You Rarely get the 200-400bps DirecPC Advertises
they will often ration and throttle back your
connection whenever there is too much traffic
on the satellite. 200-400bps rate is a "burst"
rate you enjoy occationally. Most of the time,
my DirecPC works SLOWER than my normal 56K v90
Analog Modem! That is why a Dual Modem solution
is superior. You will always get around 100bps
transfer rate without the usage charges associated
with ISDN, and DirecPC in the daytime hours when they
also charge for usage. DirecPC really sucks due to
it's very intermittant performance. To repeat, had
there been a dual modem solution when I bought the
dish 3 years ago, I would have gone for it. Another
annoyance about DirecPC they don't tell you about is
how the system often blacks out completely for hours
on end every few weeks. When you call tech support
they deny there is any problem, and send you on wild
goose chases to "fix" the problem on your end. Then
hours later, when you actually have done Nothing to
"fix" the problem, the system mysteriously works fine.
It's obvious to me they manipulate the bandwidth to
customers, and have no user forum to voice problems
as a way to deny culpability. These black outs seem
to occur on weekends when you want to use this most!
The ONLY reason I started this thread is because there
seems to be no other place on the whole Internet where
users of this service can voice their problems and opinions.
Now if you have 2 phone lines, and don't need
Satellite TV from Huges, I'd say a dual modem
solution is the way to go. I further suggest
if you have 2 phone lines for dual modem use,
you should get call answering from the phone
company for the primary incoming line. This
way if people call you while you are online,
you will still be able to get phone messages.
I only have one phone line with my DirecPC dish,
so I use phone company answering, and it's been
very useful thus far. The only drawback being
you often don't get your messages in a timely
manner, but that probably varies between cities.
P.S. if you are only getting 28bps connections
using a 56k v90 modem, then you probably have
a configuration problem, or are not using the
correct dial-in number from your ISP for v90
support. Simply changing ISP's may help too.
I've changed ISP's over the past 4 years till I
found Netcom in my area to be consistantly best. |
