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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.
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?
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
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 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
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.
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!
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.
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
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)
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.
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
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
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
They make remote de-icers for the small dishes that work like the ones on a car's rear-window. A series of strips of electrical-resistive material that you can turn on to de-ice the dish for just such an occurence. They also make EMF transparent cloth covers that you stretch over the whole thing to keep the snow from collecting and turning to ice.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
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.
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'
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
...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.
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.
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.