Got the DirecWay system installed this evening.
I've got a machine here that's running Win2k Advanced Server and IIS and SQL Server so I can do development and, though the installer didn't think it'd run on Server, I was surfing the internet via satellite just minutes after we did the final hookup. And seconds later, I was surfing via my personal machine through ICS.
The performance is real hit and miss.
A few times, it refused to get a connection at all.
Then most of this evening it was working fine, but was really slow. About 8 kilobits per second. Or about twice as fast as my dialup.
Did a bunch of tweaks, rebooted, and I don't know yet if it was the time of night, the tweaks, or the satellite's mood, but I started getting gradually faster and faster downloads, and for the past hour, I've been merrily pulling down files at a rate of about 1.6 MEGAbits per second. Yes. MEGAbits. Grabbing 10MB files in seconds. Amazing stuff. Even John's cablemodem doesn't go quite this fast.
Until about 10 minutes ago. Suddenly my speed dropped to about 11 kilobits again. Where it was grabbing data in 300K chunks very rapidly, now it's grabbing it in 30K chunks with a lot of time between chunks. Just tried again, and it's at 35k instead of 11.
We're talking MAJOR speed variations here. From twice the speed of my modem to 200 times the speed, then back again.
I figured the sudden rapid increase in speed might have something to do with the fact that most of the denizens of Boogerville and similar communities (for whom DirecWay is the only broadband option) quit using it around the time I started seeing major speed, so I'm not having to share a bird with anyone.
The current slowdown is puzzling, though. I remember them mentioning "Fair Use Policy" and "160 meg per day limit" when I ordered the system, but their tech told me there's no way I can determine how much traffic I've moved (I can, indeed, via a 3rd-party util).
I don't doubt I've pulled a good 160 meg in the 7 hours it's been running. I know I've pulled 90 meg in the hour since I installed the monitoring program. I've been cruising all over ZDNet looking for big ol' files. <g>
So maybe they've throttled me down because of the traffic.
Or maybe the service is really that unreliable and spotty.
So whether or not I'm happy with DirecWay really depends on when you ask me. An hour ago I couldn't believe the throughput I was getting. Right now, I'm a bit disappointed.
What's real fun to get used to, though, is the incredible latency. Since it takes a full half-second of flight time just for a request to go 22,300 miles to the bird, 22,300 back to the ground, and for the results to make the same trip in reverse. Fast as the speed of light is, anything going that fast doesn't exactly travel 89,200 miles "immediately" like it seems to with terrestrial distances.
What I'm especially curious about is how it'll deal with QCharts during market hours. |
