi to receive broadband from somebody I'd befriended 5 miles away if geographically possible. Failing that, I'd just shotgun 3 modems before I'd ever consider having DirecPC again.
Also, you don't mention neighbor proximity. I know of one location in Southern Colorado that is 80 miles from a major city (if you consider Pueblo major), 10 miles south of a town of 10,000 people smack in the middle of NOWHERE that has a T1. It's a radio station antenna building on the top of a ridge at roughly 10,500 feet. Maybe you have 6 neighbors who are as fed up with dial-up as you. A fractional T1 would be affordable after the initial equipment layout if you create your own little ISP and serve your neighbors with wireless access.
"Q: What is the difference between the DW6000 modem and the DW4000 modem? A: The DW6000 is the next-generation DIRECWAY system modem with a sleek new design. It makes connecting to the Internet easier by incorporating DIRECWAY software inside the DW6000 unit. So there's no DIRECWAY software to load on your computer or upgrades to download. The DW6000 automatically updates itself via the satellite. Also, the DW6000 modem houses both the transmit and receive components in one compact unit, unlike the DW4000 that has separate transmit and receive modems stacked together and linked by a 24-pin serial cord.
It also uses a simple Ethernet connection to connect your computer to your DIRECWAY service. Once your satellite dish is installed and connected to the DW6000, all you need to do is connect your computer by using the provided Ethernet cable and you're high-speed surfing (see 'Can I run DIRECWAY on a small network?' for networking capability requirements).
Q: Is the DW6000 faster than the DW4000? No. Both the DW6000 and the DW4000 modems deliver the same DIRECWAY high-speed service experience. The DW6000 modem allows you to connect to Windows- and Macintosh-based operating systems, has no software to load on your computer, and makes networking your DIRECWAY high-speed connection to multiple home computers easier (see 'Can I run DIRECWAY on a small network?' for more information on home networking).
Q: Should I upgrade to the DW6000 from my current DW4000? A: Upgrading from a DW4000 modem to the next-generation DW6000 modem is a good idea if you would like to network more than one home computer or laptop to your DIRECWAY high-speed connection. By networking more than one computer, your family will be able to access your DIRECWAY high-speed Internet connection from any computer on the network and will not have to wait in line in order to get online.
Please understand that all computers on this network will be sharing a single connection. Simultaneous use of high bandwidth applications by multiple users may result in degradation of speed and is subject to the Fair Access Policy. Actual speeds may vary. Speed and uninterrupted use of service are not guaranteed."
The data connection comes free with their Vision service, which in turn comes free with the larger plans. For about $150 or $200/month you can get enough minutes to keep your phone connected 24/7.
I was rather impressed with the service on a recent road trip (the first time I tried it). If you're in range of a cell phone tower, it might be worth trying as a remote ISP. It's not that fast for the price, but it is completely mobile -- you get the same data service from anywhere in their coverage area.
We had bi-directionally satellite internet at I place I used to work. Although it was crazy fast we cancelled it after only a few weeks. The latency was aweful but the real kicker was the unreliable hardware transceivers. The satellite transceivers where USB only and only worked on Windows. So in our case we needed to have a dedicated windows machine to route our network traffic. It make things worse, the transceivers would drop the connection intermittently and the companies tech. support was unable to come up with a solution.
In short, bad news.
I'd suggest this for high-speed Internet in AA. I regularly pull down 1 MByte/s on torrents.
In case you're averse to living around the likes of me, however, Comcast does offer cable modem service throughout the Ann Arbor area. As far as I know, their service does not require you to be a cable TV subscriber to sign up.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
At my company due to political problems we went with Satellite from Starband. One thing to lookout for that could cost money is the actual installation. Starband is sold by dealers who in our case also installed the equipment. We have a two way connection and it does work ok. We do get a megabit down and about 120-130 up which isn't too shabby. Sometimes you will lose a signal now and then but it does recover. I would have to say it is an overall positive experience. The one place you will take a hit is FTP. Because of how FTP works it can take a while to upload lots of little files. But other than that I have no real complaints about it and hope we do get Road Runner installed in the summer. -Pat
73 KC2BQZ
At the risk of suggestion something you've thought of already, have you looked into wireless providers that might be offering WiFi? Sprint PCS started offering WiFi on a limited basis to areas their phones cover. If you have PCS coverage, you might have WiFi. Just an idea
John
I have looked into this technology as I am in the same situation (out in the country). The one reason that I did not go with this solution was that the technology is not good for VPN support. Apparently for a VPN each IP packet requires an ACK whereas for normal IP comms - like browsing,etc. they are able to group packets together to get the high speed. If you are using a tunneling protocol (VPN) they say that you will not get better than 56K.
A few notes from this side of the fence.
Performance: obviously the latency, but you also need to know that it doesn't just kill games, web pages can be a problem. They have some fancy caching software that softens the blow so it is tolerable but in general lots of surfing isn't any faster than a 56k and the download cap is very annoying, you can hit it in 30 minutes and basically be offline for the rest of the day. I have a friend/fellow installer who has it and he can't get isos because it would use all his throughput and its not worth it. (He doesn't seem to understand how to throttle things)
Cost: Its expensive but if its the only thing available then its the cheapest option.
Installation: It is a dish that has to be mounted to your house and the installers are not highly paid (barely paid is more accurate) so don't expect them to do a good job. If you can wire your house for them and have everything ready then they will probably do a better job. I prefer pole mounts where you drop a steel pole in the ground and mount to it or some other mount that isn't attached ot the house. Digging a trench and sticking some conduit in it out to a wooden or metal pole will make a happy installer who might try to do a better job. These things are huge pains to point and get good signal but they also don't drop as much as direcTV since they are a bigger and more powerful dish.
DirecWay itself isn't very responsive to problems. They are no help at all if you aren't running windows and their software. Still, given the choice between DirecWay and a 56k modem, I'd probably pick DirecWay, at least if they were the same price...I (*shudder*) was only able to get AOL in my old place and that never got about a 28k connection so moving to here and finally having cable has been amazing. I visit people with DirecWay and its so slow by comparison. Still, get it if you can afford it and a modem isn't doing it for you.
Have you thought about one of those dual modem routers? They're under $75 and supposedly give 100 MB/s transfer rate. Seems like it might not be a lot cheaper, but would be much more reliable.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
That post pretty much sums up my exact experience with the product, right down to the Nortel VPN service.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
I looked into it since I love my satellite television!
Maybe I was missing something, but it sounded like the equipment startup cost was something in the range of $500-$600... with little to no subsidizing. Looking at their website now, they still have that ($599) at $59.99/mo with no activation fee. It also looks like they're offering a subsidized $99/mo with a $99 activation. So... $600-$99/$40 ~= 12.5 months to make it work buying the equipment up front. Looks like there's a 15 month contract even with the equipment purchased... odd.
So... satellite definitely has latency. Satellite definitely has problems with severe weather (but it has to be really severe). But if it's your only option, it does provide decent downstream speeds.
Have you considered wireless of some form or another? Commerical 802.11b gear with big antennas on either end should easily be able to do 5 miles if you have line of site. Another alternative is to bring a dedicated line (T1, etc.) out to you and become a Wireless ISP youself by coop splitting the bandwidth costs between your neighbors...
Hope that helps!
--Darren
The geekiest people may well be the people with the worst internet service.
:-) In fact, we got 10" of snow overnight (and it's still snowing) and I'm at 1 Mbps via PPPoE. Hitting a communication tower a few miles away via 802.16 and then microwave 12 Mbps all the way to the metro 60 miles away.
I fall in the former category, but not the latter
Nothing but hills, trees and deer here today... rural wifi rules.
I live in the middle of no where in the foothills of the Rockies having moved here from a city with great DSL. The dialup modem went out the window almost immediately. It drove me crazy. You really can never go back after you have broadband.
You do want the new Direcway 6000 modem. The old 4000 modems use a USB connection to a mandatory Windows box. The shared internet connection from Windows is slow and bites in general. MS really sucks at doing simple networking stuff. I imagine Direcway only sell the 6000 now though it might be a little pricier. We got rebates to trade in the 400 and agreed to another years service but it still cost $200-300 dollars.
The new 6000 modem is just a gateway you plug in to your Ethernet LAN. Direcway automaticly upgrades it. I wager its a Linux box but I don't know for sure. You set it up and control it via any browser. It works great from my Linux laptop though they only advertise Windows and Mac. It uses DHCP.
You do want to keep the cable run from the dish to the modem as short as possible to improve the signal stength like any dish. Ours coax is real short and we get about 95% signal strength which is the best the installer has seen.
If you get a lot of snow and wind is blowing it in the dish it does fill with snow, the signal craters and you have to sweep it, but thats true of satellite TV too.
They do have a fair use policy and will throttle you if you use it heavily. Trying to download a 300 MB ISO image it throttles at 200 MB, last time I tried, and you drop to modem speeds until the next day. So you need to stop the download and restart where you left off the next day. They have a place you can check your usage and where you stand. I think they throttle you monthly too if you abuse it though I haven't noticed that.
The performance is better off peak hours. As its gotten more popular the performance has suffered some during peak hours.
Uplink is not blazing though I send 500-600K attachments on email, they do take a while to upload.
Latency is certainly a problem. You notice it the worst on web pages that have a 100 little images and URL's embedded in them. Even then I still take it over a 56K anyday.
I play Everquest on it and its certainly playable though you have to learn to work around the latency which runs from as low as 200 ms up to 700 ms, usually around 500 ms. It was much worse on the old 4000 modem and the shared connection with Windows. You notice it when you try to chase down stuff since they are a 1/2 second from where you think they are so you have to lead them but keep them in view of your camera. Its best to play a caster with snare or root or have a pet to work around this. It takes a while to zone due to the latency.
The latency would probably make shooters unplayable though I haven't tried any.
One down side is I think you are putting money in the pocket of Rupert Murdoch and FOX since they bought DirectTV last year and I think DirecWay went with them. So if you dont like Fox politics...
My sister has the competitor, Starband which is the other satellite option in the U.S. I think it has to run through a Windows machine, at least last time I checked.
@de_machina
My aunt and uncle have a satellite on their RV. Normally based in Texas, they came to visit me in the Seattle, WA area. They noticed that their service was poorer up here. They had more dropped packets and greater overall latency. I suspect the primary reason involved the angle at which the signal had to reach the satelite - the farther north you are, the more atmosphere the signal must pass through. Does anyone have specific experience from around the same latitude as Ann Arbor (just guessing, from around the 40-45th parallel)?
A remote salesmen here has two problems with his satellite 1) Flakey VPN connection (sometimes it will work, sometimes it won't).. the lag is sometimes to much for it to work properly (they state that right on their website). 2) Outage periods: salesman here loses connection for 30minutes every day at the same time. Don't know why.
Where outside of Ann Arbor did you move? Places like Chelsea have enough big hills that wireless might already exist and be an option.
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
It's besides 34K the most efficient way to create lag in online games.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I have no experience with DirecWay, but I have a couple of years with Starband, which is their direct competitor. The price is steep, but when you are in a rural area, satellite is your only broadband option.
I compared the options before I got set up, and went with Starband because the DirecWay option had a download limit of 500Mb/month (I think, at the time).
If you can afford the setup fee, then I say go for it! It beats dial-up every single time, even if it is slower than Cable or DSL.
I'd have to say that the only performance problem I've had with them is that when it rains REALLY hard, or when there's snow on the dish. For the snow, just scrape it off, and you're fine.
(I'm not affiliated with either company in any way, etc. and so forth...)
Good luck...
then I'd say give it a shot.
Caveats: The DW6000 seems to be a real pain to install. Our tech spent 4 *days* getting it aimed. According to him, it's much pickier than the DW4000, which Directway recommended he use to aim the dish.
I'm getting about a megabit down, but a frighteningly poor 17 kbits up. Latency for me isn't an issue, but the poor bandwidth out certainly is. It's not much better than Sprint or Verizon's 3G data service.
Some of my company's outside sales force went out and got this on their own only to find out that they couldn't connect to our VPN unless they bought the business class service. We were unable to tunnel around this so they're paying twice as much for the same service with VPN enabled.
Yes, it does take pretty inclement weather to truly block the signal. But if it gets very cold in your area when it rains or snows, ice can form in the dish, and that will ruin your party.
If you can get away with it, think about not putting it on your roof. I live in NW Indiana and the only weather that would throw it out during the weather were the big spring thunderstorms with the cloud tops over 40,000 feet up. Snow never affected it, nor did ice/snow frozen on the dish.
However, when I got a lot of snow/ice frozen on it, once it started melting, the liquid water running through the snow matrix could take it out for an entire day until the snow melted off all the way. Because of trees in my neighborhood, I had to put it on the roof, and there was no way I was going up there with heavy snow that was melting.
Not sure where Taco is, but I grew up about 30 miles NW of Ann Arbor in the middle of nowhere. My family is still there. Last time I talked with my brother he had cable modem access (about 2Mb down / 256 Kb up) for $35 a month (Charter communications). I don't know of anywhere near Ann Arbor that doesn't have something.
Dan
The next generation wireless standard is positioning itself as an alternative to cable and DSL broadband access. Your location may be a prime candidate. Should not have the latency problems of satellite.
Vote for Pedro
For a supposedly "operating system agnostic" ISP I'm disappointed that Flash is required to use DirecWay's web site.
Of course, "agnostic" means "skeptical about the existence of God". Perhaps what is required is a full "atheist operating system".
--
Joe
There is a large WISP in MI called Speednet
I know they cover most of Saginaw->Mackinac area but I am not sure how far south they go. There is a *really* sucky webpage available here that shows WISPs in MI.
I have a few family members that use Speednet and they are really happy with them.
SP
"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." - Voltaire
One of my coworkers has DirectWay and you can almost hear the outbound bits banging off the dish. It's unbelievably slow. His download speed is super (2 Mbps at times); unfortunately, he can't do VPN connections and he often has to resort to using dialup or going to someone else's house to send large messages. He gets hit with the download throttle whenever he tries to download anything from the MSDN download area. Personally, I'd avoid it unless there's no other option.
We've had Starband internet service for over 3 years now and I hate it so. It's so slow. The only thing I like about it is the 120-150KB/sec downloads. For everything else it bites.
I try to synchronize 1 file in Dreamweaver MX 2004 and it takes 5 minutes. It takes a blink of an eye at my house with DSL.
Most of the time at work I'm forced to use dial-up cause it's ping times are faster. Mostly I need to upload and synchronize files and use SSH. Satellite seriously fails at these tasks. Try typing something in SSH and have to wait 2-3 seconds for it to show up.
Downloading email to outlook also takes forever. The ping times keep it to one message every 3 seconds. That really adds up when I check the email Monday mornings and I have over 1000 emails to download. I've had outlook take over 3 hours to download my email while using the satellite.
No, no, no.
Run screaming. Better off with ISDN or terrestrial wireless. If you do anything interactive, the half second delay will ultimately drive you insane. The proxies behave in the weirdest way, and the terms and conditions are onerous. A bad, bad way to go.
Installation is expensive, contracts are long, and service sucks. Forget running a server, upload speeds are WORSE than dialup.
Have you looked at http://wireless.nether.net/? You are not the only frustrated AnnArborite. Also see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aawlan/
When I've tried to video conference with my brother-in-law (who has a satellite provider), I've found that the bursty nature of satellite providers to be a problem. You get very high throughput, but in pulses. This works poorly for real-time applications like video conferencing where just buffering to smooth things out adds an unacceptable delay. Apple's iChatAV just gives up and says the connection is too low data rate.
didn't need broadband.
I have setup a few for friends/customers that are barely lucky enough to have phone service. Downloading files, surfing (using their proxy), pulling audio/video streams are all fine. ANYTHING that is interactive pretty much is broken due to ping times of anywhere from 600-1200ms. SSH/Telnet, games, chat (mostly) and VNC/RDP are all essentially unusable. I've also been unsuccessful setting up FTP at the customer side.
Using their proxy is required to get acceptable performance out of any TCP based protocol, unfortunately they only proxy a few applications and SSL isn't one of them (can't due to the nature of the protocol and how they proxy to get around multiple TCP setups). SSL is SLOWWWWW.
Summarized: HTTP/FTP/MAIL all are great compared to dialup - anything else is slightly/noticably worse.
dslreports.com has a specific forum for DirecWay.
Dslreports.com
"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." --Howard Aike
I was talking to a Verizon Wireless rep. the other day and he said that the I-94 corridor and the rest of the digital access area of Michigan is expected to get broadband-comparable wireless access within the next year. Wait a little while and get a cellular wireless adapter. Right now the wireless throughput is about 56k equivelent.
I had direcway, for about a week before I finally gave up on getting it to work with my corporate network. We have a page that uses an ntlm login, which is not supported by direcway. It took me four days on the phone with support. I got all the way to level 3 before I gave up. They didn't know what ntlm was and didn't even know how to setup a static ip on the dw6000. The last level 3 support tech I spoke with insisted that I had a static IP of 66.xx.xx.xx and that my gateway was 192.168.0.1 I still have the dw6000 and the transmiter from the dish on the floor in my office collecting dust two months after canceling my account. which they continue to bill to me.
But since he already has a dish it means they dont need to spend time finding a good angle for strong signals or spend time finding a good way to run the cable through his house from the dish to his modem.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
How many neighbors do you have with the same problem? With a T1 line as cheap as it is these days, you may just want to get with your neighbors and see if they have any interest in pitching in 50 bucks a month or so for a wireless link. If you get 7 or 8 folks together, buy some cheap wireless gear and a few cantennas, you can probably get yourself a "real" connection without all the BS you tend to get from satellite or from regular broadband ISPs (think invisible caps, no server policies, etc). Get a little techno-hippy wi-fi co-op running!
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
Disclaimer: I work for DirecTV.
This is my opinion of DirecWay, take it for what it is worth (which may not be much):
- Direcway is pretty fast. While Direcway gives you an estimate of 400-600Kbit/sec, in reality you can often get 1+Mbit
- Direcway's equipment is VERY exepensive. Direcway actually takes a loss on the install/equipment package, but it still costs in the neighborhood of $600USD
- Direcway gives you a lot of geek points. It is a fully 2-way satellite system (DirecPC was only 1-way, using an analog modem for upstream). Unfortunately, or fortunately depemding on your opinion, you cannot install it. By federal law you are REQUIRED to ahve it installed professionally, because it is a 2-way system.
- I would personally avoid Direcway because it is Windows/MacOSX only. This is their definition of "Operating system agnostic"--Seriously! www.getdway.com actually defines OS agnosticism as working with Mac and Windows! I found this pretty disgusting.
- While technically you have "unlimited use", if you download more than about 230MB in a short period of time, you are rate-limited to analog modem speeds. This means the next time you download a Linux or BSD ISO, your first 230 or so MB (I forget the exact value) will go fine, but after that it will take forever. This is to reduce the use of bandwidth by those that "abuse" the system. Bandwidth abusers are a particularly big problem for satellite, because satellite bandwidth is quite expensive. Still, it sucks.
- Other than for gaming, the latency really isn't that bad. For gaming, you are better off with an analog modem.
Overall, if cable/DSL/wireless are available, go for them. If only analog is available, satellite is MUCH better. At worst, latency is bad and bandwidth is only somewhat faster than a modem when you "abuse" your bandwidth.
I use cable for internet access myself, because it is better than satellite, and DirecTV for TV, because it is better than cable.
This is my opinion and obviously not DirecTV's.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
As an answer to your point about SSH, if you are on Windows (and however I don't think you are, I'm gonna mention it anyway :p), SecureCRT has this pretty neat feature to buffer your SSH TX. When I was still on ISDN, I rather enjoyed this feature while I was downloading the latest 0-day Slackware ISOz. 8)
I'm not aware of any UNIX SSH client capable of buffering though, but I do think you have a good chance of finding one somewhere on the net.
-raz
"I shoot troubles with a jackhammer"
LIke you I live in an area with few broadband options, basically satallite or none. I have been using direcway for over 2 years. Initially as a one way subscriber and currently as a two way subscriber using the direcway 6000. I am very happy with the service. I don't recommend downloading large files. There is a cap on downloading band width, under Direcways limit downloading the latest linux iso is basically impossible. The lag makes online gaming an non issue, unless your playing spades.. I think the cost is a little high considering equipment costs and monthly fees. Proffessional installation is required for the two way systems due to the danger of getting your hand or head in the way of a high power broadcast up to the satallite. In general i am happy, customer support has been sent to India(like our mars mission), but response to issues is usually pleasant and productive. My home is networked cheaply using a couple of netgear switches, but I haven't used Linux to hit the web yet. I am a linux newbie and unsure of any security risks, but I was assured it would work with the 6000; albeit officially unsupported.
Jeoin
Hey, 128k (actually 144k with DSL or ISDN) IDSL isn't big-bad broadband. But is is a hellavalot faster than 53.3k.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
In the real world, you'll get ping times in the 550-600ms range. It's not at terrible as you'd think, but like I said in a previous post, it makes using a terminal quite painful. It's usable, but really unpleasant.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Browsing is fine.
Non Twitch games ARE playable tho slightly laggy ( I've played EQ Online on the PS2 and it was totally playable, just a tad laggy)
The FAP is the real downer, it's 169MB per day for a Consumer level account(Slightly increased to around 200MB if your down loading during non peak times (2am til 7am)
I've never used VPN so I cant comment about that, tho others have said its pretty much useless.
You can also check a good forum for Sat Internet here:
http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/sat
Good luck.
Zep--
Can I move to a sunny and remote beach town in Mexico/CostaRica/etc and get this kind of Internet access?
Thanks for the scoop. My brother emailed me about wanting to build a network in his house a few days ago, I'll have to pass this on to him before he starts drilling.
...I still get my daily dose on 56k. The only time I really need more is if I need to move iso's or something. So, is there truly a need, as opposed to "just nice to have"? Considering the cost differences/TOS, etc.
C|N>K
I've read all of the replies to your message so far. The one thing I don't see mentioned is that outages are due in great part to the installation of the dish itself.
If the dish isn't aligned plumb with the satellite, is is much more susceptable to outages. Always go for the highest signal strength you can possible get in normal weather. (That means above "acceptable".) That will get you even better reception when the weather is bad.
People need to make sure their satellite dishes are secure. Maybe it isn't the rain so much as the rain combined with the wind that is shaking the dish around a bit? That'll really wreck a signal when you combine the two.
And of course, cable quality. If they use bad cables, they're going to hurt their signal quality.
My worst satellite reception experience? I lost DirectTV *THREE TIMES* when the cable company came by over and over and cut my satellite wire, somehow thinking it was stolen cable (COX). The last time, their fraud manager came out (boy was he a suspicious ass) and put some nice labels on the cables ("DSS - Do not cut") so they wouldn't touch it. And replaced my cables, too.
Starband is working great for me, living in the Santa Cruz mountains.
... the very few times I've had access problems have been during intense (very intense) rain.
It's fast and reliable
Performance isn't quite as good as DSL, but it's pretty nice, and totally incomparable to the misery of dialup. My kids say online gaming isn't great because of latency, but that's not an issue for me.
I'm happily running a home network off my connection, one slow old dedicated modem machine (350 MHz Pentium running XP) with five others hanging off it.
The only snag I've found is hitting a 5Gb bandwidth cap on uploads -- Internet access been cut off a couple of times, restored automatically by visit to SB's website reset page.
Tech support when needed has been good -- knowledgable, helpful and free (after quite a long hold time.)
Alan
I am therefore I think?
Remember it is a two-way satellite. Not a passive one-way for regular satellite TV. As such, the signal is more prone to being disturbed. The dish has to be aimed more precisely at the satellite and any wind or heavy rain can affect this. (Disclaimer: I used to work for Starband)
Snow and weather is not a problem for satellite TV, though of course, the cable companies spread a lot of FUD that it is. The cable companies also say that digital cable looks better than satellite, which is also a load of crap.
Weather MIGHT bother the uplink or degrade the downlink somewhat, I don't know.
This is a new week so that would mean that we must now form brand new opinions of our "enemies." Wasn't DirectTV the company that was suing all of the "pirates" that purchased any form of Smartcard reader? The individual that has the responsibility of what to post and therefore the individual that decides what corporation gets lambasted, is now inquiring about a possible business relation with the same corporation.
How about a little "Practice what you Preach"
I have very little patience for hypocrites.
Stay tuned for new sig...
I lived in Grand Haven for a summer. It was fun being so close to the lake, but the whole area does lack many of todays modern conviences. Plus, because it is a tourist spot the prices are jacked up pretty high ($1 12 oz coke vending machines back in 93). Poor Taco. My advice would be to learn try it, its most likely not going to be worse than 56 k. Maybe you should see if you can arange something with Hope College. You could be an honorary something or another and recieve free broadband some how. Ok details aren't quit there, but you know and stuff. Mind numb from high speed inter- thingy access.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I believe you get something like 400mb every 4 hours or some crap like that. If you go over their bandwidth limits (I do), your connection slows to a less than 56k quality. Good luck, my DirecWay satellite only sees use when I need to extend my Wireless G connection.
You may want to mail or talk to Jerry Pournelle over at www.jerrypournelle.com . He's been dealing with dialup and satellite connections on and off for several years, now. He's a columnist for Byte, which is still around, and he's been dealing with computers for longer than some people reading this have been alive.
E-Sabbath, who really should reactivate his old account.
I'm in Mid-Michgan, and SpeedNet is very popular. Is there a similar service that serves the Ann Arbor area?
> Does it cost a fortune for the required professional installation?
Won't your employer pay for it, given your position?
How long have you been using it? 24hrs? 1 month? 2 years?
And that's a bonus. Before last week I'd get 28.8K, sometimes 26.4K. After 7 years of this you get used to it. Hell, after a month you get used to it. The only thing you really notice it on is BIG files, for regular eveyrday work stuff the difference with small mostly text based things is barely noticable. Browser caching helps a lot too, if I click preview on this page right here the difference between dialup and a T1 is less than a second. I can live with that.
I had 128K ISFN when I lived in Toronto in the early 90's, but I live where I do by choice, cripplingly low bandwidth and all.
If you saw the view from my (home) office window you'd understand. And the people are way different here than in any big sh^H^Hcity.
The only thing I get tired of is explaining to people: "No, there serevrs aren't here and are not on a dialup. It's actually possible to work on them when you're not sitting at the console".
Need Mercedes parts ?
I will never puchase a DirecWay system again. First of all, they cap your downloads to 100MB/hour (I think), and then start to ratchet your bandwidth by half until you are down to a crawl. So don't expect to download any .iso files. Also, ping times are around 3 seconds. SSH connections are *possible*, but they really suck. Direcway will give you a utility to setup MS Windows machines to work w/ direcway. To get linux boxes to work, you need to set the direcway box as a proxy, as well as change the window size to 50000 -- I forget the route command, but I can email anybody who is interested (My linux box is at home, and I am at work.) I hope this helps, STAY AWAY!!! mmb@marlboro.edu
--- Boox
I also live in Minneapolis and have DISH service for my TV. I installed and aimed the dish, and was very careful about it. The aiming bars on the Dish receivers (which may or may not be in dBi - I don't remember) register 96 and 102 for the 110 and 119 satellites, respectively.
I installed my dish three years ago and have only had two service drops in the entire three years, both in the first six months when I was still using the free pair of lnbs. Since I installed my quad lnb I've never once lost my signal.
In Minneapolis we get an average of 55 inches of snow per year, with annual precipitation around 28 inches (according to the U of MN). So with almost 5 feet of snow annually and over two feet of annual precipitation, we have a lot of potential obstacles.
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
Whatever you do, don't get this service. My boss has it, and hates it. Dial-up is faster, which is sad. To answer your question, yes, it bogs down during the day and the lag is awful. Dial-up is probably 3x faster for things like SSH and pcanywhere. It's a good concept... until you imagine how it's going to work with 2 way communication. Downstream is fine, upstream is a nightmare. In other words, keep your inexpensive dial-up account until something better comes along.
Multilink PPP. If you're going to be paying $120/mo plus $600 hardware startup, why not go with a few extra dumb phone lines and a few extra 56k modems?
You'll probably get the same speed as you would from the satelite, but no latency at all. I'm sure *someone* at OSDN can help you rope the modems together and get a cohesive connection out of it. You might need to use some peicemeal HTTP downloader app to get the full benefit for large downloads, but I don't know how multilink PPP works.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Just last week, it finally began working again. We had hella snowstorms this week: service was not affected. There's a lag when you begin using the internet, but afterwards it's pretty smooth. If you've got the funds, I would recommend DirecWay.
- The service may slow down a bit during the day. I remember it did when we first got the dish - it seems better now on the new satellite, but there could still be problems.
- The installation is pretty easy, for me. The original modems (one TX, one RX) they gave us were USB, and the new modem/router we have is pretty neat. It connects via Ethernet; we configured the router attached to a single box, then took it off there and plugged it in to the switch and it worked right away.
- The installation was kind of a pain in the ass, but not much. The techs were good people. The issue we had was that we needed to erect a tube and fill it with concrete, leaving a pipe sticking out for the satellite. Once we took care of that, we just had to run the coax into the house.
- The service is a bit expensive, especially since you have to pay for the equipment (about $600 I believe.) You can pay this off incrementally on top of your regular bill. However, the installation was included and DirecWay has 24 hour tech support, albeit shitty tech support.
- I haven't tried SSH, but I can when I get home...
The service isn't bad! We have five or six Windows PCs in my house and I feel we are very adequately supplied with bandwidth.Do you love freedom??? Do you love freedom!!! DO YOU LOVE FREEDOM!!!!!!!!
It works in linux for free. And uses standard DVB equipment.
Or use any other DVB internet provider. Forget about anyone using proprietary crap hardware. Stick with standards.
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
I have been using Starband since it started. It had it issues in the past, but I have been very happy. I have friends who have DirecWay and they are not so happy. I also hear the new DirecWay hardware is better and their experiences may be different now.
Starband has a new modem that has a 4 port switch and requires no special OS gateway software. I have it connect to a LinkSys RV082 router with multiple operating systems on the LAN side with no problems.
Starband will give you up to 4 static IP addresses.
Starband is extreamly reliable. If you are using the model 360 modem, you will surly want to have a dedicated gateway machine for sharing the Internet. I used XP with ICS until the model 460 model was released. Now I have no gateway, just the VSAT modem/router.
Again, my experience is that it is very reliable. latency is bad; 700 to 2000 ms. I have seen downlaod speeds as fast a 1.25 MB per sec (no lie). I get 300K+ occasionaly, and 80K to 120K is normal. DOwnloads are very fast. VOIP and such stink. But, when it is all that you have, it is better than dial up.
I have just had a T1 sent up here via 5 gig wireless link (there is a tower 6.79 miles away). I have found the satellite to be more reliable. Not as responsive, but far more reliable than wireless. This is why I have the new LinkSys RV082 router. It has two WAN ports to allow redundancy and load balancing between the two WAN connection; plus it has great VPN capabilities.
Jamey Kirby
SpaceWay (the successor to DirecWay, I believe) is to start commercial service in 2004, or so says their web site. Any idea if this is a reality? The specs are much better. However, is it worth holding off getting DirecWay? Does anyone know when in 2004 this service might launch?
Could you post your experiences on /.? I think it would be interesting to the community to get your first hand impressions.
Thanks,
-Sean
Direcway is alright for browsing but its not real useful for much else. They have a fair access policy which limits you to 206Mb down in a four hour period. If you exceed that limit, you won't have access until your average goes down (a few hours).
SSH and VPN work over it, but the latency is pretty bad. I used both a great deal and rely on a dial-up connection for them if I'm doing anything involved. SSL is also tedious through it since it doesn't go through Direcway's proxy...
FTP is pretty poor over it as well - especially if you're uploading. My 56K dial-up connection is about twice as fast for uploads as my Direcway service. Forget about online gaming.
If you just want it for browsing and small downloads, its great. Otherwise, it is certainly not worth the expense. I had Roadrunner for 2 years before moving out to BFE and I'd say calling satellite internet "broadband" is false advertising.
Check out BroadbandReports for more information
I have been on Directway for the past year and a half. It is the worst thing I have ever seen. Spotty connections their filters sometimes won't let me connect to my web servers for updates. I haven't been able to use SSH. Stay on dial up You are better off.
Thank GOD I am getting DSL in less than 2 weeks!
Can Smeg!!! Will Smeg!!!
If you have decent cellular/PCS reception in the area, there are other terrestrial options that you might consider. The good people at Verison have a PCI card that gives you always on internet connection via their cellular netwok. Speeds and latency are pretty good. I saw download speeds at 300+Kb/s sustained and upload around 80Kb/s. Latency was around a 300ms on the hight end, and I used it to manage my box via SSH without issues. One consideration is that this option is geared toward a Windows enviroment and I do not know about linux support for it as it uses a propietry dialer client to connect. I've used Sprint's PCS service much the same; however, only with a PCMCIA card. I do not know if they have a PCI version of the card. Speeds/Latency were about the same and the same disclaimer applies concerning this being a Windows solution. Costs on these packages were $80/month for "unlimited" access (read contract for limitations on "unlimited"). Hope this helps! MrKnisely
The service is horrible. You do get a gigantic gain in download speed, and a slight increase in upload speed. (12 kb a second.) You can't host a server on directway.
The latency was so unbearable that I would get disconnected from AIM numerous times. Chatrooms did not work at all.
Also, look at where your directv dish is pointed. If it's narrowly passing a tree, then forget about dway. They usually get you a directway dish with an added directv module.
Since they have to aim one dish to get two signals, you get mediocre quality in both. During the spring and summer, sometimes this will become unusable. If this wasn't bad enough, the setup was a pain, and sometimes the modem locks up for no reason.
Unless you absolutely, positively need high speed downloading, stick with dialup.
Greetings;
My wifes cousin switched from local 33.6k dialup to DirecWay satellite service some months ago, and while I can't speak for any other install of DirecWay, her connection is just utter shite.
Marginally faster than 56k dialup (And I do mean marginally), overall I thought it was a rather embaressing example of an internet service daring to suggest it might be broadband or "High Speed".
As usual, your mileage may vary;
No, a true geek would build their own rocket and launch their own communications satelite into a geo sync LEO
A true geek would know that geosynchronus and low-earth orbits are two different things. Unless you want to load it with propellant constantly, which you really don't.
But just hope they don't change smtp and pop3 servers. I worked @ a tech support shop last year, and one of our customers was using direcway when they decided to change e-mail servers. We [myself and peers] tried to contact direcway many, many times; sometimes on hold (valuable time spent playing quake3) for 5HRs.
So to summerize: nice connection w/ good rates; but horrible service.
Is this the New DirectPC? I did the installation software for that. When I left the project, they had a switch that would go from [out 56k - in sat] to [out in 56k]. This way if you are browsing you use the great speed of satelite and for telnet/ssh/games you can use 56k both ways. James
slashdot@navagus.com
For a very long time a lot of people in Northern Virginia couldn't get highspeed, and we live 10 minutes from WorldCom and AOL headquarters! What several of the tech savvy did was get a T1 for ~$450 a month and resell via 802.11b to their neighbors.
I suggest the NASA site as reading material.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those that need closure
Heavy snow and ice DO bother the DirecWay system. This is because water absorbes microwaves (this is how a microwave oven works), so the precipitation does effect it. I have not had much problem with rain, except in *real heavy* rain.
Did I mention I will never purchase a DirecWay system again?
just my 2 cents.
--- Boox
I think TDS Metrocom serves Michigan. I'm getting a 768k T1, with 5 business lines installed for $160/month. It's their XDATA plan, IIRC.
My currently 1500/768 ADSL with 5 IP's is $105. Add to that my normal phone at $35, and I'm almost getting 4 additional lines for free.
Not that I need 5 phone lines, but that's their requirement. Anyways, I have 4 kids, 2 of which are girls, I'm sure they're be used at some point ;)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I live in Northern Michigan (Roscommon), and I have several clients that have/had DirecWay and snow *is* an issue. I have been called out just for the purpose of climbing on the roof and sweeping off the dish.
Also, lag is a problem for more then just interactive programs. One insurance office used it to connect to the internet which is how they managed their customers on the home office's web page which was mostly text with small graphics for logos and such (like Slashdot...) It was sloooow. Think 3 sec DNS request, etc. I replaced it with a single 56k 3COM LanModem for a 5 person office and it was faster (for that situation)
On the other hand, I have a real estate office that uses it to download photos of properties and they love it. (And they just came out with a device to allow you to connect without the need of a windows PC, just ethernet!)
If you are still in Michigan, I would look at Wireless ISPs. They have their problems, I help manage one so I know, but they can get places where no one else can.
Spray some PAM or other kind of cooking spray on your dish, it helped me with that exact issue greatly.
Get HomePower magazine this month and see the article about the editors life with satelite modems for the last 3 years. A good read with lots of insight. The only problem is you'll have to suffer throught the Mac stuff, kind of like MacHack all over again.
I've got a friend that is using DirecWay as he is in a similar situation where cable & dsl are not availble in his area (way out in BFE)... He had told me though he had to go with the business class service so that he could SSH back into his network as it seems they firewall inbound traffic on the residential service. While I was staying with him for a day over X-mas I got to use the connection to check my email back home on the opposite coast and it was fairly slow, but not completely unusable just a bit tiresome.
You should be running a DNS server in house, and primary the root zone and have a decent sized cache. You're right in that DNS is a major part of all internet traffic (just look at what actually happens for one lousy web request some time, it's downright scary) but, since they're small but urgest requests it would make more sense to route these over a phone line than via the sat.
:)
Think of the sat as a 747. Really good for BIG things, but not so hot if you want to deliver a small package halfway across town really quickly.
Squid and Opera help a lot too. Even with dialup
Need Mercedes parts ?
If you can get cable or DSL go that route. If you can't then the Dish is decent.
/release ipconfig /renew to get it back up.
The only outages I had with it in the past year was during a particulary sever thunderstorm, and when my girlfriend left her radar detector on in my driveway.
Yes, it's a common problem, and the tech support was pretty helpful in diagnosing - for some reason some detectors can bring down the connection.
If you're looking to use it on a lan - beware - when it's running good it's great, but occasionally some of the pc's "lose" a connection and you have to run an ipconfig
You'll have to use direcways software to config for the way they do packets - they have a tool to run on all the pc's to modify them to talk thru the satellite.
Lastly - be aware you're fupped on a satellite. if you go to download over 140 meg in one shot - you get throttled to less than 1k under their "Fair Use Policy".
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
I'm in Europe - Scottish Highlands - and have been running on satellite for 18 months. I'm using the earlier DirecWay DW4000 system - marketed under a different company reseller here (Bridge Broadband), but still the same thing underneath.
I've found satellite excellent. It's got pluses and minuses compared to 'normal' broadband, but so long as you understand what you're dealing with then it's a really good choice. In fact if I moved back to an area with cable broadband I'd be very tempted to take this dish with me and stick to satellite.
Good things
* Generally there's no problem with contention ratios. I'm contracted for a 512Kb pipe and that's what I get whenever I demand it. Having hear horror stories of cable broadband being slower than dialup because of the contentiion ratios piled on (20:1 +) it's nice to have a fat'ish pipe to yourself. This is probably the single best thing about satellite. (OK, I know there must be contention management somewhere, but I've never seen it).
* Cost. Although upfront costs are high, and running costs not cheap, you do have all that pipe to do what you will with. I've got cable laid to my three neighbours, who I charge 'normal broadband' rates to, so the ongoing cost works out the same, if not slightly cheaper, than cable broadband. Some vendors don't let you do this while others smile benignly on it so check.
* Easy upgrade - if you need more bandwidth the Hughes system can generally give it to you with little or no kit changes. 512Kb is enough for me, but it's nice to know that could increase several times.
* Reliable - reliability seems excellent. True there's the occassional glitch like any system, but because everybody is going through the same earth station problems tends to effect everyone at once so they really pull their finger out. I've found with systems based on local exchanges that if something goes down because only a few'ish local people are effected it can take days to fix.
Bad things
* Ping times are unavoidably long. Around 900ms for most destinations as against 250ms for cable. However this is less of a problem than you'd expect for most things. Web browsers can be tweaked to grab more items in parallel - so total page load time is no different, and downloads/streaming media etc it doesn't matter if you're just a second or so later once it starts. However most games are out and video-conferencing is doubtful (I'm told the system can be optomised to make it possible though but not tried)
* You can get outages in very heavy rain under very thick cloud. This is pretty rare but does happen - but generally it's obvious what the problem is so having a beer for half an hour until the heavy rain passes is a fine solution. Also occassionally had problems in blizzards from a build up of snow on the transmitter.
* Some services occassionaly don't like satellite. For example I quite often find ftp upload is much slower than expected. This may have something to do with the way satellite doesn't transmit/recieve a continous stream of IP packets but collects them together to transmit as larger 'frames'.
Bottom line. Unless you find the ping time problem a killer issue then satellite is a really good rural solution. Like all engineering it helps if you have some understanding and 'machine
sympathy'
Taco,
:-)
Have you tried looking up Catalyst Wireless here in Ann Arbor? They have (or had) an antenna on the 777 building at Eisenhower & State, so if you're within a few miles of that you should be able to get a 512Kbps connections.
If that doesn't work, a T1 will cost you about $125-250 per month plus internet access, or about $400 per month if you don't abuse it.
It's deductible, of course.
These systems may require Pro installation, but if you saw some of the guys doing this, you'd know it's not that big of a deal. After I saw the crackhead (quite literally, I'm not poking fun) who installed my coworkers Starband system I decided to get certified myself. It didn't cost me anything, Took me about two hours, and now I'm certified to install these things. Plus if you install your own system, you make a commission on the money you pay for your service. Take a look at http://training.starband.com/html_files/installati on_training.htm
Go away, or I will replace you with a very small shell script.
go ann arbor, thats my hometown right there
" I'm aware of the game crippling latency, but that's not a huge deal to me."
You can join my Half-Life server any time!
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
I have had Direcway for years. The biggest drawback is the bandwidth limitations. If you download more than 420M within 4 hrs, they shut you down for 4 hours. It made downloading Redhat9 a painful experience. I had to use leechftp & limit myself to 12k....ugh.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
using Sprint Vision as a data line for your computer is now verbotten. So far they're mostly adopting a "don't ask, don't tell" policy towards the occasional infraction but they definitely dump anyone who tries to use it 24/7. How much is too much, nobody really knows.
You really don't understand what latency is, do you?
A lot of people don't. Especially managers. That's why the telecom engineering department at my last workplace deployed negative latency inducers. Similar to echo cancellers, negative latency inducers (NLI's as they're called in the telco world) sample the link and use forward-anticipating logic circuits to calculate an appropriate future datagram. Low cost units run about $125K a pair (though there are rumors of a sourceforge project and can snip out about 250 ms -- making VoIP over international telco links much more possible.
Doubled back to back and then some (in a manner similar to plugging a G.729 stream into another G.729 codec to double your voice compression and get 64:1 type ratios), you can get latency reductions of 1000 ms and greater. However, you have to be careful about employing too much NLI on domestic circuits - especially on voice over IP traffic - otherwise you'll get a party being heard on the remote end of the phone before they talk, and that can get confusing!
(Believe it or not, management bought this explanation... *sigh*)
The problem with install is not the reception of the signal it is the uplink. The tuning specs for your uplink are much stricter than the reception. If the dish is not aligned right you can fry the Bird. This is why it is required the have a pro do the install. At one point in the begining training for this was free to try and get enough installers with the right skills.
A friend of mine live just out of reach from cable-modem/DSL. He's five miles away from my house (cable modem).
.iso sets very often.
In the last month, he's spent more time connecting to my wireless net or going to Starbucks for T-Mobile's wireless net, than at home.
The melting snow is a bitch on the connection (Spokane, WA).
SSH is painful for any interactive work. Latency is a pain and games are shot. Bandwidth caps mean you aren't going to be grabbing 3-disk
While it can take a bit to disrupt the DOWNWARD signal, it is much easier to screw your UPLINK signal to the point it doesn't work. Thus, TV is less affected than internet connections.
However, if you have no other option, it beats dialup. It depends, though. Are you far enough out that the phone lines are crap and you are getting 14.4-28.8 dial in? Or are you just in a good area but without DSL/cable?
If the latter, look for an ISP that will allow you to bond two dialup links. Get two phone lines and two modems and get them to bond into one link. Also check out ISDN, though it may be expensive.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The weather discussion is interesting, as I'm in Minnesota. My other question is regarding other interference. I live near a major airport. Sometimes I get TV interference from aircraft flying overhead. This behavior is inconsistent; i.e. I do not get interference from all flights or on all days. My suspicion is that is has to do with whether the overflying aircraft are using radar or not; but have no proof.
If I go with satellite, I would be directly north of this airport by about 2 miles. In other words, the dish will point to the south, directly over the airport. Should I expect interference?
A few years back I was on the DirecTV Internet Service (don't recall what it was named then) and there was a particularly sneaky bit involved. They had a mysterious threshold for data transfered, beyond which they throttled your sat. connection down to something less than dialup. The support folks claimed to have no way of telling if you had passed the threshold and the threshold was not disclosed (they also did not discolose how long it took to get 'in the clear again'). They would refer you to their 'Fair Access Policy' and that would be it. Fortunately I moved somewhere where I could get a high speed wired connection. Robert H
I'm in a similar situation and got an ISDN line from my teleco. The service is about $90/month (SBC), and provides 2 64K channels. I use it both for my phone and internet connection. Internet is 64K that bursts to 128K when the phone is not in use. ISDN router/terminal adapter can be had for about $200. It is not DSL but I was very surprised how much better even the 64K ISDN is to a "56K" dial-up. 128K ISDN is all you need unless you want to download lots of music or movies. -Brent
Rob, I too live just outside Ann Arbor in Saline. In my area there is no DSL or cable either.
A guy in my neighborhood has a T1 to his house and sells service off it for $35/month, using Motorola's Canopy. he can get up to a 10 mile radius, so it's possible that you're within range.
As a result, you get 1.5Mbps (shared) upstream AND downstream, which is better than most cable service. It's been very reliable, and cheaper than cable too.
Anyone who's interested, drop me a note and I can give you the info.
Chikli Consulting LLC - http://agileshrugged.com
I once accidentally bought a house "out in the sticks" (Osgoode, ON) where I couldn't even get ISDN (which I had while living in Ottawa). I grabbed a 486 that had 2 serial ports, added a serial card and put 3 56K modems on it. When I called Bell and asked for 3 additional phone lines they had to run a new wire from the curb to my house. On the 2 lines that ran across the connection I got 48K connections to the office (connecting to a Cisco AS5300). Note that I asked for 3 additional lines, and I already had one being used for voice. After multiple attempts they were unable to get all 4 lines working (they'd disable other ones, etc,etc) and I gave up on 3 modems, settling for only 2. ..anyway, using multilink PPP on a 2.1 series kernel worked perfectly, and it seems due to the modems compression I was often getting better apparent speeds than I was on ISDN. Using (compressed) SSH across such a configuration was nearly the same as being in the office-- no problems at all. Of course the SSH's compression and modems compression didn't help each other, but I'd bet SSH compressed the data far more than the modem would have anyway. Pages with lots of text just flew down.
I had the system configured to keep 1 line up all the time, and when there was traffic it'd dial on demand the other line, and keep it up for ~45 minutes before dropping due to inactivity.
IIRC, the total cost (to me, anyway) was around $18*2)= $36/month for the phone lines + hardware of course.
BTW, I'd also tried multilink PPP on Windows (95 at the time) with equally good results.
-- I speak only for myself.
GO BLUE!!! Big Ten Champions!!!!!!!!!
DirecWay now offers the DW6000, which appears to be an operating system agnostic router for satellite internet access.
It is agnostic, so you shouldn't have any problems running Linux, OS X, BeOS, Windows, whatever. Instead of 2 units+software it's all integrated into the same system, a box that's about 2x as big as a cable router would be but with cool blue LEDs. Ethernet port in the back, you can set up DHCP on the router or disable it if you prefer (so you can use something else or just use static, whatever).
I already use DirecTV, so this might work well.
You won't get any kind of discount. However, you *may* be able to buy a kit (ask whether you need a kit A, B, or C) to consolidate your programming on the DirecWay dish. If you have local channels or already have a dual or multisat dish, then you're going to need to keep your DirecTV dish for TV. If you can manage to use the DirecWay dish for TV as well, then you'll be less susceptible to rain-fade.
I'm aware of the game crippling latency, but that's not a huge deal to me. The monthly price seems reasonable, but is there a catch?
Yeah, a couple of big fat catches. Tech support is absolutely abysmally bad. The worst tech support I've experienced in 22 years in the IT industry. In addition, you're limited to 165MB of bandwidth per day - if you exceed that then you'll be throttled way the hell down until your quota is built back up.
I'm abusing my power as Slashdot editor to ask for experiences with this (or similiar) services. Does it bog down during the day? Not work with common hardware? Hidden costs?
That's okay - if I wasn't posting this anonymously I'd be in a heap of trouble. Hidden costs would be if you need a tech to come back out to troubleshoot your system. For surfing it's pretty damned quick (lots of caching going on via back-end). Not had it bog down except when bandwidth was exceeded.
However, sometimes there will be trouble with a transponder on a bird which will knock a bunch of people off for days (unless you want to repoint your dish, have the NOC okay your move to another bird - long, long hassle). Of course, rain-fade or very heavy overcast will kick you offline.
Does it cost a fortune for the required professional installation?
No, you have to be a certified installer to put the thing in. But the cost of the install is supposed to be included in the cost of the system, though (depending on market, etc) you may pay $199 for a standard install. If you need a wallfish or have a long run of cable (couple of hundred feet) then you'll have to pay extra.
Is ssh completely unusable?
I don't know - you'll have to adjust your latency thresholds so your apps don't time you out before you get a response from the server you're trying to download from (FTP). Haven't tried SSH over one of these.
Everything said and done, DirecWay is a damned sight better than rural dialup ever will be. Most of the time, you'll love the system. Odds are you won't experience many problems; however, when you do they'll be a royal pain to get fixed. So, keep dialup as a fall-back.
You'll find surfing and emailing to rule. Not so much with anything else, though. Oh, if you need a static IP, expect to pay another $30 a month. Also, if you have an older DirecWay system, you can probably upgrade to the DW6000 for $100 ('cause it's so much easier to troubleshoot).
I have had numerouse co-workers switch to DirectWay, and the only issue they have had was with certain VPN clients. They can't make the connection. All the rest of the issues with service are typical gripes with DirecTV (As you probably already have with your Dish TV.)
My Pops has DirecWay in S.C. On 2 separate occasions I've gone down and tried to work remotely using Terminal Services and SSH. Both are very sluggish to the point where they are unusable, I've looked at the icmp round trips and they are often 500-2000ms. Both times I unhooked my laptop from the RJ45 and got on dial-up at 28.8Kb/s which was better.
In a word - variable. The download speeds can go as low as 28k all the way upto 1.2 Mbs.There is a quota that they don't tell you about and if memory serves it is 120mbs per day. Make sure you are provisioned on a newer satellite other wise you will go crazy between 4 and 8 PM.
Severe weather will affect you but 95% of the time it is useable. Make sure that the system is grounded or you will be resetting it every couple of hours.
BTW if you want to buy the equipment from me email me at snoopy456 at hotmail.you know the rest. We finally got cable in our town.
AT&T Wireless has nationwide rollout of EDGE (highspeed wireless data...faster than Verizon or Sprints) and at 250 for the card and $80 a month for service (unlimited) it might be worth looking into...i think its supposed to max out at something like 384kb and on average do around 160kb. Anyway if you have ATTWS GSM service in your area that might be something to check out or try..(aircard + adapter for computer? ehh probably no linux tho)
My personal experiences...
.js file, or whatever, comes in with a 2 second lag. For complex sites (which is MOST commercial sites with https connections) it can be pretty slow. I simply use Mozilla's "block images from this server" trick most of the time.
Latency sucks. I'm actively looking for an alternate (I can't get DSL, I can't get wireless, I can't get two-way cable). But I will say that DirecWay is MUCH better than a modem - in most cases.
Latency is not so much a problem for browsing, surprisingly, because if you're used to a modem, you wait longer by far for content to arrive. With the DirecWay software running (on a 3000/4000 box), or with the 6000 system, the thing is smart enough to ask for all the subitems on a page at once, so once the stuff starts arriving, it gets there pretty fast.
The real problem with latency, surprisingly, is EMAIL. As you know, it's a challenge/reply system, where it's necessarily linear - you can't multitask it. So every step takes 2 seconds - which means for checking about five POP3 mailboxes with a dozen saved messages each, and downloading a dozen new messages, can take upwards of 3 or 4 minutes. I usually hit my email button, walk away, and come back later. And when I'm home, I just leave it running all the time. Not worrying about dialing up is sweet.
Same thing with FTP - if you manage a web site, like I do, it can be REALLY painful working with FTP, since the linear nature of THAT transaction is also very slow with high latency connections. Uploading or downloading a hundred small files totalling 100K takes well near forever (10-20 minutes), even though you could do it over ethernet in a second or two.
Finally, browsing any secure site is very slow - since the system doesn't do its magic compression / multi-request with https. So there's really no browsing acceleration there. So each image, or
Uploading anything is REALLY REALLY REALLY SLOW. You're better off uploading over a modem - no kidding. I usually see 2.8k upload speeds. Much worse than I used to see with a modem with decent software compresssion. And that's WITH DrTCP optimizations applied. Since I market software and must download 10Mb installers to my web site regularly, I've learned to just start them at bedtime, and check it in the morning to be sure it finished.
Downloading large files is amazing - nothing to complain about - 10 Mb downloads are painless and I don't even think twice about requesting them anymore, even via email.
I personally haven't yet hit the FAP limit once. So I have no complaints about the capping. Of course, I'm not downloading full Linux installs or anything - just an occasional 10 or 20Mb demo installer for some software. And I don't traffic in MP3s or other multimedia.
Installation was quite easy - I have a friend who's an installer, and he gave me the mount and cable ahead of time, so I ran my own cable and did the mount the way I like it (lots of roofing tar, extra heavy lag bolts, etc.) I couldn't do the dish install because of the FCC requirements, but after my own pre-installation, my friend was able to get the dish mounted and pointed within about 10 minutes. No problem. Be sure to account for TWO RG6QS cables - not just one - to carry both the send and receive modems.
I have had some difficulty with the "commissioning" - where the receiver downloads the adapter keys - when I turn the thing off for a week while I'm out of town, it typically takes an hour or two before it's up and running again. That can be very irritating while it's resolved.
As with other posters, I've only had a few instances of rain fade, and usually very brief.
I've never had a real problem with tech support - they're usually slow to answer the phone but once I get a person we usually have the problem resolved fairly quickly. There was one exception where the guy must have been from Pakistan, couldn't really speak English, and obviously didn't want to hear what I had to say, was just reading a scrip
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
I have Dish Network at my house in Florida. When it rains hard, you can forget about watching TV. Sometimes it will even go out in a light rain (most of the time it stays on). Of course, my system is about 3 years old, so maybe they have improved upon the hardware by now.
I live in the sticks where satellite is currently the only possible form of broadband available, despite living less than five miles from a local ISP. Wireless is still not an option because of the tall hills and signficant woodage between me and the ISP (and Mandrake dies hard whenever I plug in my USB wireless cards).
I had three separate dialup accounts (one for each person in the house), which ran between $40-$60 a month depending on the ISP.
The initial $200 setup fee was waived by DirecWay both for the initial one-way installation (which cost me $200 for the equipment), and the two-way DW 4000 upgrade (which cost me $400 just for the transmitter).
I had to commit to a year of service with the two-way, and it required a Windows box to act as the household Internet server. The Windows-based server reduced the satellite capabilities by roughly 25-30 percent over what it provided directly to the Windows machine. It is excruciatingly painful under these circumstances, which is why I had cancelled it a year ago (after my contract expired).
I recently signed back up after finding out about the DW 6000 (which has yet to arrive), and after my dialup provider had one outage too many. The cost of finding another dialup provider for three dialup connections was just a few dollars short of the satellite service.
The service with the DW 6000 is on a monthly billing cycle (no long term commitments), and I get a $100 rebate when I send back my current DW 4000 modems (gladly!). I would have gotten another $100 rebate if I agreed to the 15-month commitment (I will never do such a foolish thing as getting locked into a multi-month agreement again). I pay $65/month since I own the hardware outright.
I visit a small number web sites, so most images are cached in Konqueror. Site like Slashdot load faily quick, though the latency is definitely noticable. I unplug everything during thunderstorms, so signal interference from storms in a non-issue. I have maintained an 84 signal strength in a blizzard (30+ is the minumum needed), and the run of the mill local heavy rains and snow have had zero effect on my signal.
My largest single-session downloads have been the SUN JDK + docs (~50 megs) and FlightGear (78 megs). I have never been FAP'd, as I don't download ISOs (I buy all my distributions directly from Mandrake). I download lots of little things, usually under a meg each, and only a few large things over 10 megs.
My only problems stem from that fuckin' Windows Box(TM) acting (poorly) as the gateway. This will go away when the DW 6000 arrives. I haven't tried in in the context of a VPN (my workplace uses a Symantec VPN, which I don't think is Linux compatible), but that would just be icing on the cake rather than an actual need. I also don't play online games, so that's not a problem.
The bottom line is that the satellite is a great deal for a family of three sharing the connection. Except for that Fuckin' Windows Box(TM), it beats dialup by a wide margin for my house.
My father has DirecWay, and it's not a good idea for a professional. It's not networkable, has awful low points during business hours, and goes out whenever it rains, snows, or is unusually cloudy. plus leaves break it till you get them off the dish.
and comment about 'mule' accounts:
You can't moderate a comment made by someone with the same IP... It mainly forbids you to moderate your own posts created with another id, since the odds of having the past-IP of someone you want to moderate is low...
~SavingPrivateNawak
If its the only option you can get, it is better then dialup in a few ways. People with remote linux boxes should note that the latency makes it near impossible to do anything in a remote shell since you'll have to wait about 2 seconds for a response to any key you type. Also, if you dish gets out of alignment, you'll have to pay about $150 for them to come out and re-point it. If you get the installer that I got you'll want to stay far far away from this product.
If I recall, he bought a regular desktop PC and put Linux on it. I think he put a proxy server on it to help cut down on the traffic. I know he got a domain and put up SMTP/POP to provide email for his neighbors. I don't think he is doing any port 80 traffic.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
There is one down side with DirecWay I forgot to mention. I had real problems trying to subscribe to some email lists like Bugzilla at moziila.org and Bugtraq. Their email server would reject the confirmation emails for some reason. A guy at Mozilla sent me the exact log entry when the confirmation was rejected. It might be their spam filters, though I checked their filter list and saw no evidence it would reject these reputable sites. I suspect there is just something screwy in how there email server handles these slightly atypical emails.
I spent something like 16 hours on the phone to their tech support. At least 90% of it appears to be in India, all the front line support is. It is a case study in how horrible outsourcing tech support can be. They are just sitting there ready canned FAQ's and if your problem isn't in the FAQ you will never get a resolution. It was pretty clear the people I talked to weren't even basicly literate in using a browser, email or the net. I demanded to talk to a manager, he assured me he would escalate the issue. I never hear back, I call back and am on the line for a few more hours and it finally became obvious they assigned the bug to "needs further review" and it never was resolved. I wager a skilled email admin could have at least explained the problem in a few minutes if I had ever got through to one and their email server clearly appears to have a bug in it.
I had to use a FREE yahoo email for the lists that I couldn't get subscribed through Direcway. It worked without a hitch on the confirmation mails.
@de_machina
Man, it sure would be nice if these services were available in Ecuador. I went there over the summer and the best connections I could get out of my aunt and uncle's house was about 14.4k. If I could get high speed access in Ecuador then I could telecommute to work in Dallas, TX... that would be to say the least "kick ass".
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
its the other 2 way satellite broadband setup, associated with Dish instead of DirectTV.
After 3 years I was finally able to switch to DSL.
Consumer 2 way satellite service is more expensive and slower than any other broadband alternative (DSL, cable modem), but better than dialup. If dialup is your only alternative, and you can afford Direcway or Starband, go for it. Latency is high (that darn speed of light matters when the hub is in geosync orbit), upload is MUCH lower bandwidth than download, and a proxy cache definitely helps, but it is always on and has much better download bandwidth than a 56K modem.
Bob
When I was living outside of a small town in Arkansas, I had this same problem. I considered DirecWay but eventually decided not to because of all the downsides involved.
What's really strange is I moved to a small town in Mexico and my options are Dialup, DSL, Cable and wireless. If they can manage that in a small Mexican town, why not a small American town? That's what I can't figure out. Granted, the small Mexican town is about 10 times as populous as the small American town I was living in, but in most ways, it's also 10 times as backwards.
If I were you, I'd talk to your neighbors and collaborate on getting a real connection for your neighborhood like some of the other stories we've seen on that.
My housemates and I had several issues with a DirecPC system. (We had both upload and download via the dish, they also have upload via modem, which might be better.)
1. Latency was usually around 600ms. While this might not be bad for downloading, since the actual speed once the download started was great, it did make for a very annoying web experience. Often times we could dialup to a local provider at a 33.6kbps connection and connect to websites faster.
I think this was because every request takes 600ms at least, and some webpages require many requests, etc. The upload via modem might fix this issue.
2. We had problems with the USB interface. It was the only one available to the system at that time. It would often just drop off and we would have to reboot to continue. (We were running it on a windows box because they did not have any bsd/linux drivers.)
3. Our service was down many times over the course of the six month period we had it. Several times this was for period of a couple of weeks at a time. I found this to be unacceptable.
I'd try the uploading via modem if you have that option.
"Sed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?" -Juvenal
I don't use games or interactive video, so can't comment on the latency issues there - just plain surfing the latency is not generally a problem. Personally, I can handle a .25 sec delay between a click and the time the download starts. If that's not quick enough for you, maybe it's time to cut down on the caffiene :-).
File downloads are really fast, with no FAP. However, uploads are severely limited in terms of speed - big attachments can take a long time to send.
Streaming audio works adequately for KPIG, Nascar races (including all their fancy applets), and hockey games.
I was warned strongly that the system was very weather sensitive, but have experienced no significant problems due to weather on my end, and only a couple or three outages due to severe thunderstorms at Starband's Florida ground station.
My employer's Windows-based VPN system does not work over Starband, but they warned me about that upfront. I don't know if it's a latency thing or they're just blocking the ports for some reason. No biggy, since my work travels well on a USB flash drive. SSH works - I use it to contact SourceForge and other places.
I use an old P-II system running WinProxy on Win98 to connect to the Starband modem. The P-II is connected to a Linksys wireless gateway, and my home network lives behind that.
Racing is an addiction that makes heroin look like a vague hankering for something crunchy.
Satellite Internet SUCKS, but it is slightly better than dialup. After living through 56k for too many years, and not having any broadband in my area, I finaly broke down and spent $1000 for a year of DirecWay. (Hardware + 1 year of service.)
Browsing the web is about the same speed as a 56k (after you take the latency into effect). SSL is completely unusable (too many small packets sent back and forth, which you don't want with high late4ncy.
Upload on mine was typically worse than with dialup (25 to 30k up). The only place it pays off is downloading large files. In that case, I got far better than the advertised 400k down. more like 2000.
If you have ANY OTHER always on connection choices... take it instead. If you rarely pull down large files, there is little point in switching from 56k.
"...unlike the DW4000 that has separate transmit and receive modems stacked together and linked by a 24-pin serial cord."
;) Hey, my mo is fine, but I think my dem is busted!
Kringe! I think they mean "unlike the DW4000 that has separate transmit mo(dulate) and receive dem(odulate) stacked together..."
Some of the things covered here are correct. Ping times suck (800-1000ms), upload sucks, downloads rock. BUT, there is FAP More info can be found at the Broadband Reports Sat. Forum and a guide for tweaking your network is at tweakhound An example of a statstics someone is getting today, 2004-01-26 07:15:03 EST: 1726 / 32 Your download speed : 1726359 bps, or 1726 kbps. A 210.7 KB/sec transfer rate. Your upload speed : 32325 bps, or 32 kbps. Your upstream result was very slow! .. not good
Seems like broadband .. above the 1mbit barrier!
I had Starband about 2 years ago. To be blunt, it sucked. It was unreliable, intermittent, and some things just didn't work. Anything interactive or using a lot of round trips was nearly impossible. This includes email. The smtp and pop3 protocols do a lot of round trips. They had special accellerators for http and ftp to eliminate the round trips and do things in larger "batches". But this was buggy. And if you exceeded the download quota, then it got very slow.
I dropped starband when I found an ISP that would let me "bond" two dialups, as this was better service for me.
If you have server space somewhere, you can set up your own compressing proxy, and probably do better than a small VSAT.
The model 6000 modem/router handles DHCP in a odd way and cannot be shut off.. to be able to use fixed IP addressing you would have to get ahold of a better router and hook the 6000 into it. Then rework the router to your heart's content.
Professional installation is free, unless the installer has to get atop of a roof, then there maybe a fee for him to do so.
My personal experience with one was with a client that had a DW6000 installed due to the wireless being shut down in the area (1500/mo for a T1, thanks verizon). The installer did a sloppy job installing it, putting a small portion of the dish under the eave (or overhang) of the roof, which mangled the signal and could not get a signal over 60%. He called me up to come out to check it out and discovered the discrepancy, then tried to call the installer to get him back out there. That jackal never returned any calls made by both me and the client! Talk about piss poor customer relations. I called up a fellow installer that is as reliable as the sun and moon, got him out there, and proceeded to pick up the pieces that the previous jerk left behind.
We managed to get the signal up to 75% due to the location of the dish and proceeded to install a wireless system, using linksys gear. Haven't had a problem since.
When your installer completes his work, make him sit down with you before you sign the paperwork, CONFIRM that the cables are not kinking or the crimps appear that they may fall apart at any time. and go through the system diagnostics with your browser and MAKE SURE that your signal is a solid 80% or higher! It should not wobble more than a percentage point.. If it does then there is something obstructing the dish and the object would need to be removed or relocated.
IF you get someone that appears that he did not do his work properly, get his DirecWay/DirecTV installer number and call it in to customer service. REQUEST that another tech come out to set things to right, on their nickle even!!
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
My Brother-in-law recently had the 'Two way' Satallite internet at his office.
....PS.... also, the 'sat modem' they gave him only had a USB port to connect to.... so he was not able to use a router to share the connection to his other computers. So he had to do Internet Connection Sharing which was a nightmare. If you do go w/ Sat and have multiple computers, make sure you get a network (RJ45) connection on the 'sat modem' unit so that it can be connected to a router.
He experienced very high latency. The connection was fast, never seemed to slow down, but was very latent.
The only time he saw the latency was playing multiplayer video games (QUAKE). The connection was too latent to play.
Yes, when he downloaded files, they came well over 100k/sec.
The latency would also cause a problem with streaming video or audio. Due to the breaks in the connection (way too fast for use to recognize), the video/audio/games would skip very bad.
Since he has changed his office to a cable connection and is fraggin away!
Of course if satellite is all you are able to get in our area, it is great. But if you have another choice (cable / dsl) I would recommend that.
At that time, the only option was having a Windows box hooked up to the dish, so I have an XP workstation sitting on the front end of my home network.
Overall, I'd have to say that I'm fairly satisfied. I've been able to sit in my living room and terminal service into servers at work (over wireless, no less) without too much of a latency issue (it's typically about 3 seconds); at first the delay was disconcerting, but after a while you adjust.
The pipe is actually pretty fat. I'm averaging a decent transfer rate (~300kb/sec), allowing me to download (or upload) from home most of what I used to piggyback onto my work laptop.
Weather is occasionally an issue. Snow or ice stuck on the dish, for example, will wipe out the signal entirely. A couple weeks ago, for example, I had to go out when it was -5 degrees and very gingerly remove a coating of ice off the dish in order to meet a deadline. Yet that's been more the exception than the rule. Caveat emptor.
My only complaint is that the basic satellite home service I signed up for has bandwidth throttling after ~180 mb of traffic in a 24 hour period. (The satellite networking is shared rather than switched, so bandwidth hogs would need to be dealt with). Nonetheless, downloading distro ISOs are still out of the question from home, and that's a real pain.
It sounds like the service you're considering is an improvement over mine. I'd really like to get rid of the Windows box as the front end of since I'm basically putting the most vulnerable part of the network right up front in script-kiddy land, though DirecWay does seem to have a pretty solid firewall.
I'll be checking out the DirecWay site for more details about your system.
Can anyone compare DirecWay to Nebulink?
I have some users in Coca (Francisco de Orellana), Ecuador. Coca is in eastern Ecuador right in the middle of the jungle (check it out on the map). We have a satellite setup for about 10 users, the bandwidth we are allocated is 128x64kbps. For all that bandwidth we paid $3000 for dish, receiver and setup; we pay $400 a month for this access. The latency is painfully slow however I have found a way to speed things up a bit. I installed a Mini-PC (like those Shuttle XPC's) with Windows 2000. I setup DNS caching along with ISA to do web caching. The experiences amongst the users has improved greatly. Downloads are reasonable and I do some bandwidth access-control/throttling using an old Netscreen-5 firewall (thank you e-bay!), so the big-boss-man always has priority with his access. This is just my experience in this part of the world.
They are required by law to provide a T1 if you ask?
I know there are various requirements mandated by that ludicrous breakup settlement on providing voice, but a digital non voice link? huh?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Actually, it's not too bad - if you turn off image loading. Just straight html compresses nicely, so the actual throuhput of a page isn't too painful.
-MDL
Happy meals fund terrorism
If sat. is all you can get, then by all means, get DirecWay. I would recommend the DW4020 over the DW6000. The DW4020 is a rock solid commercial grade router that can be configured to give you static IPs and double the upload speed (aprox 128k) when combined with a .98 meter dish. The DW6000 is a residential box. Check out www.copperhead.cc They run a great message board devoted to DirecWay. Also, check out www.skycasters.com. They are a VAR that offers pretty interesting solutions (including double the upload speed) for people such as you. Talk with Richard McKinney at Skycasters. He is a great sales person (I'm a very satisfied DirecWay/Skycasters customer) that will explain all the inns and outs for you. Do not go with a Powered-By provider such as DirecWay-Powered By AOL.
I had the old modem, and it was a lemon. On top of being chained to Windows it seemed to go out often. We would call in, they would site the weather as an issue, but at 4000ft the weather was below us. It only seemed to happen when it was sunny. Come to find out, there was a bit of an overheating problem with the unit.
Other then that, ssh was glitchy, and downloads somewhat slow. I had the opportunity to use another product I found much better. Gilat had a unit like the 6000, years ago. Compeltely independent, and they would let you install it yourself. You may want to look at thier offering as well. They seem to be a bit ahead of Direcway.
http://www.gilat.com/Home.asp
I approached my local Telco about getting a T1 for the house. When I asked the customer service rep, she asked 'A T-what?' and then referred me to the manager who also asked 'A T-what?' It seems that my local telco is privately owned, and has six employees TOTAL. Three work the office and three work the lines. Yes, I live in Michigan, not far from Ann Arbor.
This topic, while perhaps not front-page material, couldn't be more relevant to me. I live probably no more than 15 miles from CmdrTaco (west of Chelsea, MI) in an area where DSL and cable are not (!) available.
:)
If you wouldn't mind summarizing your findings, I'd be very grateful.
Check out GroundControl's 4020 system, up front hardware costs are steep (1700+) however the monthly is only 115.00 with a static ip and NO FAP!! Latency of course is an issue, however no other options make satellite attractive.
Howdy, Your satalite link will be way better for large file transfers. Your modem link will be way better for interactive sessions. The particular dis-advantage of each will drive you crazy. You might be able to contract with both services and plan to use the link which will best suit your puprose of the moment/session.
http://www.sat@once.csp.it/
maybe not exactly what you are looking for, and i haven't tried it yet, but i think it seems to be quite nice (it's free!)..
Hey, its his house.. his rules.. .
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Having DirecTV already is of no benefit. DirecWay requires it's own dish - it's a bidirectional dish, unlike the television one, which is receive-only. So, there's no savings at all for being an existing DirecTV customer.
Also note that, while you can install your own DirecTV receive-only dish, FCC regulations restrict you from installing your own microwave transmitter - so you MUST get the DirecWay dish professionally installed. (You also want it high up, on a roof or similar, so that stray kids and dogs don't walk in front of it and get fried).
I've read that these satellite providers just broadcast their usenet feed 24/7 and if you pick your stuff off the broadcast it doesn't count against your FAP.
So, questions about StarBand:
1) Is that true about broadcasting the feed?
2) If so, do they carry the alt.binaries hierarchy?
3) How is there coverage for alt.binaries?
I envision a 1TB spool on my system that just sucks in everything from the groups that I am interested in and then I point my newsreader at it locally and pick and choose what I want. Do you think that would work ok with the way Starband does usenet?
Lack of cholesterol intake leads to depression and a dramatic decrease in mental capacity. That explains why you're having so many problems.
I did a lot of research with Direct as I needed to provide internet access for a client of mine in a remote location. The problem with satellite is that you cannot do VPN at speeds that are beyond dialup. That the pages do not say VPN anywhere indicates to me that you still can't do VPN at broadband speeds and this might be a problem. Otherwise, others that I have talked to using satellite for internet access say it is fine - no major glitches.
I have a Direcway 2-way satellite connection, and I've been pretty satisfied with it as a whole. I don't have any experience with the newer systems (mine is ~1.25 years old), but I thought I'd share anyway.
To answer the first question I ever had: yes, the latency is horrible. I get roughly 700-850ms to the backbone. I do a lot of support from home, and I do it via the corporate VPN when I'm on the satellite. Because of the excessive handshaking, my connection actually responds worse than my 28Kbps connections directly to the customer's network. For more intense bitstreams like PCAnywhere, MS TSC, or VNC connections, the satellite holds its own, but only until I open a console window, and then we're back to major suck.
Web surfing tends to be better than my 33Kbps modem connection when I take advantage of the "Web accelerator" that Direcway provides - for pages with lots of graphics anyway. Still, I dislike the interminable 3-4 second delay between click and action. Furthermore, the speed I enjoy now is the result of much research and T&E with configuration settings. Out of the box, things didn't go quite that well.
I got the $100USD installation fee waived when I bought my equipment, so that wasn't an issue for me. Too bad the FCC wouldn't allow me to do my own installation, because that's what I ended up doing. The guy they sent out here was clueless with regard to satellite setup. The only thing he got right was setting the pole in concrete. He finally left the first day without ever getting anything done (other than the pole). That night (after dark even), I sighted in the dish, installed the software, and got to the point where I needed only to enter the activation code (which I didn't have). The next day, the sat man brought a couple that he was "training" to help him out. He was a little perturbed that all the work was already done, but he told them to remove the dish and begin as if they were starting from scratch?!! It took them all day long to get a poor signal, but it was just enough for them to be able to activate, so they left it at that. Once they left, I took a few minutes to get my signal strength back up and voila! In all the time I've had the system, there have been no additional costs above the advertised price (think mine is $50USD/mo).
I don't notice much difference in peak and non-peak usage, but with a nominal ping of 850ms, an additional 200ms is chump change anyway. The traffic cap is annoying sometimes (too lazy to patch?). I haven't paid much attention to it, but it feels like I've got about a 450Mb bucket to draw from which gets replentished at about 120Mb an hour (more late at night when I'm on :) . When you run out, expect dial-up speeds for 3-4 hours as punishment for hoarding all that precious bandwidth all to yourself. My standard workload is 20-50Mb/hr, and I surf for much less.
So, in conclusion, I keep the satellite because work pays for it. My wife and I enjoy playing Starcraft online with our friends. She'll use the sat connection, and I'll dialup (silly UDP port restriction for Starcraft prevents us from both using the sat). The lag is bad, but we still get reasonible quality games if we set the Extra High Latency option. For other games that I play alone, I use dial-up for most everything with the occasional exception for mudding.
Why are the ping times you quoted for cable so high? What kind of cable connection are you talking about? I have a 200kB/32kB, and ping times are rarely above 80ms.
I've read that these satellite providers just broadcast their usenet feed 24/7 and if you pick your stuff off the broadcast it doesn't count against your FAP.
So, questions about DirectWay:
1) Is that true about broadcasting the feed?
2) If so, do they carry the alt.binaries hierarchy?
3) How is their coverage for alt.binaries?
I envision a 1TB spool on my system that just sucks in everything from the groups that I am interested in and then I point my newsreader at it locally and pick and choose what I want. Do you think that would work ok with the way DirectWay does usenet?
You're not Seth Finkelstein, you're a troll.
Why don't you just post this stuff without stealing someone's name?
One of the nice things about sites like Google and Slashdot is that they load rather quickly. Slashdot is not yet plagued by things like countless useless animations, excessive graphics and flash. I can't help but feel that is has a lot to do with the fact that Taco is viewing the site over a dialup connection.
If he moves to high-speed access I fear that it will only be a short while before new web "features" start taking over the site and it becomes as slow as all the rest.
I have always maintained that web developers should be forced to use their sites over bad dial-up connections so that they keep things compact and don't overload the site with bloated images and useless animation like so many do. There is nothing worse than being stuck behind a hotel PBX and having to work or access web sites via a 19200 dial-up connection.
Gee Bob, I really don't apreciate you sending me the HTML email with that ugly stationary theme and the 1 meg image in your sig!!! That inane "Wassup" message took ten figging minutes to download!!!!!
read the fine print you get a very short burst of high speed then the fair access policy comes in to play. they then slow down to 56k or less
Ive ran direcway for 2+ years, and my expirences are mixed. We have the older modem, so my router is (ick) a windoze machine. From there, wifi serves our house with access. Basically, its better than dialup. Doing any kind of remote terminal access is awful (type a character, appears several seconds later). Also, which is probably mentioned in the comments, the issue with FAP. Luckily, i convinced my parents to upgrade to a buisness class service. Getting a full ISO of a linux distro takes over night, but doesnt get my connection killed like it did with the basic service. Once you pay off the hardware, its not a whole lot more than cable, but for us geeks in the sticks, its about the only option. I say go for it taco, but beware of its many caveats. oh, and i would love to get my hands on the new modem with the rj45 connectors. Would make running my home network MUCH easier than "relying" on windowsXP.
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
Well, here is my opinion and we have been used four seperate satellite setups for about two years now. For normal web browsing the DirectWay Satellite system is not much better than dial-up and in some cases much worse. The more individual files that the website has the slower the response time is from the satellite. We installed several on the outskirts of three cities to provide a link to our remote offices were broadband was not an option.
First off, talk with the technical engineers because the sales people forget to mention that some traffic like ICMP and others are automatically placed at the bottom of the satellite systems queue. This is why you will see things like a 400ms+ ping time. What we learned is that if you use your link for downloading files it is great. Once the connection is established it goes beautifully. The problem with game playing or even intense web browsing is that you are always transmitting data and files that may be small but the fact that it requires multiple file transfers is the bad part. When you think about it, how many files does your web browser download when you go to a website core html, pics, flash, audio, etc? The more individual files on a site really causes problems for the system's performance. Like I said though when we used it we did data batching scenario and would compress large quantities of data into a single file and then FTP it to a drop box for pick up in our corporate office at regular batch intervals. In this type of scenario we got great performance with a several hundred K/sec file transfer rate.
If you want to deploy any type of remote desktop software you better make it VNC with best compression or forget it. Even the use of VNC will turn out to be a lesson in humility and frustration.
In my opinion the system really stinks for anything other than large file downloads. It just does not seem to be very versatile.
"Help me Obi-/.-Kenobi,your my only hope!" -$
If you actually give DirecTV money, I suggest you get familiar with their 100,000 lawsuit/letter compaign against purchasers of completely legal ISO programmers.
"In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me -- and by that time there was nobody left to speak up." -Martin Niemoller
Nobody is suggesting you do anything other than stop giving them your money. Especially as you can get DISH and have the same capabilities.
Nice quick response. A personal attack that says something about an anonymous person you have no information on. Unfortunately, it isn't true, so you can quit using that line. But in any case, I'm not offended, I understand what you are going through here.
I'm trying to help you. You don't have to eat any other animal product, just raw egg yolks. If you have political reasons for your diet, you can get your eggs from a source which doesn't violate animal rights.
You'll be amazed at how much happier you are once you do this. Start out slow, with 1 egg yolk a day, and slowly increase to 6 eggs. The depression will probably go away almost immediately. You'll find you can think better and your mind will function a lot better.
http://www.satcomweb.com/mobile.htm is a phased array antena for your car for DirectTV and similar systems. Internet any where, well, anywhere in the satalite footprint if it they can all work together.
Plato seems wrong to me today
yes, the latency sucks. but if you've been using shitty, rural 56k for a long time (and if you're considering direcway you probably have) this is going to be a huge improvement. fps gaming is out, but you can still play civ3. and ssh is useable. the new system is agnostic as noted, so unlike the previous version you won't need a win98 firewall (damn!). there are some gotchas still - you can't run a server due to the way they have their system set up, but i doubt you were running one on the dialup.
...he should put up a standard TV antenna on a 100 foot tower, so he can pick up 2 channels full of static.
Oh, but wait, he could just stream real-time video or download DVDs off of his 56k dialup. Is that the alternative you are suggesting?
Geez, some people need to think before they get on their moral soapbox. Some other people need to think before they mod that crap up too.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
On private property? I'd have had their asses in court so fast their heads would be spinning.
And with that subject what more do you need. I am a little biased because I have been an installer, but I live here in rural Oklahoma, and have no chance of ever getting anything but dial-up in my little poedunk town, so I got it, since I could get it for a cheaper monthly price, and have been happy with it ever since. Now mind you, I have the older version that requires you to have software loaded on your pc to run it, but older it be, good it still is. if you have any technical questions about it, feel free to e-mail me.
Read the fine print.
I've got a user on this service, and its been a nightmare (I'm a network admin, and have 10 remote users connected over VPN to the office). If you EVER need to upload anything, you may as well dial up. When dealing with their support, I was told that a 40Kbps upload speed is within their spec, and so they wouldn't work with me to improve it at all. This becomes an issue when you need to send emails with attachments (or connect to an Exchange server, as was the case for me until I gave up and mover her to a pop3 configuration in Outlook), or any other data you might need to send. I've had a ton of issues supporting this user, and by contrast, my one user who is on dial-up is nearly problem-free. Here's hoping this WiMax stuff catches on
I haven't seen anybody suggest something like this, so here I go. I've never had to try it, because I always have a reasonable connection when I want to ssh, but it seems to me that it could work pretty well.
Get a MUD client. Connect to localhost, telnet port, and log in. From there, ssh out. You still have a big delay between when you hit return and when you see the result, but you don't have a delay for the rest of your typing, which is the big deal. Interactive editors would be a bit hard to use, but you can always run those locally. The point is to buffer your command line instead of sending it character-by-character, so your latency shows up only when you actually expect a real response from the other end.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
This is one place where the solid dish is a disadvantage. If the dish was a mesh (coarse enough to let water fall through rather than being held in the holes by surface tension) this might not be such a problem.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Use PAM or some other non-stick cooking spray on your dish to help keep water / snow from sticking to it.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
DON'T SIGN UP FOR THAT BULLSHIT! I had it. Oh my holy hell... sure it's fast, but call them and ask them about the flipping cap.
200mb cap for 4 hours! yes, call those bastards up and ask em about it. I can d/l that much on a damn 56k modem in that same timeframe, and yet DWay costs $60/mo. Oh, and they cap you at 1kb/s for 8hours if you exceed it.
So call 'em up and tell em to shove it. I did.
I got Starband (and lost DSL) after moving 7 miles out of town into the woods (in this part of Vermont I'm lucky I have power :-) )
Starband is coming out with the same router based service (the 480 Pro model) for their "telecommuter pacakge" Currently it's only available for small businesses at $139+/month. They don't have pricing yet for telecommuter, but I expect monthly they will be in the $79-99 range.
I have the standard home user package. I bought my equipment so it's only $49/month. I currently get around 60 Kbps/450 Kbps up/down. For most use it's adequate (especially web/mail).
Starband doesn't support but allows the use of a windows box as a gateway (I bought WinProxy for Starband specifically for this).
I would have much preferred setting up an IPCop box, or just using a linksys router, but their software that runs the modem only works on Windows (supposedly).
You aren't supposed to be able to use a VPN, but in a pinch I have used our Cisco PIX VPN with decent (but slow) results. Connections do get dropped pretty regularly. The telecommuter version is supposed to support VPN more robustly, especially non-IPSEC variants.
Depending on the monthly upcharge I may upgrade once telecommuter is available.
The conclusion:
If you don't have any other choice and need more speed than dialup, it's a pretty decent solution, especially if you mostly deal with stateless protocols.
no sig for you!
I have a cottage in Northern Canada and get 650kps with 65% signal quality because I am receiving through trees. It has never gone down except in EXTREMELY hard rains (trees were coming down). I can stream shoutcast all day and the latency is bearable for VOIP being 500msec on average. I work with real time stock quotes and spend the whole summer up there...
It's the home of the University of Michigan and is quite a nice small city. I find it surprising that the town is not wired on speed, as it is a fairly yuppyish place. I live about 30 minutes north of town, have highspeed and am a whole lot more rural than him. As an aside, this is where they have the annual Hash Bash, if you're into that. ;-)
is a standard, RFC 1990, and supported by Cisco hardware, FreeBSD 4.9, etc.. It lets you combine several slower links, think modems, into one faster link. You have the expence of multiple phone lines but you might get a volume discount. And in some places all you can get is a phone line.
I know in 3rd world places, where a dish might attract the wrong kind of gun fire, multilink ppp is used over existing bad phone connections(9600) to make faster pipes for sending pictures back to CENSORED. THE REST OF THIS COMMENT HAS BEEN REMOVED. MNGT.
You don't really need their new machine-agnostic service. It's not hard to find an old laptop or PentiumI PC lying around that can serve as your gateway module.
Step 1:
Find a PC with a USB port and install an
Ethernet card if it doesn't already have one.
Step 2:
Make sure the PC has Win98se, Win2000, or WinXP.
Install DirectTV as a USB client to their modem.
The DirecTV install tech should be able to help
you with this. You'll have an IP address on
DirecTV's network and be able to browse the web.
Step 3:
Setup Internet Connection Sharing on the PC to
enable a 192.168.0.0 network on the Ethernet
card.
Step 4:
Plug a hub or switch into the Ethernet card
to allow other clients to connect to your
192.168.0.0 network.
Step 5:
Take an Windows/Linux/Mac PC and set it to
boot via DHCP. It should work, just as if it
were talking to a cable modem or DSL modem.
Step 5a (optional):
For extra reliability/stability of web
connections, you could optionally set the
browser on the new client to use the gateway
PC as an HTTP proxy server. I think it listens
on 192.168.0.1:83, but I'm not sure.
Step 5b (optional):
It is possible to connect a standard broadband
router into the gateway PC and use its firewall
features to keep your home network protected
while you're connected or even connect wireless
gear to your network. You need to set the
WAN interface of the router to use DHCP, and you
need to set the internal netowrk to be something
other than the default 192.168.0.0 (for example
192.168.1.0), so that the router doesn't get
confused about addresses on the external and
intranal side of its network.
It's faster than dialup for downloads, but not as reliable. If you have access to anything else (cable, DSL, broadband wireless), you're better off.
I setup a remote coworker with 5/5a/5b who roamed around his house with an 802.11b wireless laptop. As long as there were no packet drops on his wireless, it worked ok. Note: If you get any packet loss, your packets now have a RTT of 1000ms to the remote server instead of just 100ms and retransmits really really suck.
-ez
From looking at this story, so far we have about 200 comments so far - and about 5 reviews. Most comments are highly moderated flames. Anyhow, I'll do my best to contribute my "actual" experiences with DirecWay.
Short review: It sucks. You're better off with ISDN.
Long review:
I helped to set a good friend of mine up with a DirecWay connection, as he lives on the outskirts of town on a private road, and is unable to recieve any other form of broadband. This was about 3 years ago, and at the time, it was DirecPC, and only worked one-way.
And it was okay. When it worked, we could get a respectable 150kB/s (close to the advertised 1.5mbps) and
about 700ms pings. Not great, but certainly tolerable. The slow 56k upload was a hassle, though. In addition, I will testify that their software was bad--no, it was horrible. It was buggy, and behaved erratically.
DirecWay promised that when they rolled out two-way service, the software and the service would be completely revamped.
Around this time, my friend spent one year abroad. During this time, he cancelled his subscription.
When he returned, he called DirecWay and had them install the two-way service. Thanks to the installer, he never did any setup on his PC, and didn't install the connection software, nor did he leave a CD.
As we found out, there is no easy way to download the software via. the net. In fact, once they finally sent us a CD, we couldn't find patches on their site. Which brings me to the topic of their support. I have called them many many times. Their staff is unknowledgable, hold times are guarrunteed to be over an hour, and they are barely fluent in English. DirecWay recieves a F- for support.
The new modem was little more than a modifed one-way modem which only connected via USB - not the promised revamped hardware. The software installation process was buggy. Very buggy. You had to try two to three times before an installation would finally work. Once we got it running, we saw that it was the exact same software we had used a year earlier - with a small patch to enable two-way communications - NOT the promised revamped software. And there was no way to see if there was an update via. DirecWay's website. They do have a support site. It's well hidden, and down most of the time.
Oh yes. Most everything is down most of the time. In the year we weren't using it, their NOC continued it's decline. DNS was a mixed bag - sometimes it worked sometimes it didn't, and you couldn't use a non-direcway DNS server. You also had to use a proxy server to access HTTP sites. This combination meant that the service was down. A lot.
Thanks to direcway's otherwise useless diagnostic utility, we could see that our modem was indeed in tip-top shape. We never dropped below 80% signal. It was clearly not the weather. When the service went down (which was quite often), it was usually a result of network trouble at DW. Even when we were able to get on, it wasn't that fast in terms of thoroughput or latency. Ironically, the site which always had the most trouble was DW's own site. It was ALWAYS down.
Now, the DW6000 caught my eye as solving many of these problems. However, after several phone calls to DW, I determined that not one of their representatives had even HEARD of the modem.
However, even if we could try it out, we wouldn't. They failed to come through on every other one of their promises they had made in the past. Their support was terrible, and their whole company was poorly run.
This is on top of all the stuff being discussed in this thread about the TOS policies, bandwidth caps, etc.
In short, we cancelled it. It just wasn't worth the pain and aggrivation. They keep promising improvements, but have always failed to deliver. If you can get ISDN, go for that, or attempt to do some sort of line-of-sight WiFi with a friend across town. You could even try to make your own DSL by ordering a dry copper loop between your house and one with broadband. Heck, even multilink 56k would be better...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
if you like sitting on the phone to ask why you can't send emails to anyone or are wondering why your being blocked as a spammer then you'll love it... We got direcway because my mom teaches online courses and wireless and cable weren't here yet and after a week there were so many problems that we got to talk to "muhamed but you can call me John" (the support is based in India and they tell you their name and then an american name that you can call them) almost 3 times a week if not more with about 2-4 hours waiting for each call. luckily wireless has come into the area and once the contract expires the satelite is gone
I was looking at it myself. My personal wireless T1 may be going away in August (the source is moving, probably away from my line of sight). I'm working with some financial backers to light up the city I'm in wireless, but who knows if it'll be done by August. If it does work out well, we'll be covering the entire Los Angeles area in a couple years. The Charter Communications folks were really upset when I moved. I ditched the cable TV for DirecTV, and went to the wireless (above). They were begging for me to stay with them, but I was like, "If your service didn't completely suck, I would have." It was bad. More than half the time, I would find my download speeds at or below 128K, and if I started an upload, I was below 128K. When it's barely faster than a 56k dialup, why pay the extra cost?
l
I was watching TV, and saw the DirecWay ad, and thought it looked interesting, so I switched over to the DirecWay channel. I don't know the channel off hand, but it has a 15 to 30 minute looping advertisment on it with the bubbly airhead repeating the same brainwashing over and over.
DirecWay has a speed comparison chart at:
http://directv.direcway.com/connection_test.htm
Basically, DirecWay a box, that attaches to your computer via ethernet and to a DirecTV-like dish with a transceiver on it (bigger LNB). They say it'll give UP TO 500Kb/s for downloads, and no information on uploads, so this could be comparable to cablemodem or DSL, depending on your neighborhood. They say it's "really fast" compared to 28.8 modem, so who knows.
You should expect long latency though, so browsing Slashdot may be ok, but SSHing to the server to make changes will be painful. Since I spend half my life in a shell using SSH, I'm not sure I could handle it.
I see quite a few comments about weather problems. You shouldn't really expect bad weather related problems, at least with DirecTV. I messed around with my dish until I had beween 92% and 100% signal strength on all channels with the A and B LNB's. If you're up north or find you have a weaker signal, you can buy a bigger dish that'll fix you right up. My friend owns dssaccessories.com, and he recommends using the upgraded 24" dish. If you have iceing problems, use a heated dish. I'm in LA, with a 2 LNB oval dish, and have no problems, even in the occasional rain storm. My dish is secured well with the standard equipment, so it doesn't get blown around with wind. It'll take the same kind of work to get a really good signal DirecWay signal. Don't necessarly trust the installers when they put it in. My in-laws had their DirecTV dish put behind a tree, so when the wind blows, they loose their signal.
They're looking for a $599.98 deposit and a monthly cost of $59.99 or a $99.99 activation fee, and a 15 month contract at $99.99 to cover the equipment cost, converting to $59.99 after 15 months. Either way, it's pricy.
Hope this helps.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
It isn't as fast as Sat. but you could get a multiple Dialup setup. One our clients had a remote office in Grass Lake MI with a CISCO router and 6 dialup lines. This is what they setup after the POS Starband system wouldn't stay connected with multiple users. The ISP was Digital Realm in Ypsilanti...they most likely still have the equipment and nothing to do with it. Our client finaly was able to get a T1 that could handle IP traffic so the dialup system was taken out.
I've used the two-way service for about 21 months now. Just switched to thier DW6000 modem. That was a welcome relief, although expensive, but the ability to network without 3rd party proxies is nice... one less thing to deal with.
Issues: Latency can be a pain, sometimes VPN connection to work doesn't..., Fair Access Policy.. understand the concept, and I know I can pay more for more access, but if you bump the ceiling on FAP, they throttle you back for and hour or two... limited to about 4-5 MB while throttled.
Just some comments:
There is nothing in common between DirecTV and the DirecWay service except that both can use the same dish. The ground stations are on opposite sides of the United States (DirecTV - west, DirecWay - east). They do not share the same satellite transponders, therefore comparing delay / transmission problems need to be looked at separately. The DirecWay system does experience some problems in heavy rain / snow conditions but not across the board (unless the storm is in MD). It completely depends on which satellite / transponder you were commissioned to during account setup. Just like DirecTV has limits to the number of channels it can broadcast due to satellite bandwidth constraints, DirecWay has limits to the number of customers it can place on a transponder and the amount of data that can cross these links (hence why FAP was created). The bandwidth issue is a huge deal, transponders are expensive and it takes time to set up the ground equipment to support it. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as adding more T1/T3/OC-xx lines to a router to provide more bandwidth.
Most protocols work over the DirecWay system without any problem. H.323 (i.e. NetMeeting) sometimes causes a concern but normally the tech support people can get that resolved. While many people do complain about latency issues, especially with games, there is not much you can do about that. It is pretty hard to get around the fact that the signal has to travel up to the bird and back down. Ping round trips at 800ms to 1200ms delay. There are continuous efforts to increase performance on the ground side to lessen these issue.
If you have access to DSL or Cable broadband you should pursue that. DirecWay is more suited for remote locations where the only other option is dial-up.
I have a friend that uses the Midwest Wireless ClearWave service and really enjoys it. Its only available in southeastern Minnesota and parts of Wisconsin and Iowa (i think). For $100 a month he gets 1MBit up/down, without a cap. He had DirecWay for a while and got sick of the 500MB per day cap. I guess after that they drop you down to 56k speed. It might be different now, but he got fed up and kicked their ass to the curb. If your in the area for the service, I would try it out, especially if you can split the cost with someone. My parents were just outside of the coverage line so they cant get it, but hey DSL just became available so alls good around there.
I don't really care now since im going to University of Minn. Duluth which has a 35MBit pipe feeding the University. The max i have reached is somewhere between 3-5MBit.
I also live outside Ann Arbor (Saline, actually), and until about a month ago, i had direcpc satillite internet. In my 2 year experience with satillite internet, I can say that it isn't worth the cost. It's slow (200 kbit/s at best), the latancy is high (ssh is nearly impossible (type a command, wait 5-10 seconds)), and it's damn expensive, more expensive than cable. The router that you mentioned is a few hundred dollars if I'm not mistaken, the dish is $300, and the service is $60 per month. It's just not worth it. Web browsing IS faster, but the support for linux and certain protocals (rsync comes to mind) is very flaky. I would recommend just waiting until Comcast rewires your area. They're currently rewireing a lot of the areas around Ann Arbor, I've seen the crews out and about. My neighborhood was hooked up about a month ago. It's just a matter of time before you'll be surfing in style on a 3 mbit/s cable connection, so have patience.
Life is offtopic.
...has become more and more about finding places with cheaper and cheaper rent, because you can no longer make enough money to live in a real city with real internet access!
I'm abusing my power as Slashdot editor
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
I too live in the middle of nowhere in the mountains of Southern California. I doubt even wireless internet will reach here anytime soon, so I have to use DirecWay. Here are some important points from my experiences:
(1) Avoid Hughes as an ISP. We used them for awhile. Very flaky reliability, especially downloading large files. Downloads were about 10K-30K per second when they did work. Uploading large files, supposedly possible at about 4K-5K per second was just impossible. Forget streaming audio or video. Want support? Go to AA or something, 'cause you won't get much with them.
(2) Use a good ISP like Ground Control. Get the Business Edition. This runs about $100 a month, but you get a static IP address and it is very reliable. Downloads from good servers can come through at speeds up to 150K/second or more. Uploads almost always work, even though they are still at around 5K/second. Streaming audio and video works, sometimes. Plus, their support is pretty good.
(3) Realize that you have a daily limit on bandwidth. You can probably pay more to get more, but the Business Edition gives you something like 350 MB/day, with a 'trickle recharge' of something like 5K/second or about 18MB an hour on your limit. That means, that whatever you take off your daily limit, every second gives you an additional 5K. If you exceed this limit you get FAPd (Fair Access Policy) which means you get reduced to about modem speeds for 12 hours.
(4) Non Business Edition subscribers get only 200 MB/day (I think) and are FAPd for 24 hours upon breaching the limit.
(5) Expect the proxy to go down on occasion. Surfing with the proxy enabled is MUCH faster than without, but you may find that sometimes your connection appears to stop working. Disabling the proxy often will fix that. Also, try to 'restart' the DIRECWAY Webcast service as this will often fix the proxy problem. Sometimes you'll just need to reboot, and sometimes it's just them.
(6) Have your dish adjusted properly. Figuring out how to this this yourself can save you a lot of money (but I think you have to be licensed, officially). Pay particular attention not just to your signal level, but also your 'Isolation' level. The DirecWay dish doesn't just get adjusted on two axis, but also 'rotates' to adjust the polarization relative to the transponder on the satellite. If your polarization is not isolated enough, your signal gets 'stepped on' by other signals (and you probably do some stepping yourself). The connection may still work, but may become more flaky. Since there are now some 8 thousand mobile DirecWay satellite dishes which adjust themselves - all from varying locations at varying times of the day with variable success at isolating their signals, and because there are countless satellite techs who don't polarize the dishes correctly to isolate their signals, you may have great access one day and all of a sudden it starts to slow down and get flaky the next. Checking your isolation value may show that someone else is stepping on you, at which point you'd re-adjust your own dish again to isolate it better.
(7) If you adjust your own dish, do pay attention to stay behind the dish if you ever want to have children again. The transmitter is very powerful and can potentially do bad things to your body. If you set it up yourself, don't put it someplace where kids or other people will be exposed close up to the transmitter. If you plan on carrying around the dish with you on vacation (yes, some people do this in their RVs) and you don't have a mobile license, realize that you are breaking the law, possibly irradiating innocent civilians, and anyway the DirecWay people know where you are within about 20 miles, and they are supposedly disabling accounts of those people who move the dishes around with them.
(8) Don't be disappointed. THIS IS NOT BROADBAND! In comparison, it really sucks. But it doesn't suck as much as dialup!
Would be nice if I could get 56K. Nope, we've got an 8 machine LAN all using NAT over a 28.8 dialup line. (Yeah, we have more computers than users at home. Some of us have a laptop and desktop.)
/. readers pulling in at 21.6 and such. Very sorry. Consider yourself lucky, Rob. Your connection is better than what many other /. readers must endure.
I also feel sorry for the
Remember Linux (and I believe FreeBSD and OpenBSD) support routing by port number and by protocol flags. That means you can (with a little care) make sure your ssh goes via the modem while your file sucking operations go via the satellite.
All you really need then is something to check file sizes against the bandwidth cap and fax orders for very large files from a CD vendor automatically 8)
"This file will take 2 days to download
[Cancel] [Continue] [Fedex]"
One of my clients has DirecWay - their offices are in a warehouse row where DSL and cable companies aren't available... and this is in L.A.! The speeds are so-so, but the download cap is annoying. In any case...
At CES last week, DataBahn announced a satellite dish that provides satellite TV, unlimited broadband Internet access and up to ten telephone lines. It's the equivalent of a T1 telephone line (ostensibly, much faster than what DirecWay offers.)
They have a portable unit (for boaters, RV'ers, etc.) for $4,000 and $79 a month.
The company also has a permanently mounted dish for around $650 with $59 a month charges.
888-GET-DATA
its better than dial-up, but it has some rather crippling restrictions. Its fast for dloading, but you have about a 100 mb limit every hour or so (the so-called "Fair Use" policy) and then they cut you off. Also the thing you mentioned about lag :( Another thing, with snow like we have here in VA (read: not very much; usually about 2-5 in), there's about a 10% chance that the net stops working after a fresh snowfall (usually for anywhere from 5 hrs-2 days; you have backup dialup provided).
:(
:)
Something that happened last year: We had snow. It started to melt. Big chunks slid off the metal roof. They took the coaxial cable with it. The upside was that the repairman was included free in the deal.
File sharing especially invokes the "Fair Use" policy, you must either set low bandwith limits or just have it on for an hour at a time. The prob with that method is losing your place in someone's queue
Web surfing is about the same speed as dial-up because of the lag time.
Where sat. really shines is dloading; it's too bad that it has the restriction... Earthlink is my ISP; they of course use DIRECWAY. At the time Earthlink offered the exact same package as DIRECWAY for about $10 less a month.
It's kinda amusing EARTHlink offering sat. net...
Read my blog: HansMast.com
...it's reliability. Now that broadband is taking over, dialup access has fallen by the wayside. Dial-in POPs have no capacity, aren't maintained properly, and reliability sucks. And the more you get out into the hinterland, where broadband access is a problem, the worse it is with dialup too. 56k? You're lucky if you can get 28k, and keep a connection for more than 5 minutes.
How far out of Ann Arbor? I live in Ovid and get wireless access from this company:p .htm
http://www.mutualdata.com/serviceareama
This is a decent alternative for rural customers. There may be something similar available south of here.
We will keep re-defining success until we are sucessful.
CT,
/. For extra added incentive, link to photos of Nathalie Portman or your wife. If we don't knock the bird out of the sky, you'll know what kind of bandwidth you can sustain :-)
/28 or /27 block of permanent IP addresses, maybe even IPv6, and you'll never be able to go back to dialup again. After a few months of paying US$150-$250/month, you'll justify it as a necessary luxury expense.
When you get your satellite connection set up, put your home server on it and post the link to the front page of
In a slightly more serious vein, and back to the original topic, have you done some googling for T1 connectivity in Ann Arbor? From looking at some networking maps, there is a ton of excess capacity running through Ann Arbor, the UoM has a number of OC48 links to internet-2, there must have been excess capacity pulled through the city which some local ISPs have leased. A T1, if it doesn't cross a LATA boundary, is supposed to be dirt cheap in the U.S.
For someone like you, with two hardcore geeks in the house, a permanently on T1 connection to an ISP with an almost-everyting-permitted AUP would probably not cost much more than the satellite connection. A
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I am using Mac OS X with the Dway 6000, in short it rocks. I have my Airport Extreme plugged into the router and use three OS X boxes with the system. My only complaint is upload speeds, if I am popping mail and sending a file via ftp there is not enough upload bandwidth remaining to sing on to instan messenger. Also, I tried downloading a 500mb linux image, no go. After 300mb worth of downloads in a three hour period your download speed drops to dialup speed.
I have had zero issues since the installation, which was about three months ago (it was installed Nov. 17).
The installation was problematic however, the installer didn't know anything about macs, and he had to use my iMac to configure the router. Also, there is a bug in the router that crops up during the dish pointing process, the signal strength never goes higher than 29, even if the signal strength is actually much higher. It took this guy all day to do the install, but like I said, since then service has been rock solid.
Jason
http://www.web-hopper.com/ These particular guys an in Cincinnati, OH. Q > How does WebHopper work? A > WebHopper receives downstream data via a digital television broadcast signal transmitted to a small antenna sitting on your desk. Upstream data continues to go through the phone line to your existing internet service provider. Q > How much does WebHopper cost? A > For a single residential connection, WebHopper's cost is comparable to that of other high-speed internet providers. A single monthly fee is billed to your credit card based upon the speed you select. Choose from 3 speed levels so you only pay for the speed you need! 256k speed is $29.95/month, 512k speed is $89.95/month, and 768k speed is $129.95/month.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
If you have cellular service in your area you can get a CDMA2000-based pcmcia card that will provide upto 144kbps upload and download. If your Cellular Service Provider is Verizon, in the very near future you could get upto 1Mbps speeds on the service. This 1x EV-DO (1Mbps) is already available in some parts of the US I believe.
The card costs about $150, and the service is about $80 per month for unlimited data. Voice can be shared on the same link. I have tried this service from Verizon, Sprint and Cingular. Verizon and Sprint have the best speeds, while Verizon has the best coverage, atleast in the North-east where I live.
I've got two clients on DirecWay, and it is basically useless except for basic web browsing. I'll not rehash all the previous comments.
s _cards/index.html l ess_laptop.html
One solution I'd investigate if I were you is Cellular Wireless. Assuming true fixed wireless is unavailable, this solution may be.
I'm using Sprint's PCSWireless product for mobile access and emergency internet usage in non-wired areas. It's a PCMCIA data modem that gets between 60-175K up and down transfer rate.
Upside:
* Latency is pretty low, and it works anywhere Sprint's PCS network is available.
* $90/month unlimited bandwidth (they may have pulled this offer, but it's what I was able to get)
* Great for travel. Compact, and pretty reliable once it's setup.
Downside:
* AFAIK, Windows only (you can move to the next post now).
* Supreme pain in the ass to initially setup
* Tech support that I'd rank as some of the worst in the business.
* You'd have to run a computer with a PCMCIA slot as a router, and make sure it's got a good cellular signal
If you can get somebody to write an open source driver for this puppy, it'd be great for SSH, or any other remote access, and you could use Satellite for large file transfers as well.
AT&T, Cingular, and other providers are rumored to have similar products on the way as well.
Sprint Hardware: http://www.sprint.com/pcsbusiness/devices/wireles
Rate Plans: http://www.sprint.com/pcsbusiness/plans/data/wire
nt
You can't stream porn with that connection?
yeah i just moved to the middle of nowhere, maine....i thought i was gonna be screwed and have to use 56k. but as it turns out theres this little shed down the road that says verizon on the side. its kind of funny that the CO for my entire area is just a little shed but guess what it was wired for dsl! muahahahahahhahahahahaaha P.S. DirecWay Sucks
It's been years since I used their DirecWay service (it was DirecPC back then), but back then they were one of the slimiest companies around. That surprised me as I was, and still am, a DirecTV subscriber and have always been quite happy with that service.
DirecPC implemented a "Fair Access Policy" (FAP) to try and reign in high-volume users, even though they sold the service as "unlimited internet". That, in itself, was understandable, but the way they implemented it was deplorable. I don't know if it's still around or not.
At some arbitrary point, DirecPC would decided you'd violated the FAP (the limits of which were closely held secrets not to be divulged to mere mortals) and would drop your current connection. They'd subsequently throttle new connections down to about 300-450 baud for some unspecified period of time (usually several days). Worse, their "customer service" would never tell you if you'd actually been FAPed, leaving you to wonder if the problem would eventually rectify itself, or if you had a hardware or antenna-alignment issue that required action on your part. Coupled with their pathetic drivers which would frequently just stop working until the machine was power-cycled, you never really knew what the hell was going on.
By way of example, I could always trigger a FAP violation by attempting to download one of the abundant MSVC patches. The patch weighed in at about 100MB, and DirecPC would always drop at 70MB and then be useless for the next three days. I actually had to fall back to a 28.8 modem to get the patches.
I'm know they eventually settled a class-action suit over their FAP, but I don't remember the exact details. I do know I dropped them at that time and would never go back.
Go to www.dslreports/forum/sat to find out about anything and everything Direcway. I am getting dsl, so if you want a used dw4000. :-)
Biggest thing that is going to effect you is that uploads SUCK. Fap sucks, but if there is no alternative, it is a great solution.
I had the sat thing for a while. It worked fine. I just changed my TCP/IP settings in windows to compensate for the latency. I could download big files quickly. However, playing online games was a bit tiresome.
If you need something better than 56k then I would say that the sat is alot better. However, Cable or DSL are much better.
Well, theres a hidden FAP of 500MB for 4 hours, then it reduces its throughput speed to about 20 k/bps. Then for me it costs $70 a month. Usually it never bogs down for me. Also, the speeds have been improving for me. I started out with about 100 kb on a good day, now its about 150 kbps on an average day. I don't know, I'd say go with somethin else if you can, if not, then this is alright until somethin better comes around.
nothing.can.stop.me.now
It's hard to find this out, but the standard direcway service nat's you. You do not have a publically routable ip address, let alone a static one. Upgrading to a commercial package can get you a static ip. The nat boxes also tend to kill long running connections (i.e. if you leave ssh running logged in somewhere).
The standard satellite modem (for lack of better name) doesn't work well in linux. Hughes has a patent on the LZJH compression algorithm. DirecWay forces you to use IP compression for port 80 connections with the LZJH compression algorithm. So linux drivers have trouble with web traffic.
The latency is awful. During peak hours (afternoon on) ping times get up to 2 seconds. I've never seen them below 700 ms. Some web pages that open a lot of connections to download small items feel slower over the satellite link than over dial up.
Finally Hughes has a fair access policy the details of which they won't share. As far as anyone can tell they're using token bucket qos with a bucket of about 150 megs and and a fill rate of 56kbps. What this means is that if you doenloaded nonstop all day you'd get 56kbps. You're just allowed to save up some of your bandwidth and use it all at once, so the connection feels faster.
Weather has lousy effects on connection quality. Heavy cloud cover can mess it up occaisionally. Mostly though the problem is rain storms. A good thunder storm can knock out the connection completely until it passes. The DirecWay service is much more suceptible to weather related problems than satellite tv is.
Essentially it's ok for large downloads (although be sure to find someone's script to tune the linux ip stack settings, or large downloads will stall partway through.) Most stuff is painful over it. We keep a dial up account with a local isp for ssh , and times the link isn't working. I'm a very unhappy customer. I didn't believe a lot of the complaints I read about DirecWay because the complaints were so negative they didn't sound believable. 4 hours after we had the installation completed I discovered that by and large the complaints are all true.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
Learn what the First Amendment is before you wave it around. It (and the rest of the Bill of Rights) protects people from actions of the Government. That's it.
It doesn't say a company can't offer you a contract that limits your ability to say nasty things about them. Breaking that contract gives them the right to cancel your service, not send you to jail or anything.
Bugs me when people don't understand their own rights.
Well... I had DirectPC from Best Buy a few years ago and my father-in-law still has it running. It is the one-way satelite. He lives too far away to be able to get DSL or Cable. He is also too cheap to fork out $$$ for anything but dial-up. I used the DirectPC and very seldom had problems. In really bad storms, we would lose power and phone but since I had my PC and Satelite on UPS, I still had internet. That's sweet. If the only option is Dial-up or Satelite, go satelite. IMHO
Short Media Member
First of all, make sure you are not "powered by" anyone. Earthlink and AOL resell the service and most people quickly want to get out of that situation. Earthlink and AOL have really bad support and slower downloads speeds then DirectWay directly.
It is 128kbps up and 400kbps down peak (For reference a T1 is 1540kbps up and down). It's expensive. I didn't realize it was $100/month for the first year and $60/month after that, but it is a two way Satellite system and those are still expensive. Most users seem to get better than 400kbps down, but somewhere around 30-80kbps up. With the one-way (dial-up systems) most users get 18-28kbps up due to the overhead in their protocol.
No phone line is required with the two-way system. There are one-way and two-way services offered.
This is something I wrote when I had the system and using it over SSH:
"I am typing this e-mail over our new DirectWay system, and it is extremely painful. It is far worse than dial-up. Every character I type takes
about one second to appear. I have to count the number of backspaces I want, number of arrow keys, etc.
C:\>ping [My ssh box hosted at Hurricane Electric]
Pinging [My ssh box] [1.2.3.4] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 1.2.3.4: bytes=32 time=1012ms TTL=242
Reply from 1.2.3.4: bytes=32 time=861ms TTL=242
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Ping statistics for 1.2.3.4:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 2, Lost = 2 (50% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 861ms, Maximum = 1012ms, Average = 468ms
Ignore the average, Microsoft apparently counts dropped packets as 0ms.
I seem to be getting about 900ms ping times on average to most fast sites. We are getting about 750ms on average to the first hop.
The speeds vary a lot. When I did a speed test earlier I got 252kbps down/18kbps up. Right now I am getting a lot better:
CA server:
Test running.........
**Speed 827(down)/25(up) kbps **
(At least 16 times faster than a 56k modem)
LA server:
Test running.........
** Speed 653(down)/51(up) kbps **
(At least 13 times faster than a 56k modem)
(For comparison to what I got when I was on cable modem:
2002-03-05 23:03:40 Speed test (la) 780/124 kbps
2002-03-05 22:58:28 Speed test (wc) 772/109 kbps )
I also did the toast.net speed test and got a bit worse results, you can
see them here:
My toast results
I disabled their proxy server to speed up Web browsing, but their software comes up with annoying pop-ups that tell me that I am not using their proxy. I will set it back when I am done. Speed tests do not work through proxies, so that is the main reason I disabled it.
It took me about 20 minutes to write this e-mail and the connection dropped once during writing it."
I use SSH so much that I went back to dial-up before the trial period ended. I get about 150ms over a 56K connection so SSH is about 6 times slower. Web browsing wasn't improved enough to make the service worth it. Some sites seemed slower even. I believe it was any HTTPS sites like checking my bank account were terrible.
DSL reports has a FAQ available. It is a good site to check out when looking at new ISPs.
DSL Reports Satellite FAQ
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
Q: Why does the service slow down when used in conjunction with a VPN?
A: Our communication satellite is located over 22,000 miles from Earth. Each data packet must be sent down separately and acknowledged by the remote site. This process takes time. In order to expedite the delivery of data packets to our end-users, HUGHES has developed a patented technology for aggregating those packets and sending all of them down simultaneously. VPNs encrypt each data packet, which prevents our technology from aggregating the data packets and reduces the throughput significantly.
I think this would also cause problems with SSH given the similarity of the technologies.
Digital oscillators and six analog filters (I've got a DW8000, its successor).
I am interested in purchasing your ($699 Licensing Fee ) which price is
($1499) and don't worry about the shipping agent I have a shipping
agent that will carter for the shipment I have a client in US who
is owing me ($3000). And he has promise that he will be sending the
certified cashier check down on my behave, I want you Have it in mind
that the remaining balance of the excess fund will be wire via money
gramm to the shipping agent who is coming for the pick up. If this
mode of payment is accept by you I will like you to send your Full
name and address including your cell phone number in which you will
Receive a certified check drawn in U.S funds.
Regards.
I WILL BE WAITING FOR YOUR IMMEDIATE RESPONSE.
The most comprehensive FAQ that I know of about Direcway is at BBR.
I've had Direcway since December 2002. In short, it sucks, but at least it ain't dialup.
The lag is god awful. Minimum latency, by the laws of physics, is 600ms, and more usually twice that. Forget ever playing any online game. Pages take nearly 5 seconds to even begin loading. FTP and email are so painfully slow you want to gouge out your eyes.
The download speed can't be beat (depending on what satellite/transponder they activate you on), but upload is a joke. All customers on a transponder fight for the same 128kbps upload speed. Dialup is better and more reliable for uploading any file larger than 20kb. When you do upload something, don't hold your breath because you will probably max out at 20-45kbps.
Yes, rain/snow/heavy cloud cover knocks it offline. Since you're in the north, it will go down easier than it would here (weaker signal the further north you are). I usually have to cycle the modems when the rain knocks it off. It fills up with static (probably could be grounded better).
This probably won't apply to the new Dway 6000, but the model I have (4000 I think) has software which Direcway uses for A.) Remote Access and B.) Popping up full page advertisements. See here for details.
Tech support is a joke. Don't bother. Go to Copperhead or BBR if you need help.
I don't know about the newer system, but I'm behind a NAT (and I think this applies to everyone unless you pay for a static IP). You cannot run a server because of the NAT. SSH probably won't work. I can't use VNC unless someone on the server side initiates a client connection to me first.
Then, there is FAP. FAP (Fair Access Policy) is a joke. If you download more than 169MB within 4 hours, they firewall your connection. They claim they throttle it to dialup speed, but that is a lie. The internet connection dies for hours after the FAP kicks in. If you decide to download a .ISO or other large file, use dialup because it'll download slower but in much less time than trying to work around FAP.
I would suggest taking a very hard look at Starband before spending any money with Direcway. I plan to switch to them myself as soon as I can afford to do so because of Direcway's popping up ads on my PC. I need to recover from Christmas first.
Only on
My favorite download manager is wget (if RMS is reading this, I really meant to say GNU wget). Thankfully, I don't have a DirecWay connection, but if I did, I'd make use of the --limit-rate option.
Wget has been ported to Windows, too.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
We are located in the biggest city in Canada, Toronto, population of the greater toronto area is between 4-6 million, which is above 15% of the population of the entire country, so of course, it makes sense that we can't get any high speed internet access where we're located.
Okay, the deal is that we're too far (by a little margin) from the CO to use Bell's DSL service, and Rogers doesn't have cable internet available on our little side-street, which is only one block away from Kennedy/Ellesmere, a fairly major intersection. The buildings right behind us on Kennedy road all have high speed internet access (choice of DSL and Cable), but not us, we're in some backwater industrial park in middle-scarberia, and we're out of luck.
Anyways, the problems with satellite are:
1. The drivers for the 2-way satellite modems suck, they crash regularly. The drivers are available for Windows only, not for linux.
2. The NOC (operations center) in Texas goes down more often than [insert colorful image not suitable for younger slashdotters here].
3. The satellite link becomes unavailable whenever heavy rain or snow gets in between our dish and the satellite, or between the satellite and the NOC downlink in texas.
4. The latency is terrible. Ssh remotely sucks. You could download small pages ( 5. Get used to hitting reload a lot on your browser. First try didn't work, try try again.
6. Don't ever ever try to use WinGate with your Satellite access, trust me on this one. And pay extra for a public IP, so you can use a NAT firewall/gateway in your home or office.
Regards,
Someone who has been there.
I haven't experienced any of the problems folks here have mentioned, like download throttling. I get the same download speeds at any time during the day, no matter how much I've downloaded up to that point. Connectivity tends to be pretty good. High-overcast days are the worst, since apparently that bounces around the transmit signal. Rainy days and snowy days generally aren't a problem (as long as I keep the dish swept off when it snows)
The latency sucks, of course. It's still overall faster than the dialup and ISDN I used to have (which the satellite has replaced). Once the data starts flowing, its great. Forget about online games, and ssh is hugely frustrating for more than a couple of minutes. I end up doing a lot of work locally, then uploading the results, rather than doing the work directly on the remote box.
I had a similar problem. Bought a new house recently, in the middle of a minor city. Before signing the papers i checked with both DSL carriers and digital cable to insure availabilty.
both assured me that all was well.
deal signed, place dsl order and discover that their confirmation of service was based on the zip code. sure, i'm in the same zip code as all those tall buildings, but i am 17,000 feet from the CO.
UGH! same story with cable.
so, thinking i was clever i signed up for dirctwav. ponied up about a grand in equipment and installation costs. and had it installed.
let the horror begin!
first off, you have to have a windows (and now mac, so i have heard) machine to act as your modem. you have to run a user-land appliction to enable access to the radio. it is less than stable software.
second, you have to use ICS to share it. i initially tried ISS, thinking it'd be nice to have a firewall on my gateway, but ISS would not consistently use the radio modem. so, i had all kinds of crap bridged into my network.
third, the data satellite view is narrow. i mean NARROW. nothing more frustrating than having no data connectivity while your directtv signal strength is 98+, just because of a light wind. no matter how often it happens (which was a lot!) you dont get used to it.
did i mention that it takes a good 2 minutes to re-aquire a signal lock?
after months of lost connections, low bandwidth, and a two solid week stint of downtime (which they wouldnt reimburse me for) i stumbled across the last straw.
there is a limit to the "unlimited" use. Hit their threshold (which is never quantitaivly defined by their contract or customer service) and they slap you down to 32K. yes. less than half of dialup. for up to 8 hours!
i found this out after my aformentioned 2week downtime was fixed and was retreiving all my mail to my local servers. too much data, and i was limited.
i used my modem, found a local wireless provider, they cam on site that day and set me up with 1.5down/768up (+ static IP space) for half the price.
i called and cancelled directv. and gave them a piece of my mind.
if i hadnt found the wireless, i probably would have set up a double dialout solution, 100K would have been faster than i was ever able to get from directwav.
in short, its expensive and it sucks.
(i'll sell you the modem and dish, cheep!)
The local telco may charge so much for it that it ends up in their annual profit report, but they have to provide it.
Not quiet, at least in our parts. Qwest (aka Qworst to the locals) has refused on the grounds that they have no available facilities and would have to completely re-engineer facilities at a community level to handle the extra capacity. City council threats, intervention by the state governor, etc. have not changed their behavior - in fact, one major packing house employer in a community of less than 2,000 had to buy off a T1 from the local bank, freeing up the capacity in order to get one.
Another large incumbant LEC in the state (but not an RBOC) got a $5/line "broadband subsidy" tucked into the local residential and business phone service rate. Does this mean they're bringing DSL to small communities and farms? No. But it sure helps their financial statement look prettier.
Unfortunately, as they've been granted a cash cow monopoly, the grant took away the interest in reinvesting in it. State-level regulators got what their politics designed (and the LEC lobby ensures the cash keeps flowing to keep any ideas of progress from emerging).
Then compare it to wireless if you can get it. If not then look into setting up your own wireless ISP setup. If you write a story about the experience isn't it a business expense?
It's $20 if you are a T-Mobile customer, and it's all-you-can-eat. It's only at modem speed, but I can live with that. It's also more secure than using an 802.11b public hotspot. With GPRS packet data transfer you are behind T-Mobile's NAT rather than being nekkid to the world and r00table. Unless, of course you run something like Zone Alarm in Windows or have the firewall active in Linux/BSD/MacOS X.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I used the DirectWay (business account) system for over a year. It is useful and can be a decent connection, but it will never quite feel like real broadband. Also, be aware that unless you get a static IP and a business account the IP you get is goofy and makes using things like a VPN difficult or impossible. With the static IP and bigger account my bill was $115 per month.
In my situation I had only SAT or a 19.2K average dialup available, so my choices were limited. If I had the ability to get a solid 44K+ dialup connection I would have looked into maybe a dual modem system.
Also, consider ISDN. I was too far away (not enough F1 pairs in QWest speak), but if it's available you get decent bandwidth and low latency. An ISDN router will give digital phone connectivity and pretty speedy (all things being relative) connectivity.
Good luck.
I came up with a website that tells of people's experience with DirecWay. Doesn't sound like DirecWay is worth it. http://www.thesqueakywheel.com/complaintlist.cfm?I D=2503
I have used the DirecWay service back when it was still owned by earthlink. At the time you still needed to have a dial up to send but recieved over satalite link. We got one of the new devices to use and it works great. I have always been able to ssh out from the it. I can also VPN. It rocks, especially if you are no where near cable or DSL. This is also within 2 hours of Ann Arbor (Grand Rapids).
--BigJoe
You can get Multilink routers for next to nothing on Ebay. I have priced nearly everything as far as rural broadband in the 48th worst state in the union for broadband penetration - Vermont. I am currently using 2 USR 56k modems and a Webramp 350e (Ramp Networks is out of business) all purchased on Ebay. Alternately I have built a working router for this using Win98SE so I'm sure YOU can kludge together a Linux-flavored one.
:-) but is terrible for sniping with a Covert Ops :-( Think flamethrower rather than pistol...
I often have a downlink of 50.666kb x2 and an uplink of 33.6kb x 2. I can even use it to play WolfET on occassion, though it isn't great -- ~200ms pings at best which isn't terrible for a Field Ops calling in airstrikes
I can only download about a single gB per day under the best of circumstances but my ISP has no FAP about it.
Yes, it's 2 phone lines. Yes I pay the full local usage cap each month. But even with my Multilink ISP account ($30/mo) it is less than a single phone line plus $99 DirecWay fee (if you pay for the hardware over year). I have done spreadsheet after spreadsheet on the comparisons and I feel the dual modems are the way to go.
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
I have the DW4000 and am using a Win2K machine as a (poor) gateway (via ICS, which sucks rocks). I considered upgrading to their DW6000, and called their tech support to ask some questions about the capability of the DW6000. I recognized their canned responses and asked to speak to an engineer. Eventually their support personel became actively hostile and rude.
The last person I spoke with was a manager, who told me a few gems like:
Before you do business with DirecWay, do some googling:
That was one way to get continuous coverage in LEO.
Maybe 802.16 will solve Taco's BW problem.
Basically see if your telco will set up a LR Enet link if you pay for the HW, something for install, and something for monthly BW charges. They might just bite.
Hi :)
:)
:) (yes including some things considered not possible on a such satellite system like VPN (you'll need to encrypt only payload for this, for technical reasons that I'll gladly explain if you want me to)
,HNS has been good to me :)
You can use SSH over the DW6000 and DW4020 , which are basically the same things, the DW6000 is a DW4020 that has been scaled down and integrated into
one Box.
I am using a DW4020 myself, I am in Europe so I do not know what grade of service you'll be getting in USA. But here we get up to 256Kbps/2Mbps , I personnally use the 128Kbps/2Mbps service right now on a DW4020 and I already have my DW6000 , just need to plug it in to replace my DW4020
Oh I use FreeBSD behind it and I do all my sysadmin work from it
Also to mention : I admin and install these systems and I know these babies quite well
You can contact me if you need to know more
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So I recently used a friends DirecWay system, and they asked me to hook it up to wireless router. First of all, the thing uses two modems, one to receive and one to transmit. The only output on the modem (to the computer) was USB. Meaning connecting it to a router wasn't going to happen (without a bunch of weird connections). Not to mention the speeds sucked at about 500k max.
Hi!
I'm in rural America, and I've used a variety of methods for Internet access over the years: a 56K frame-relay circuit, ISDN, a fractional T-1 circuit, and now DirecWay. Some thoughts:
There is little comparison. The "two-way" DirecWay service is high-speed download, and essentially 56K upload. If you're doing a lot of uploading (particularly of graphics) that's a bad thing. If you're uploading text, it isn't that noticeable. On the other hand, you definitely will notice the latency. It's annoying.
On the other hand, DirecWay is dramatically cheaper. You can buy the "modem" up front and pay $59/month, or capitalize the "modem" over 15 months for a total charge of $99/month; after 15 months your rate drops to $59/month. I viewed the cost of the device as equivalent to buying a router--its a capital expense. I can tell you with a broad smile on my face that $59/month is a LOT cheaper than the $450/month I was paying for a fractional T-1. (I dropped the T because I'm no longer doing offsite development for clients--I took a full-time position, so I don't have as much need for the bandwidth.)
We learned this the hard way: DirecWay and DirecTV actually broadcast from different satellites. The way they provide service from both is to aim the dish at a compromise position. The result is poor signal strength from either TV or Internet. Our satellite guy came out last week, saying that DirecWay had emailed all of their installers to install a separate TV dish. It makes your roof more cluttered ("I heard you went to work for client," said a neighbor. "Was it the NSA?") but it will definitely settle the question of who is the biggest geek on the block.
Once you're past that initial latency hit, download speed is remarkable. While there were benefits to having the T-1 circuit, I'm 28,000 feet from the CO, so packet loss was a persistent problem. Internet radio is better, and watching broadband TV is MUCH better.
Overall, we're very happy with it.
I had direcway when I lived out in the sticks (up till about 2 months ago), and I can tell you from firsthand experience that it is miserable. The throughput is great, but the latency makes browsing (especially anything ssl) painful. If you are doing large file transfers, it really does go pretty fast, sometimes faster than my current cable modem. But for ordinary web browsing, it is really the pits. Also if you are uploading anything to a site, it is extra painful, because their upload speed is pretty slow and you have the latency too. A double whammy. If there is any possibility of getting anything else (ISDN, etc), I would certainly go that route first. If your only choices are DW or dialup, I guess I would pick Direcway.
we have had direcway in our real estate office for about a year now and it is ok. I have a cable connection at home, so I usually compare it to the adelphia connection. Cable seems more responsive when surfing the web, but on downloads sometimes it goes faster then the adelphia. Things to keep in mind. Mount the dish good. Sometimes ice or rain can take ours out and we just have to wait until it can connect again. The new satelite modem should fix the messy internet connection sharing issues (we deal with it ok) The latentcy seems to affects other programs too, like streaming video or some instant messaging. Sometimes these things bog down. If I want to watch a CNET video at work I have to put it on 56k to get a non-rebuffering video. Excessive use during the day doesn't seem to affect us, but then again I can't tell that my cable connection gets overloaded durring the day either, so I'm probably not a good judge of that. Upload is slower then download. I wouldn't want to host anything on it, unless it was serving a few users at a time and it wasn't an intense job.
You'll probably want to do anything except something that requires signing a contract for an extended period of time. Looks like 50km WiMax might be just what you want:0 0.shtml ?tid=126&tid=137&tid=187&tid=193&tid=9 5
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/01/26/0642
If you do live out in the boonies, you may only connect at 24,000 baud... You thing the 1 second lag time is unacceptable!
I live about 40 minutes away from Ann Arbor, MI and I tried DirecWay about a year ago. I had a very similar experience to the parent poster. Stay the hell away from DirecWay, it's pretty much worthless. You'll be down all the time, have to reboot a few times a day when it's working to keep it working and the tech support is horrible. If you absolutely have to be able to download large files quickly I guess it's worth it if there is no other alternative but be sure to keep your dial-up account. Trust me. You'll need it.
I thought I was in the middle of nowhere. No cable, no DSL. A Wireless link is coming, but yeah.
" or crappy dialup."
Maybe dialup wouldn't be so crappy, if the Internet wasn't so bloated. People do web pages like modern programmers do software. Lazy and bloated.
I agree with the folks suggesting T1 + wireless for neighbors. A very successful service here in Santa Fe is La Canada wireless, which as earlier folks mention, share a T1 with very simple 802.11 wireless, building a very effective network for those unable to get a cable modem or DSL. Indeed, they would not now change, even if cable/DSL did become available.
http://www.lcwireless.com/
" but we get so much of it during the work week that we really don't care much about having broadband at home."
Do telemarketers and helpdesk have phones at home?
Damn people, I don't know what you people are smoking but its not that bad. Taco, if you want to know about direcway, look up my email address and mail me. I'll tell you all about it, pros and cons.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
How exactly does is this abuse?
He didn't submit a story, then accept it himself (quad karma!), and it is his site to begin with.
- This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along, move along..
" You really can never go back after you have broadband."
You can if the economy tanks and your job goes to India, while you end up working at Walmart.
The bounce to the bird is irrelevant for downloads and uploads (you only experience the lag once),
My experience seems different, FTP upload speed has a major suckage factor; there is just too much hand shaking going on. In fact if you're uploading a new website, with a lot of directory depth and a ton of smallish file, 56K dial-up will kick digital satelites ass up arround it's ears.
Satelite is optimized from cramming data down, not up.Of course if your just web browsing mostly, it'll make quite a difference, if the server your browsing can keep up
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Just a thought: Use the 56kbps modem for latency-sensitive purposes (e.g. SSH, where throughput isn't so important), and use satellite for browsing, downloading, etc.
"If you have the $$$ there is nothing stopping you from getting a T1. You can get a T1 just about anywhere. The local telco may not like it, but they have to provide it."
That's why John Navas says that there's no broadband monopoly. There is always an alternative. Just not necessarily the desired one.
BEFORE it snows! :P
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
My wife's business had them, for just about as long as it took the owner to actually touch a terminal. Drove everyone in her office stark raving. Not only latency but the "now you're up, now you're down", the DNS failures, on and on and nobody gave a hoot at Direc*.
a rch/search.pl?p=1&lang=en&include=&exclude=&penalt y=0&mode=all&q=DirecPC
i t20010201. html0 10125. html
2 8. html0 10712. html0 40115. html
/ /trevormarshall.com/waveguides.htme vormarshall.com/byte_articles/byte1. htm
i t20010823. html
0 10823. html
t ml
The heavy caching was problematic, as was web surfing; it actually behaved somewhat well when doing larg file downloads, but the bazillions of little files and requests attendant to modern web surfing was sloooooooooooooww.
My favorite curmudgeon, Jerry Pournelle, also had their service. He had rather unkind things to say about them on multiple occasions. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/cgi-bin/perlfect/se
Robert X. Cringely surveyed the competition, and also found them wanting:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulp
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20
The bottom line is, ya canna' change the laws o' physics, as a wise Scot once said. Perhaps you could instead consider some guerilla wireless?
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit200106
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20
May I be so bold as to refer you to some good sources for WIFi wireless antenna making?
http://www.trevormarshall.com/biquad.htm
http:
http://www.tr
Or, Ham Radio Outlet allows you to buy ready-made high-gain WiFi sticks.
http://hamradio.com/
Of course, you could face technical difficulties, either from hams (like me) with *licenses* to put kilowatts on 2.4gHz, or this kinda problem:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulp
Maybe you could get a 'dry pair' from Telco and roll your own:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20
However, hams are reasonable guys, and lighting using WiFi never really caught on, so I think guerilla WiFi is a safe bet, and cheap, too. If there is a stong emitter in your 'hood, just shift to 802.11a on 5gHz and carry on. Visit these guys
http://www.personaltelco.net/static/index.h
for more info and lots of enthusiastic help for the esteemed Cmdr. Taco, really.
73s and best regards,,
K7AAY, PDX
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
google for "DirecWay sucks": 45
google for "DirecWay rocks": 1 to "about 5"
We use a direct way setup for our emergency response communications and some local high speed multimedia needs. Since our station isnt stationary we had a person attend their instillation training and then come back to teach us what he learned. Most people that have major packet loss just have bad reception. While we have never played games, we Have transferred VoIP communications and emergency mailing with little trouble.
the key is a proper setup. i believe most instillation technicians do not do a very good job with this, probably because it isnt easy. for us, we must obtain our precise location using GPS, call their operations number over a satellite phone, give them our cords, wait for them to open a channel for us, and then carefully aim the dishes and adjust polarity to the information they calculate. there are systems that do this automatically in under 10 minutes but we can not afford them. in good conditions it takes us about a half hour to complete.
as for weather interference its all about the condition of the dishes. if you shell the dish properly you shouldnt have any problem. we have had very nice dB gain during some pretty nasty storms.
if you can justify the price and dont expect it to be the greatest thing on earth then you might want to give it a try. realistically it is a very good service. people fail to consider the complexity of its nature and expect it to be better than is possible.
You said it, I live in San Jose, CA(the so-called capitol of Silicon Valley) and can barely even get a dialtone. The closest thing I can get to broadband is an I-SDL line, 128kbps for $79.95/month! Cable Internet isn't available in the majority of the city, and I'm too far from the CO to get a regular DSL line. I would go with Satellite, but I wanna play games.
Have had the service for 13 months now. I live in a rural area and no DSL or cable etc. I have had some times when I had a hard time. This was when it rains real hard, or there are big T storms in the area. I was told by Direcway about this in advance. I have noticed some degradation in speed during congested times. I hear the new 6000 is faster than my 4000.
the company i work for is part of the oil industry and we use similar satillite versions. We use the 4000 and 4020 direcway. The 6000 that you are talking about is called Spaceway. Spaceway is the consumer version and Direcway is the business version. System reliablity is top notch cept for thick fog, which will hamper the abilty for the sat to range. Overall I think its a reliable route.
Lots of bs so I will try for a REAL answer to the quetion.
I too am on dialup and slow(33.6 usually) so having had DirecTV here in the country I asked my friend down the road who sells it and he let me play with it in his store. I am a programmer and was/am an electronics tech also plus a ham operators.
DirecWay will cost approx $200 for install. Its a 65lb dish and not at all like the DirecTV disk. Its advisable to NOT use DirecWay for both TV and Net usage. If one dies then both are dead. Better to keep the DirecTV and just add a new ant, additional coax and the new (DW6000)box. Its connected via a nic card and Cat 5 cable. No usb on the 6000. You then use a wireless or wired router to spin off to other desktops. Easy I believe. His was USB and slower.
Now the IP is in the 10.xx.xx.xx Class A and IANA
and you can't do a trace route on it for shit. So you have , IMO, some real protection against virii and so forth. Also against hackers but its not usable for games. The UPLOAD speed was bad(36 or so) but DOWNLOAD was very fast(746 or so). Short interactive responses were of course very slow but usuable for web surfing. When it gets a large download then it excells. So the ping times are of course not that good . I got 1250 ms.
Checking it thru DSLREPORTS gave me those figures.
There is also FAP(Fair Access Policy) which you can run into if you exceed certain bandwidth usages of a certain time. This is too keep the bandwidth more available for those who aren't Kazaa users or bandwidth hogs.
Cost per month is about $59.99. Hardware was quoted to me at $399. Then $200 for install comes to $600. Some ask a total of $800 but thats shoppable. This was small town USA.
I could install it but they said then you have a problem with them not standing behind YOUR work. He said if they did it they wanted to be sure it was ok. They know me and know I could do it but they like to make a living too. Your choice but it looks doable for a good techie type. Aiming may be harder. If you get into a unsolvable problem then they may charge the hell out of you for that.
It has pros and cons. You can't do a website. Not sure if the IP is fixed but it really doesn't matter then due to the above.
I thought to get it but having second thoughts now. I am sometimes instead using my Kyocera 7135 on Verizon 3G to connect. Its faster than dialup. Unlimited 'Express Network(now called HotSynce)' costs $50 / month and you need at least 2 bars on the antenna signal to work ok. More the better. If a tower is local its nice but it has a tendency to go 'dormant' and has a latency due to this also some bugs still being worked out.
Best , hands down, is cable or DSL of course. I can get neither. I would like to have both dialup and DirecWay if I have no other choices. Rain comes along satellite goes byebye for awhile.
Is there no way to daisy chain some broadband out to the woods? Are you so far from a friendly neighbor (even a string of them) that you can't get a point-to-point wireless going?
Using CHEAP antenna's you can go ten miles (or much more) line of sight, and with Power-over-ethernet, those cheapies can be on top of a severely tall mast...
If that still isn't enough, better antennas cost more but go farther, and once you've bought them, they're yours.
From what I've read a while back, the 6000 Model uses an Ethernet port instead of a USB port. I used two direcPC Satellites about two years ago, (one for my Geeky GF and one for me) we had some old model at first then got some 4000 models, but only the the receivers not the transmitters. I was looking into Satellite internet again since some of my family lives out in the boonies... Personally I'd go with Starband.com since they don't have the Fair Access Policy (FAP) it has some high startup fees but many different plans... The best one seems to be "StarBand Model 360 Standard Plan" with a 3 year contract, $699+S&H and $49.99/mo As mentioned in the original post, latency sure does suck. I would go dial-up only when I wanted a hit of EverCrack. But with a Bidirectional Satellite Modem, you would have to pay extra for the dialup service, so as long as latency(gaming) isn't important then Satellite should do just fine. I eventually got rid of the service when mcloudteleco.com started offering Paradyne reachDSL service. Although it is not as fast as direcPC, it is cheaper, and there is no FAP Cap. For more info on the FAP go here: http://www.copperhead.cc/fap.html Also, I was unable to connect through IPSec when using the satellite, I don't know if anything has changed since back then, maybe the 6000 model doesn't have the same limitations as the earlier versions.
Our Telephone Cooperative/Internet provider is beginning to offer what they call long distance DSl. I looked for it on their website(www.pldi.net) but could find no mention of it there. If I remember the blurb correctly they were advertising sevice as far from the switch as 12 to 15 miles. The technicians that intalled my regular ADSL a little over a year ago claimed to have installed it for customers as far away as 8 miles and the customer was delighted. Not sure what kind of speed can be expected at that distance. Maybe that is something that could be done in your area if some company were willing to step forward to provide the service. redsilo
I helped set it up for a friend who had an AOL dialup connection. All I hear now is how the upload speeds are horrible. When they try to send an email with images in it, it takes forever. Whenever they try to use UPS for online shipping it is dramatically slower. Also they have said that sometimes their download speeds get extremely slow as well. All of this is with all of the hacks to speed up the connection installed. I would say that when I tested it the download speeds were dramatically faster than my 512K DSL and the upload speeds averaged betweem 14 and 40K. The 40K average only showed up on large transfers. I have a feeling that large buffer sizes in some portion of the satellite unit are the key to the slowness, but there may also be rebroadcast regulations that play into the speed.
Anyhow, maybe this is helpful.
Enjoy
You are lucky, Ed Gruberman. Few novices experience so much of Ti Kwan Leep so soon.
I had DirecWay and yes you are right about the latency and it is a major issue. For two reasons yes it cripples games but when you send requests they are also slow. The downloads are great if that is all your doing but in today's internet world you are sending quite a bit of data as well as downloading it. Beyond that The installation cost us $700.00 dollars about two years ago. Those may have come down a bit. Our next issue was a lockup issue. It would randomly just lockup and we would have to disconnect it from the usb port shut the server down and unplug the sat receiver. This happened about every 3 days. Again this was supposed to be fixed in a fimware upgrade. I never kept it long enough for that to happen. At any rate all in all it was better than dial up but it has it's drawbacks and depending on what YOU are expecting you may find it works for you.
Some real world ovservations on satellite connectivity:
...but due to the fact most satellite-based ISPs utilize proprietary communications and compression protocols, you will likely also find problems using IPSec over satellite links... ...specifically with respect to KeepAlive on stateful connections.
Not only will you experience the latency issues...
just my two cents
When you go to a drug dealer to buy oregano, don't be surprised when the cops knock your door down. These people were buying hardware from places they KNEW were not entirely above board.
"Above board"? Are you claiming that the programmers were built with stolen parts? That the sale itself was breaking some law?
No, you're not claiming any such thing. In your view they're ONLY "shady" because many of their customers intended to use the devices to steal service.
That's EXACTLY the same argument as banning all peer-to-peer protocols - napster, gnutella, FTP, etc. - because SOME people use them to infringe copyrights. Or banning DAT tape drives, VCRs, casette tape drives, reel-to-reel tape drives, and photocopiers for the same reason. Or banning search engines because they index copyrighted files, thus facilitating copyright infringement.
It's also the same issue as banning aluminum foil because some people use it to line hashish pipes. Or banning "tire thumpers" (used by truckers to prevent dangerous blowouts on the road by quickly checking tire pressure) because they're usable as a billyclub. Or blocking under-21 boaters from possessing distress flare guns (thus killing some of them in high-wave coastal waters where a handheld distress flare will not be seen) because of their similarity to a pistol.
The courts are clear on this. A dual-use technology is legal if ANY of its common uses are legal, even if MOST times it's used a law is broken. This leaves DirecTV in the position of an extortionist, using the high cost of defending onself in court to impose penalties for strictly legal actions in an attempt to intimidate their victims.
Yes, DTV caught a few dolphins in with their tuna, but you don't hear about all those tuna.
So do you also propose a final solution to the "Palestinian Problem" by killing all the Palestinians? Or maybe all the Israelis?
If you want a martcard programmer for a legal project, they can be obtained from proper, reputable, legal venders. (and yes, they're more expensive than the 20$ hacker junk.)
So people should have to pay enormously more money for a less-functional product, even though the product is LEGAL, simply because SOME (maybe even MOST) of the OTHER purchasers use their new purchase for a crime?
What happened to the free market? What happened to price competition and innovation? What happened to small entrepeneurs beating the large corporations at their own business? Do you oppose those as well?
This is no different from buying guns from a guy in an alley.
Yes it is different. SELLING that gun in the alley, without the appropriate federal and state paperwork, is on the books as a felony - which also makes buying it a crime.
(And I'll leave the issue of whether even THOSE laws are valid under the 2nd Amendment to some other thread.)
Freedom means letting other people do things you don't like. So get over it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The only solution for the good Cmdr is to bond at least 3 or more modems. Earthlink (despite the fact that they shovel money into the evil Scientology cult) will allow multiple logins on the same account - therefore you can get ISDN equilivalent speeds from them without paying more than the $19.99 per month. The downside is, you guessed, it three phone lines. It is more reliable than DirecWay (or any satellite providers) is more responsive than DirecWay (with latencies only in the 200-300ms range, still bad, but better than 2-5 seconds in satellite roundtrips). Plus, there are a few routers out there that do the triple channel bonding for you.
I put in a network in a million dollar house (a friend's, not mine) perched on a cliff face in the Ozarks. They used DirecWay for connectivity and a cheap Dell PC running Wingate for the router. The following observations apply:
1. The original equipment installer makes a big difference. There are a lot of details to keep track of, and a missed detail creates huge problems later. On our site, the installer aimed the feed horn at the wrong satellite. Hughes/DirecWay thought the box was in one subnet, when it was really in another. The thing only worked intermittently for the first three months until a DirecWay support guy noticed the IP we were getting. Rather than reassign us a new IP, we wound up having the tech come out to re-aim the dish. We discovered shortly after that that he had failed to ground the dish assembly properly, too. Wound up killing three satellite TV receivers before we figured that one out.
2. The ping times are brutal. SSH to a machine in Chicago got to the 1 second per keystroke level at one point. Games other than chess are right out.
3. Transfer speeds for longer downloads are actually pretty good. Streaming was okay, too, as long as there was no unexpected return traffic.
4. There aren't too many support options for software routers, and the equipment we were using was satellite on one side and USB cable on the other. Wingate, as it turns out, has a native driver for the Hughes USB equipment. There's an open source project, too, but configuring a Linux box to use one of these things is pretty hairy. I believe there's newer equipment available now that will output to an ethernet port, but you might want to do some research there.
5. The DirecWay software is Windows-based. It installs either on a lone client machine, or on the gateway PC alongside the router software. The latest version is pretty stable, but the software is closely tied to the firmware in the transceivers you get from DirecWay, so version upgrades and bug fixes have to happen separately for every kind of equipment they have in the field. This means bugs tend to linger a while.
6. Weather is a factor. High-sun days heat the dish and cause something called thermal fade, or heat fade. Sunspots are a big deal, especially this year. Rain isn't too bad, nor is snow. Electrical storms, however, are a show stopper. I don't know about Ann Arbor, but Shell Knob, MO gets some of the most amazing lightning storms I've ever seen. In the spring, this rig was down a few hours every night for a few weeks.
7. Support is spotty. The first-tier guys are, frankly, miserable. They don't even do much of a job reading the scripted answers off the cards. The second-tier support "specialists" are a different matter; very knowledgeable and extremely willing to "own your issue" until it is resolved. Sadly, I know this because I've had to deal with three of them. Field installers are almost all subcontractors. DirecWay uses their network of satellite TV installers to deploy the internet equipment. Some of them know what they're doing. Some are in the field because their landscaping job was taken over by a cheaper laborer. There's no way to know which you'll get.
8. There are a lot of variables in this particular setup. You're radiating high-frequency RF into open space, and a million things can happen to the signal en route. Some of the equipment in this setup lives in space along with radiation, thermal swings that would surprise a Midwesterner, meteors, sunspots, and what-have-you; sometimes things just don't work for a while. Hughes is trying to either sell off or retool this whole endeavor; as a result, what they do with your packets once they receive them isn't entirely predictable from week to week.
All in all, it took us a year or so to get this running as well as it is. At peak performance, it's about 400k down and 50k up, with 800ms+ ping times. It stalls about ten times a month (or more) for weather, software hangs or freak space gremlins. We rely on Wingate's squid cache to m
I used the system for just over a year, re-sold through Earthlink.
Yep, the download cap sucks, but I found that I didn't hit it very often. Also, the upload is basically that of a dial-up, and I could never get it better, though some people claim that they have.
As for the uptime. I found that the weather problems weren't as bad as they made them out to be, but I'm in Northern CA so it never gets any worse than kinda foggy and cold!
Never had a problem with DNS servers not including sites, but then again I wasn't doing anything other than editing and maintaining a site.
The support blows chinks. Forty minutes a call sounds like heaven to me. When I first had it installed the installer guy gave up after a couple hours and I personally spent the next week on the phone with those idiots trying to get it to work, and it was a mistake on their end. Basically, if you have a problem, you have to learn how to fix it yourself, unless you have a week or so to waste, but as was said before, this might just be Earthlink, although I have my doubts that the Hughes support staff even exists. If you need help, I found Direcway Uncensored to be very useful and informative.
I found that the Hughes software locked up our machie once or twice a day, but after fighting with it for a year I think I finally got that worked out. Now, however, I think they're only offering the DW6000 which plugs directly into a network, which should make life so much easier. I have heard nothing but good reviews of that unit, but can't afford it right now, so I've never used it myself.
Basically, as long as you can get it set up and are willing to dedicate some time to learning how to run the stupid thing, it's better than dial-up and pretty good, as long as you're not expecting anything like regular broadband. I would recommend it if you have a choice between dial-up and this.
Good luck!
DirecWay has this wonderful thing called its FAP. You can only download around 200mb in a couple of hours before they throttle you to dial up speeds. It's not fun. Not to mention their "snappy" http proxy doesn't work on pretty much every site with cgi submits.
I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this as it was the one thing that finally moved me off satellite.
Twice a year, near (but not on) the equinox you will have a period of about a week where the sun appears to be lined up with the satellite and you will have low to no signal. Generally this is during daytime hours, and so folks who only use the system at night may not have noticed. But boy it made my life "fun" for a while.
As other posters have suggested, you might want to see if there's fixed wireless available near you, or if you can find someone line-of-sight who can access DSL or Cable who'd be willing to let you setup a link much as Bob Cringely described a year or two ago on his site.
FWIW...
I have been a direcway subscriber for about 4 years because I too live in the country. My primary job requires that I be able to be connected and move data and source around. I get to see my 2 year old daughter and wife every day when I am at home. We have llamas and horses and a bunch or other animals. I have tractors, trucks, and other big equipment to play with. The trade-offs are worth it. However my direcway experience has not been too good. It crashes (driver instabilities) and slows down dramatically during peak times. It will seem slower than a 56k dial-up when you are browsing. I choose my tooling carefully. I write automation scripts. I work longer hours. If I really need to I can go to a local store and use their wireless bradband for about $5 an hour. The only problem I have is large database files and sometimes big doc files. There is a throttling mechanism that limits you to about 50k if you pull too much data too fast. The tech support is not very good. Here is a good article for direcpc, and it still applies to direcway: http://www.hamradio-online.com/1999/nov/direcpc2.h tml
I have one of the DW6000 units on order, but haven't heard anything about the install yet. I can't tell if it provides the DHCP address to the client uses it itself to proxy the requests. The current setup I use proxys the traffic for one machine and provides an address on their private network. Not all of the addresses have reverse resolution so I have had probelms with mail servers. The address is only "live" during the proxied transaction and can be pinged from the internet during the transaction, but only them. When the client is idle the traffic is not passed in from the net. I had to install a firewall because my system was getting infected by viruses even though I was behind their proxy. I use VPN and SSL from behind their proxy. I use sygate office network on my local server so I can support multiple VPN tunnels through the direcway system. The satellite driver requires a seperate systray applet to work correctly and does not work with M.S. routing and remote access, so no built-in VPN. There is a Linux driver out there, but it requires initial setup on a windows box and was still pre-release last time I looked. There are other bidirectional satellite providers out there now. My research has shown that the equipment cost is more, but the service is better.
There are alot of mistaken comments in this thread. Here it is from a Direcway user. Their service sucks. If you don't feel like tweaking it all yourself, don't get it. I had to (after my professional? install) repoint my dish and actually tighten the bolts. Have had a great signal ever since. I have had no weather outages, even when my Dish network tv sat was out. The built in proxy server kinda screws with some pages. As in, half your pictures don't load most of the time. Downloads are always faster than they advertise. I constantly get 1megabits/sec. I have seen a max of 1.7. But, here is the biggest problem of all with Direcway. FAP! The fair access policy. Basically, you can download 169meg in an eight hour period. Once you hit that, you are at 56k. Picture a bucket full of 169mb. There is a trickle at 56k filling it. You can use it all at once if you want, but then the bucket refills at 56k, and thats all you get till it fills up again. Its great for downloading small programs, patches, mp3's, etc. But no way you can download a Linux distro, or anything that big. There it is. For me, its better than dialup, but it is far from being "broadband"
First, we never saw speeds reaching what was advertised, maybe about 200 kbps down. You definitely want to go with the professional install--it was not pricey even with the surcharge for coming out to the sticks (2.5 hour drive).
We run a web proxy application on the Windows machines, which provides HTTP connectivity to the other machines in the network. We never tried a "conversational" protocol like SSH, but my guess is the latency would be problematic.
Suprisingly, rain and snow have not been a big deal. We have both DirecTV and DirecWay and I cannot recall a rain or snow outage. Last time I was there, not only did we have snow, but the cloud level was about 6000 ft. With those conditions, the DirecTV signal strength was 80 to 90.
I would give you more details, but Mother Nature and her 50-70 mph winds pushed the dish out of alignment and we have had the worst time getting it pointed again. The dish has three degrees of freedom (elevation, azimuth, and polarity) and getting it right involves moving all three axes. While trying to fix the alignment, the RX signal strength would oscillate between 0 and 70--needless to say that made it difficult to align. I would recommend you do the following after a successful installation:
- Record all the positions of the dish
- Verify that the post is plumb
- Mark the positions on the dish
The other thing to consider is that you definitely do not want to have people or animals within 3 feet of the business end of the dish--the TX power is significant. That basically rules out ground-level installations.1) Bonded dialup PPP
I get 33.6K here at the best of times. I have two circuits right now,
my wife has one and I have one. What I'm gonna do soon is bond
them so there's one 66K feed. The local ISP will support this,
if it works out ok I may double it to a 134K feed. Not cheap
really and still stuck with dialup latencies, but it might work out.
2) HDSL.
I dunno about there, but here you can order a "4 wire unloaded
circuit" which is just a copper run from point A to point B.
How they wire it is a bit cariable, but if they come in under
the HSDL disatance limit you can get Pairgain HDSL boxen on
ebay real cheap. Basically you'd have to string segments of
these to the closest DSL enabled area.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Not to certain, but I just started reading into some VoIP...'stuff'. Implication so far is that the bandwidth you mentioned would be more than sufficient for FAR more than 5 lines. More like 10 or 15 -- voice uses something like 38kb/s Sooo, maybe you are getting screwed? Just a happy thought :~) I'm sure someone will tell me how much shit I am full of if such is the case.
Well, I guess it depends on how you look at it ;)
T1's are 24 channels, 23 if it's a PRI. PRI is a 23 B channel ISDN, with a single D channel. Each channel is normally a single voice channel. This is _not_ VOIP, but how the telco's traditionally work. If you want to think of it in smaller terms, the telco is taking a channel from any one of their T1's, converting it back to analog, and running that POTS line to your home.
heh. Think DSL or 56k modems. You want as little analog wire between you and the digital conversion as possible. Because I'll be converting to analog in my basement I'll have maybe 25ft of analog signal. That would give me reliable 52k connections everytime. I used to run a PBX for a bank, and we had awesome 56k dialouts ;)
So it really depends on how you look at it.. I was thinking of utilizing the extra lines for local dial-out to support that free VOIP LD network for my local prefix. Remember the name of that project?
Ah well.. Hope that makes sense ;)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Hey, are you this guy?
I have had direcpc (dial up/sat return) since 1996. I live in an outlying rural area also, and dial up sucks. So I got it, being it was THE only game in town.
Wow. I loved the speed.
Wow. I hate the tech support. They are clueless beyond measure.
I had to figure out how to re-align my dish when they changed satellites, their tech idiots couldn't help. The stories go on. If you are interested in hearing more, drop me an email -
firemedic510 (nospam)AT msn.com
Pray to God to strike your ass dead before you get direcway. Buy a T1. Move somewhere else. Just don't get DirecPC/Way.
FYI - the TV service is fine. It is the bastard satellite internet department that suffers.
Selah.
It's a pain in the ass to configure wireless with the directway system, and the latency isn't noticeable after browsing for a while.
Original Problem
One of my company's operations handles barges of wood and other materials traveling up and down the river system, and recently opened a new terminal (barge loading/unloading point) on the Tennessee River. It was decided that an internet connection was needed at this location, as well as a network camera (we have been installing these throughout our facilities). Due to the location, there is no wired broadband access available, and the phone system is iffy even for voice calls. No cell phone digital data is available service either (even voice cell service is spotty, I had to install a repeater to get decent service at the location, which is a whole other story in itself).
Ordering Process
So this leads us to satellite internet, the only real option. After researching it, I decided to go with a reseller, and SkyCasters seemed to be the best for us. They're based in Akron, OH, but they contract the installation work to the nearest available installer (which happened to be about an hour's drive from our location). SkyCasters deal directly with DirecWay, and according to them, are the only provider that have their servers co-located in the Hughes network facility. The ordering process included an phone interview with a sales person to determine our needs, and then various contracts and such to set up the installation and account.
Installation
I traveled to our location in TN to set up the local network at our facility, and was there for the setup of the satellite system. SkyCasters shipped all the hardware directly to our location via UPS, and set up the install with the local installer. The installer called the day of installation to let me know he was on his way, and got more specific directions for finding us.
SkyCasters' installation package includes a setup script for the installer to follow, as well as one for the client to follow, to make sure everything is set up correctly.
The installer assembled the dish and mounted it on the top of a stationary trailer that we use there as a storage unit, it has a flat roof. The mount is a non-penetrating roof mount, which involves a flat steel frame, with a rubber mat. Within the 2 sections of this frame, 3 concrete blocks are laid on each side, on the rubber mat, which passes over the middle bar of the frame. These blocks hold the frame down against the roof, as well as preventing any lateral movement - it seems weird but it works very well. To this frame is bolted the mounting arm of the dish, which he pointed and locked without any problem. He also ran the cabling from the dish to inside our office unit, cable tying it and otherwise locking the cables in place.
Then he followed the rest of the script to set up the networking part of the system, by which I mean the 4020 itself. He had a little trouble with his laptop at this point and spent quite a while on the phone with SkyCasters tech support, but did eventually manage to get it working. (this part I blame on the fact that he was using Windows ME on his laptop, trying to get networking set up properly on that is a nightmare)
The whole installation took about 4 hours, from arrival of the installer to his departure. Your experience with installation may vary since, as I mentioned before, they subcontract local installers for this.
Setup
Once we had a computer connected directly to the 4020 and
Are you sure you lived in Grand Haven? I've lived there most of my life and it's quite a hike from Hope, not to mention Ann Arbor. In any case, cable and DSL are available in most of the surrounding areas.Grand Haven now has wireless covering most of the town for $20 a month.
Unfortunately, Taco is outside of ANN ARBOR 3 hours away and no where near Hope College. In any case, I live outside of Grand Haven now in Verizon's rural wasteland. To be brief, my phone is useable 1.5 weeks out of a month, there's a nice loud HUMMM the rest of the time. So no 56k, 40k, or even 28.8 most days. And, at 18000 feet, I doubt I'll ever get DSL.
So, CT, After giving up a cable modem in my move I've looked at all the rural options. Download caps and latency (one or the other would be fine to me)keep me away from satellite. I would urge you to wait until a WISP is available in the area. We even have one here in West Michigan, but the tall oaks surrounding me prevent me from establishing Line of Site. WISPs are popping up all over the place so you shouldn't have to wait long. They might also have d/l caps, but the speed is excellent and the price is right. Currently $50/mo, $500 install includes equipment.
Drink Michigan Beer
I'm in a similar situation where dialup is the only land-based possibility and WIFI is impossible because of all the damn trees (northwestern most portion of Washington state). I ended up going with Starband. The 480 Pro is very expensive ($139/month for me) and the hardware is waaaaay too much (I paid a little over $800), but it works extremely well (most of the time) and happily works with my D-Link DI-614+ router. I recently started writing a review (it's mostly done, but not 100%) on my personal site that pretty much covers most of the pros and cons as I see them.
Good luck.
http://www.skycasters.com/
This group seems to get good reviews in newsgroups etc. They use the Hughes network but have some of their own equipment. Supposedly, they allocate bandwidth and such in a way to ensure more predictable transfer rates.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What broadband service TV do you use?
Read my blog: HansMast.com
If the DW6000 is assigning ip addresses on the 192.168 range, simply set your router to assign addresses on the 10.2 range. Plug the lan port of DW6000 to the wan port of your router, and you still have a full router between you and the DW6000. If your DW6000 has a dynamic ip address anyway, the only down side is the increased lag due to the extra level of NAT (which is tiny compared to the inherent lag of DirectWay). I already use this technique to keep a firewall between my wireless router and my wired router. I put all untrusted machines (i.e. web servers, wirelessly connected computers, kids computers) in this DMZ, and keep my important trusted computers behind both firewalls. Send questions to owen_richter hotmail address if you want some tips on how to do this.
I've had the Starband system at my summer house in a remote area of the southwest Washington (state) Pacific coast for several years, so I've had 2-way satellite service for about as long as it's been available at consumer prices ($69.99/mo). I have just gotten DSL service, so I may not have it for much longer.
Use: I spend 1-2 weeks/month at the house, but it's not my primary residence. I use the connection when I am there for the normal set of web/email uses plus some ftp. When I'm not there (actually, all the time), I try to upload weather and still images from webcams to my offsite servers.
Speed: Everything said thus far about ping times is obviously right. The upshot of this is that anything interactive is painful, as noted. For webpages that can be accelerated by the proxy servers in place, speed is pretty good -- comparable to broadband -- until you try to do something secure, at which point it slows down to about 2x modem speed, sometimes faster. Uploads were, as with most asymmetrical systems, highly variable, and mostly sucked.
Reliability: The Starband service goes down for a few minutes at most daily, and at least weekly. Much of this is caused by rain or sun (the few times a year when the sun is directly behind the satellite), but some of it is not attributable to that. Seldom has it been worse than a minor annoyance, but don't count on anything that can't easily reset itself after a lost connection.
Hardware: The original Starband 180 modems really sucked eggs, and the replacement process was a bureaucratic nightmare, but the 360 modem in use now has ethernet and seems to work, aside from requiring a more-or-less dedicated server. I wouldn't run 2-way satellite without putting a server between me and it. Oh, server must be Windows :-(
Installation: I have a rooftop installation carefully pointed between tall trees, but it seems to work. It's unsightly, but has high geek factor. My installer seemed competent.
Bottom Line: Only you can decide whether it's worth it versus the alternatives, whatever they are, for your location. For me, it was better than dialup (including ganged 2-modem dialup), but worse than all non-available alternatives (Wireless (trees), T1 (cost), DSL/Cable (not available)). Like everything else, most of the horror stories have a grain of truth, coupled with outsized expectations. The difference between the horror stories and the "I love it" zealots seems more about expectations than anything else.
gnet
looked into this when in a rural area w/o broadband. chose 128k ISDN instead, more reliable and dedicated bandwidth made it seem faster than prime-time broadband in a metro area. chose against directway for the following reasons: high latency slower upload speed vs. download: important if you're a develpper or graphic artist, not so if you mainly just surf the web as one other user mentioned, the usb connection-only is a pain-in-the-ass, hopefully this has changed. hope this helps Kelly
-- Jimtown Kelly
Alternatively, there may be local providers who would give you fixed wireless. (again, over a spread-spectrum based radio link) Around here in the Bay Area there are several. They can set somebody up with a T1 link for quite reasonable damages.
If you are not line of sight, there is the possibility of using a passive repreater in the middle. (two high gain antennas connected together) Think about it!
If you care at all about your personal privacy, DO NOT BUY DIRECTV! There's an unpatched exploit that allows people to compromise your account. They've known about it for over a year but won't even acknowledge it.
http://www.geocities.com/foogert99/
I don't subscribe to a paid service like RealOne--I look at different news sites.