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?

Comments

DW6000 and Router/Firewall Problems

[Eyah....TIMMY]

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.

SSH over satellite

[sterno]

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.

Re:SSH over satellite

[TomRushworth]

I've used DirecWay for several years now.

Re: weather problems - I've only had a couple of hours worth of outages in the whole time, I wouldn't consider it an issue. If you live in a snow zone though, make sure you can reach the dish easily with something to clean off excess snow. A dusting doesn't hurt, but a foot of snow on the arm pretty much kills the signal :).

Re: SSH and interactive delay - extended interactive work _will_ drive you nuts. The technical term for the experience is "wait and see, squared" :). SSH works just fine for file copies, BK/CVS, tunnels etc., as long as any typing you do is local. I use direct ssh only to set up something less interactive.

My original installation was with a Win2K box and was useless for networking, as any large file that went through "internet connection sharing" got dropped part way though. I switched to a Helius Satellite Router and have been happy with it ever since.

Overall I'm quite pleased with it. I'll never see cable or DSL, and dialup is long distance, so this is the only viable alternative for real network access, but I'd choose it over dialup even if dialup were completely free.

Fair Access Policy

[NinjaPablo]

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.

Re:Weather related problems..

[spronk]

It takes MASSIVE amounts of rain or snow to interrupt a DirecTV singal to the point where it's unwatchable. In all of 2003 I think I've had maybe 3 times where I had and outage and then only for a matter of minutes. Overall it's far more reliable than my old Timer Warner cable was.

Better than dial up, but not much

[johnmat]

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.

Satellite Usage

[Merlinium]

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.

see if wireless is availible

[Indy1]

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.

I have DirectWay

[md27]

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.

Re:Is this a two way system?

[GigsVT]

It doesn't matter, the upstream to the satellite isn't much faster than dial-up.

Only benefit it not paying for another phone line.

I have starband, I use a regular dial-in modem in addition to it. Dial-in modem is the default route on my box, and I set up proxies to a proxy server connected to the satellite for web and ftp downloads.

That way I can ssh out without horrible latency, but still download at the faster satellite download speeds.

To his other questions, rain fade is real. If you have a strong enough signal normally, you won't drop service unless it's really coming down outside. Installation for starband ran about $700 or so.

Directway is slower than Starband, but if you want the OS agnostic modem, you currently have to get the small business package, which is $120 per month. Standard service still uses the 360 windows-only modem, but it's $60 per month.

In the future, there will be robots. I mean in the future, there will be a "telecommuter" account type that will assumedly allow people to get the hardware-based 480 modem without paying so much per month.

Plenty of catches...

[duffbeer703]

Make sure you read the service agreement...

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:

6.1 Prohibited Conduct

(g) to post information on newsgroups which is not in the topic area of the newsgroup;
(j) to damage the name or reputation of DIRECWAY, DIRECTV, Hughes Network Systems, Hughes Electronics Corporation or any of their respective parents, affiliates and subsidiaries, or any third parties;
(k) to transmit confidential or proprietary information, except solely at your own risk;
(l) to violate our or any third party's copyright, trademark, proprietary or other intellectual property rights, including trade secret rights;
(m) to generate excessive amounts (as determined in our sole discretion) of Internet traffic

6.2 DIRECWAY FAIR ACCESS POLICY

To ensure equal Internet access for all subscribers, we maintain a running average fair access policy. Fair access establishes an equitable balance in Internet access across the DIRECWAY Services by service plan for all DIRECWAY customers regardless of their frequency of use or volume of traffic. To ensure this equity, you may experience some temporary throughput limitations. DIRECWAY Internet access is not guaranteed. This policy applies to all service plans including "Unlimited" plans where customers' use of the service is not limited to a specific number of hours per month.

The most important 3 words are ...

[PaulK]

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.

Re:Is this a two way system?

[Afrosheen]

My brother lives out in the boonies and I'll relay what he's told me about his satellite.

1. Latency is horrible. He gets a 1000ms ping to anywhere, so that's a 1 second delay after he clicks anything before the remote server he's hitting even gets his attention.

2. Download caps. I think he's limited to a few gigs a month, maybe one.

3. Bandwidth throttling. This is time dependent as in time of day also. If you download too fast during certain hours of the day (internet prime time if you will), you get throttled waaaay down to a few KB/sec for hours.

4. Complicated software that's windows only. Everytime he calls me for tech support, I cringe. It's always an XP problem and always hard to troubleshoot. I've been wanting to get him on linux for years but with the satellite it's just not an option. He has the 2 usb boxes setup for his connection, maybe this new router would help.

5. Awful browsing. Since the latency is so high, some servers timeout before you can get a page from them. I had him install Opera awhile back (the lightning fast caching helps alot when navigating sites on a high latency connection) and he loves it, uses it exclusively. Without Opera, surfing the web is painful.

6. Unplayable online games. With that kind of ping, you can't play anything online, except maybe Yahoo Java Chess or something where reflexes don't count. Flash games may be playable too, not sure.

It basically sucks for anything but leeching big files, and for that it sucks too thanks to throttling and bandwidth limits. It's hard to believe that in this day and age people in remote locations have to suffer with crap like this. Then again, bandwidth isn't a god-given right...but it should be.

Re:What about the price? What about T1?

[RT Alec]

I am doing exactly that-- I have a cage with a T1 from the cage to my house. I am also supplying access for a local community WISP, so my costs are covered. I ran into some problems because my location is outside the LATA of the co-lo facility. So even though it is only 10 miles away, I would have to pay a very high local loop cost.

Then I got in touch with some folks at BTN, they got me set up with a MPLS connection. It is somewhat similar to a frame relay connection, in that it is not distance sensitive. My advantage is that BTN has a connection at my co-lo, so everything fit nicely into place.

So see if you can get a frame relay or MPLS T1, with a little research there might be a very cost effective solution. YMMV

Re:No way

[warpSpeed]

The geekiest people may well be the people with the worst internet service.

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.

fake geek

[IncohereD]

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.

Re:No way

[Obliterous]

I'm posting this up here because I think that taco REALLY needs to see this.

I had direcWay for just under a year, and after 3 months, I hated it, with a passion.

First, there's a 100MB/hour cap that they wont tell you about untill you hit it.

Second, it's not as reliable as they want you to think it is. in a year I had less than 80% uptime.

Third: their DNS server fails to include many `offensive' sites. if you want to go there, gotta find a 3rd party DNS server.

Fourth: support is worthless. I averaged fourty minutes a call, just so they could tell Me their DNS machine was rebooting. (yes, ONLY one DNS server)

fifth: it requires a USB connection to the modems (or at least, it did when I got mine) and that limited my max throughput to 1.2Mbit. When you think about it, that's not too bad, considering the 100MB/hour cap...

sixth: their modem control software is buggy. P-3 800, Win2k-fresh install, and the direcWay software, it locked up at LEAST once a day. Nothing else on the box, and the box was load/stability tested when it was rebuilt.

seven: they cant find their ass with both hands, a map, two guide dogs, a tour guide, and a case of montezuma's revenge.
We wanted to upgrade to Hi-Def TV because we bought a new bigscreen, and the direcTV people took three weeks to get a technician out here. He took one look at the direcWay dish, and admited that he didn't have a frigin clue to how this was suposed to work.

we called them back, told them about the problem, and they promised us a technician that knew how to set up hi-def with direcway. a week later, the same doofus came back.

after five days on the phone with their supervisors supervisors, we cann'ed them. Much happier on our Hi-Def Dish Network System, and for the broadband, we went with Aire Networks

I know they don't cover you out there, taco, but I hope for your sake that there is something similar. after 3 months with direcWay, /. would probably have to find a new editor.

My experience with DirectWay

[dszd0g]

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