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

No way

[mr.henry]

WTF.. the editor of Slashdot is on dialup?

Re:No way

[kfg]

One of the advantages of the "Internet Lifestyle" is that it lets you do your work from more and more remote places.

One of the disadvantages of the "Internet Lifestyle" is that it lets you do your work from more and more remote places.

Places where broadband isn't available.

You might be surprised just how many geek gods are on dialup because they are geek gods. If they just lived in Altoona (or Ann Arbor) and delivered pizzas they could get cable service, but they can live anywhere they want and still work, so they go someplace nice.

Personally I like mountains and oceans, but dragging a few thousand miles of coax behind you is a bitch. The bounce to the bird is irrelevant for downloads and uploads (you only experience the lag once), but a bitch for real time interaction.

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

KFG

Re:No way

[caferace]

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

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.

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.

Re:No way

[Uma Thurman]

Apparently that takes less bandwidth than a search for DirecWay on Google.

Re:No way

[slaker]

Do *try* to recall that broadband isn't available everywhere. No, the right answer is not "move someplace else". There are huge numbers of people in suburban and rural parts of the USA where the choices are $100-a-month DirecWay (if you can get it. I couldn't due to "lay of the land" issues) or crappy dialup.

Re:No way

[kfg]

By the same token if you have the $$$ you can get cable anywhere you can get a T1.

Well, perhaps you might be surprised that a good many geek gods don't have $$$ because they've been doing geeky things instead of amassing $$$.

I'm not a geek god. Maybe a Roshi. A grey ponytail. Larry can have fun playing with his Ferrari and Marchetti, but I'd slit my skinny geeky wrists before I'd do what he did to get them. I have just as much fun with my Schwinn and homemade scrounged bits and plastic sheeting hang glider.

Or maybe a boat.

Do you have a globe handy? You are a geek aren't you? Ah, well, they don't make geeks like they used to I guess. In my day. . . , well, nevermind.

You've at least seen a globe. So picture that globe in your mind, rotate it up a bit. A bit more, Now to the left, more, more. . . .Stop!

You are now looking at a globe that for all practical purposes is painted blue.

Who is the local telco and will they run a T1 line there? Will they run another 100 miles away tomorrow?

You are looking at the ground. Lift your head and broaden your horizon. It's a big world and it ain't all wired, or even wirable.

Once upon a time, out in that patch of pure blue on the globe, a women alone in a small sailboat got into trouble. The only other person with any hope of coming to her aid was a man in another small sailboat. He was asleep at the time.

How was he notified of the situation?

Email.

The big world gets smaller all the time. It is possible in some way to get connected from anywhere (although if you have to carry that way on your back over mountains it might be better to just forget about it).

But that way will often have to eschew wires.

KFG

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.

That explains

[RLiegh]

why he doesn't read his own site ;-)

-anonymous 56k user

Re:That explains

[Zardus]

You know, I actually used to sell Coke illegally at my school....

What I mean is this: Back in Junior year of high school, my school signed an exclusive contract with Pepsi and outlawed sale of Coka Cola on campus. Almost instantly, me and a few friends seized the opportunity to make some money and started selling Coke to fellow students at a lower price than the school itself sold its Pepsi.

It went well for a few weeks, then rival gangs rose up and soon the school was torn in a Mafia-style Coka Cola peddling war. After a while, our "family" and the other guys' "family" were the only two left, and they decided to turn the heat up and set up shop in plain sight. It started a frenzy, got them shut down by the authorities within a day, and left us as the only ones to reap in the profits.

The result of all that (other than a bit of spare change) has been being able to say "You know, I used to see Coke illegally at my school..." to people and see their reaction.

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.

What about the price? What about T1?

[wowbagger]

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!

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

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:I find it odd...

[Alric]

I think you would be surprised how many developers have 56k at home. I have looked into DirecWay also; as I happen to live just between two cities. DSL might come in a year or two, but I doubt cable will be available for the next five years.

The truth is that I don't need more than 56k. I work long hours, and our netadmin is cool at my employer. He doesn't mind if I d/l legal music or non-business ISO's. I can get pretty much whatever I want; his only rule is that we don't use any P2P programs and blocks the standard ports. And you know what, when I get home late at night or have the weekend off, I don't really want to sit in front of my computer very much. I'd rather talk to my fiance or go outside or do ANYTHING different from what I do 60 hrs/week.

I understand the great beauty of an always-on connection, and if broadband were cheaply available, I'd take it. My point is just that many of us here love computers and programming, but we get so much of it during the work week that we really don't care much about having broadband at home.

Having a good dev laptop also helps assuage the need for broadband.

I'm an installer

[AMystery]

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.

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.

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