Bob Z had satellite, I believe it was DirecPC. He had an awful experience with it. Try a search on SI for Bob Z or SI Bob and "satellite." If you don't find it, just message him, he can maybe point you to the posts.
Here, I found it on IHUB:
Posted by: Bob Zumbrunnen
In reply to: extelecom who wrote msg# 342
Date:2/12/2002 6:36:17 PM
Post #of 9344
OT: DirecPC
Ask away, guy. I know everything there is to know about DirecPC.
I'm also out in the sticks and was pretty excited about DirecPC (via Earthlink) when I first got it, but there are a number of major problems.
1. Latency is enormous. It takes over half a second just for travel time when a request from your machine goes 22,300 miles to the satellite, the satellite sends it the same distance to the "NOC" (can't remember what that stands for -- but it's basically the planetary router for all DirecPC connections), the NOC to send the request to the webserver you're trying to hit, the info to go back to the NOC, the data to go back up to the satellite, then come back to your machine.
2. Uplink speed was always 30-40kbps. Not the 128kbps they advertised. No matter what time of day you try.
3. Because of the latency (and the lack of an IP address), there are a lot of things you just can't do. QCharts seemed to work okay, but I couldn't log on to Quick and Reilly's website to trade, and would expect that problem would be a factor at a lot of super-secure sites. Couldn't run Terminal Services. Streaming video (two-way) just plain won't work. Lotsa stuff.
4. Applications that involve the sending back and forth of a lot of small packets slow WAY down, if they work at all. For example, I typically get around 200 emails per day (mostly spam, of course), and the way Eudora (and most email programs, I'd think) works is to send a request to the mail-server for a message, the mailserver-sends it, Eudora confirms back that it received it, the server acknowledges the confirmation, Eudora asks the server to delete the message, the server confirms that it's done so, then Eudora asks for the next message.
Even with decent download speeds, retrieving email took forever. There could be as much as 3 seconds per message in protocol overhead, before the email even reaches you.
5. Very frequent outages or huge slowdowns. During the day, my speed would often be about the same as dialup or worse. At best, maybe twice as fast.
6. Fair Usage Policy. If you exceed a certain threshhold in amount of data downloaded in a specific time-frame, they'll cut your bandwidth way down. If it continues, they'll shut off your connection.
Someone wrote about this on the DSLReports website: dslreports.com
If, after reading that message, you think the author is one sick puppy, you're right. I am. <g>
There's a plus side, though.
They advertise 400k download speed. Well, if the stars and moon are just right, and you use it in the wee hours, I'm here to tell you I've gotten download speeds in excess of 2000k. Yes. Two Thousand! Faster than T1 or cablemodem.
I spent many an enjoyable evening (early morning) downloading huge files.
But right before I successfully got the service terminated, I went through a whole week of it just plain not working. I'd switched back to dialup and wouldn't even use the dish late at night.
There are other annoying downsides. Like that it connects to your machine via a USB port rather than ethernet, and supposedly won't run on Windows XP (or, supposedly, Windows 2000 Advanced Server) or support Internet Connection Sharing. ICS ran just fine on it, on Win2KAS at that. But every time I called them because of problems, they wanted to tell me it was because I was using Win2KAS and ICS, and leave it at that. One tech support guy even told me my USB drivers (the latest ones from MSFT) were no good.
So, there's lots of good and bad about it. I loved the speed I could get at night and that it was almost always on. And if the connection died, it would sometimes switch to dialup automatically, although it wouldn't switch the ICS setting, so I still had to do that part manually.
But in the long run, because I needed Q&R and Terminal Services, it just wasn't workable for me. If you're not using an online brokerage (or at least one that's real sensitive to lag) or things like Terminal Services, and can tolerate a lot of outages that force you to use dialup, you might just be happy with it. I was tickled pink with it until I tried those two things. |
