Slashdot Mirror
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?
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'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.
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
I believe the telcos are still obligated by regulations to provide ISDN no matter where you are.
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 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.
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 ;)
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
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
Flying J truck stops are all supposed to have 802.11b access shorty (many already do). That's probably what the trucker's are using if they aren't using cell modems. You couldn't use DirecWay for mobile use because you have to have the dish "professionally" pointed. I don't think the marine and RV antennas work for the internet access the way they do for Sat. TV.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
DirecWay (Spelling?) requires a second dish.
"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." --Howard Aike
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.
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.
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
That's a fairly profound statement, actually.
Those of us with broadband can become info junkies, endlessly clicking and staring at all the eye candy.
Those people stuck with dialup *can't* do the same (even with Lynx) and may be likely to spend more time doing something useful, like coding on Slash.
Of course, Rob is so busy running around in his Lear jet to LW confs and naked BOF's that the only one that really suffers is Ms. Taco (heh), home with the wash and litter.
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.
Turns out that the downloads aren't beaten on too badly by bad weather though the weather affects internet more than it does TV. The bigger problem is uploads (if you get the two-way version) since they are transmitted with far lower power. From everything I've read, get the version that does uploads over the phone instead of over the satellite, its far less prone to breaking down.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Spray some PAM or other kind of cooking spray on your dish, it helped me with that exact issue greatly.
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
They can charge as much as they want, but they have to use the same formula to determine a rate for everyone in that LATA. A T1 is a tarrifed service which has to pass the local PUC sniff test (not that it is difficult to do...)
I have multiple T1s to my place, and the local data loop guys that installed them remind me every time they are on a service call to my place, "You know that you are over 22000 ft from the CO? We have 2 repeaters on each T1 to get here."
I just smile and tell them that I know. For the most part the lines are rock solid too.
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
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?
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.
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!
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]"
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
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).
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.
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.