Satellite Internet -- Anyone have it?
 

Does anyone here use the satellite internet access? Just curious as we might be moving to a new place that does not have cable/dsl and the only option is Satellite for high speed. Who has it and what are your opinions?

Andy

if thats all you can get.......................

I had it, I wanted to kill myself. The products available in the US are far superior to those available in Canada however. Though everyone I know with varied products in the US still wanted to kill themselves too.

So be wary and test it out before you go with anyone's system.

Basically from what I have been told (through StarBand & DirecWay) that their 2 way service still gives me a shitty upload (40k or so ) but I can get download at about 1mb (but shared, could be about 150kb at night). Since I work mostly during the day, I am thinking this will be ok. What types of support, speeds, companies have you guys had experience with?

Basically I have cable right now where I am at, but this new place is 100x nicer and on the lake and it is extremely affordable and beautiful. Internet access is my only drawback, but just curious as to your experiences :)

Andy

I looked into once before they brought DSL to our area and it works fine, except during storms. If you live in a sunny area you shouldn't have a problem. But here in South Florida where it rains and lighntings all the time forget about it.

I also looked into it before switching from cable to dsl. From what I could find you pay more for less. But of course if it's all you can get it's all you can get. It's still far better than dialup.

I have it at my Cabin in Tahoe. It's Starband and it works great, except for the latency. You see, anything you click has to travel 43,000 miles in order to get a response, and that takes about a second every time you click a page. It doesn't seem like a lot, but it gets frustrating. Once you get the answer, the loading or download speed is very fast.

Lens,
That is who I was thinking about going with...how many problems have you had? This place is pretty secluded, just wondering how StarBand's support is and their overall speed etc?

Thanks,
Andy

upstate (rural) i've used Starband specifically for about 2 years, hate them but forced to use them anyway.

i keep a dial up account at the same location as it's a smidge faster on a few things (less latency) plus i get a lot of rain there which kills the signal. had my dish realligned twice, the house is on a hill with no trees (perfect site line), no reason why it shouldn't be faster than it is.

lots of total outages in general, too. calling customer support is like having wisdom teeth pulled, expect to waste at least 30-45 mins on the phone waiting to report any downtimes.


it's better than nothing, but i feel i get more done with my $15 dial up than my $70 satellite connection most days. i keep it because it does download large files faster, but i can't tell you how many days it has left me stranded (this is where the backup dial up comes in most handy).

I think Dish Network, or maybe it's Directv has a brand new setup thats supposed to be much better now.

I have it. It basically sucks. Down in fog, raining forget it...

Someone getting 40kb uploads is doing really damn good. My avg is 3KB. And about 20 KB downloads. That is for FTP. Try looking at http://www.starbandusers.com they usually have fixes to help with problems/speed. But if you search the board there, you will see a lot of people haven't been happy.

I would say find out if there is a radio tower around and get yourself a pizza box if you can. Probably cheaper and faster.

I jave Directway.
I live out in the hills also and can't get dsl or cable.

Download speeds are good.
Upload speeds kinda suck.
Like was said before..think I get about 40K off my upload speeds.

But, I think its the same way with everyone on that.

But when I wanna upload a bunch of shit to my servers, for my paysites.
I just make a cd and fed ex it to the webhost.
Quicker that way anyhow than trying to beat it up with a 40K upload connection.

:helpme

Not sure what you mean by pizza box, we used to call sun boxes that.. What is it you mean? Some sort of wireless connection?

Andy

Wait until you have to upload alot of small files, like galleries. You'll hate yourself for getting starband. I left that shit hanging on the side of my house in Texas.

If starband is your only choice, see if you can get ISDN as a backup. Its 128k up & down, way better than starband on the upstream.

Yes it is a wireless connection. It is fixed-wireless connections use a series of antennae to exchange data.

If you can see a tower from the property, you need to find out who owns it and if they offer wireless or contact the local ISP companies and ask them. You can choose speeds with it, most offer up to 4M speeds.

Advantages over satellite:
Not effected by weather!
Wireless upload and download speeds are the same in both directions.

Um...where do you get these Pizza boxes from?

Domino's?
:helpme

I have a Direcway 2 way system and download speeds are fast but the highest I've ever seen the upload is 8k. Seriously. Usually I'm down around 2.

I've gotten used to the slight delay when browsing. It's annoying, but when you have no other choice, it's the way to go!

I live in WA state and rain hasn't effected the availability or speed much so I can't complain there. I just try to do large uploads right as I go to bed.

:1orglaugh Having wisdom teeth pulled would be better!

Yes I chose starband because they offer a package for $120 a month that I can get 1mbps down and supposedly no FAP (where you download so much per day and you get screwed). It seems their package was a little better as far as the amount of stuff that you get with it. I am looking into frac T-1's and stuff too, but I think Satellite is going to be the only way to go. I will look into ISDN as im not even sure if they would supply that in this area. We are talking smack dab in the middle of michigan, and not very close to any large city.

I looked around for wireless and thats a no go in that area as well. The messed up part is they have cable internet like 5 minutes away.

andy

Don't trust that you will get what they are saying. They flat out lie. I will be really shocked if you get 1 mbps downloads.

My connection is supposed to have 50 up, 500 down. It doesn't come close at all.

And it is always fun when they shut your connection down for uploading to much. They will shut you down for 30 + minutes.

And when they decide to monitor your connection, things are much slower. :thumbsup

Had it.

Hated it.

Moved.

Got DSL.

I don't know about now, but in a former life when I ran an ISP it was the norm for one-way satellite data to be completely unencrypted. Anyone who can 'see' the sat can receive and analyse any packets they want.

You might want to check this out if you are concerned about privacy, or security.

Another side effect of unencrypted sat communications - someone with a basic dialup modem account could hook up their sat receiver and get a 6-10Mbps connection for about $US20 a month. This is because data headed for their modem IP went via the (broadband) sat, so instead of taking the data through a choked 33.6k modem, they got it through the ethernet port of their sat receiver. At that time the wholesale value of 10Mbps was tens of thousands of dollars.

having my shitty satallite installed wednesday for a cost of 521 dollars...so lame...new house has no cable so that's that

What about DSL?

Any further updates on this I have just bought a new house and alas they wont run a T-1 to me and no dsl or cable so I am looking at fucked up sattalite or trying to get some antennae from down the hill to broadcast a DSL connection up the hill to me.

http://www.skycasters.com/broadband-...ess/index.html

this is what I am looking at

If it was the only thing I could get, I might go for it, but there are too many factors, like FOG - that could make you loose your connection. And I know people say, well, cable companies use satellites, but they have huge satellites...

jDoG

About 0.01 percent our traffic comes from Satellite Internet -- that is over a 1 year period. It is a real small number

if you're used to cable than it sucks balls

Had it when we couldn't get dsl/cable.

What does it say about satellite if I tell you dial up was better?

Run, don't walk, away from any neighbourhood which doesn't have dsl or cable.

I live way out, 8 miles from the main road, in a small out of the way town in upstate NY (population 836) When I moved to my house last year, I couldn't get all my phone lines installed right away, because they had to put new lines out on the road, to handle my needs and it ended up taking 2 months, 4 months from the time the original order was placed.

I already knew there was no cable or DSL available, so I was already used to my dial up. I don't even have cable TV in my area, Time Warner wanted $13,000 to install it :1orglaugh So I have DirecTV...

While I was waiting for my phones to be installed, I got DirecWay, which is a 2 way satellite. The guy came to install it from Albany, which is over an hour away from me, him and his helper mounted it in the ground... when he came to do the software to set it up, their server was down. So I had to wait 12 hours to even activate it.

When I finally activated it.. OH MY GOD... do they LIE! I understand the signal has to travel lightyears to get from one point to another, but surfing was just as slow, if not slower than dial up. I don't know who uploads at 40kb/sec but I can only upload on it, at 2kb MAX. They said download speeds would be about 750kb/sec, the most I ever download at is 80kb/sec. And my signal strength is always about 78. Using the proxy doesn't speed things up very much. It's TOTAL shit. By the way, when I first got the dish, I had 6 PCs networked on it... OMG it was RIDICULOUS!! I vowed to go outside and burn it every 5 seconds. I still have it, on 2 machines, because there's no broadband in my area at all, I have a year contract with them and if I need to download something huge, its "almost" handy.

If you can avoid it, get DSL or cable... but if you are like me and it's not available... DONT MOVE TO THAT HOUSE!! lol just kidding... but I have my phones installed now and I am much happier with them, than the dish.

The dish also goes out when it snows, rains, a cloud comes into the sky, a humming bird hovers over it or a speck of pollen passes it. IT IS PURE SHIT! Then you have to go brush the snow off of it in the winter... fun fun!

http://doyouwant2cyber.com/Miss_Hyde/dish1.jpg

Oh and they also want $300 to come take it down! :1orglaugh

We were faced with the same problem...

Too far out of the city for DSL, too far off the main road for cable. We checked around and got a good deal on a partial T-1. It is supposed to be 768 up and down, but we get over 1mbps down, and about 500k up. It's more expensive than DSL/Cable/Satellite, but it's more than worth it to us. Our cost is $300 a month, and $700 up front for the T-1 router.

Nowadays I see full T-1's advertised for about $4-500 a month... we're thinking of changing.

T1's are definately getting cheap! You can get a good del about 400$ with roadrunner for a T1

I would love to do t-1 but covad says they wont run the line down my street I offered them $5000 bucks to run the fucking line and they blew me off.

Now I am thinking of setting up a 802.11G wireless to some people down teh hill from me that can get DSL it sso lame I can throw a rock on the next house down teh hill and htey can get DSL man am I frustrated

well I've set up a few direc way sat dishes ... if it's all you can get they arn't bad... way better than a phone line... but the company openly admits they are not the best thing out there... They will admit that cable and DSL are better... but they arn't after those customers.. they are after people like yourself that can't get either cable or DSL..

Now I'm not saying it's total shit either.. it dose have some pretty cool features. The best feature IMO is you can have, I think it was 23 connections open at anytime and get full bandwith on each with out causeing a slowdown..

what this means is you can make it allmost as fast as a cable modem or a t1 line... to give you an example with cable or DSL you can download several files at once.. but every time you start another file, it splits your downloading BW..

with direc way you could D/L 23 files at once and all will have the full B/W... so you can set up your browser to download more ... so in return it's tipically just as fast as a cable modem... on a side note the really shitty part is they limit how much you can D/L per day... it's limited to like 1 gig, maybe 2 per day. (I forget exactly how much)

the upload sucks though ... so no gains there... but if it's all you can get, it's really much better than phone line... on top of that they can set you're direc TV up with that dish and you will probally never get rain fade agin.

Not worth it

Well I guess it would be worth the 5K then to doa trench to my house so I can get the t-1 line.
I get 1.5 meg down and about 350 up right now on the dsl

i dont think i could stand to live withought good speed connection. I am addicted to it I must have my broadband.

I live outside Gainesville Florida nad have 2way with direcway. First off it is expensive. Second my laptop on dial up is faster in every aspect!!! we have a perfect line of site to sat5 which is the newest one they have. we share it with less people than the other 2 that they have. it still SUCKS ASS!!!

If you can, get a T1 installed. go with a partial. Also find out if they are testing that new thing with the electrical lines in the area that you are moving to... I hear that it is 3 times as fast aas a T3


Good luck

Tried Earthlink By Direct TV Satelite about 2 years ago
as a last resort


This Service SUCKS BIG TIME
The Worst Experience Ever !

Lucky To Get 1k- 2k Uploads After 30 Second Latency !
Software Is A NIGHTMARE
Ended Up Reading Long Technical Articles On The web And they Want You To Edit Your Registry To Get things Working Ect

You Can only hook up 1 Computer To this Thing

They Gave Me 2 Giant Modems 1 in 1 out that Get So Hot You Can Cook A Egg On Them !


Latency Is The biggest Problem
It Will Time Out Most Web Pages And You Have To Click 2 Or 3 Times .


Do Not EVER Order This Crap

Still Have A Giant $1,400.00 Dish On My Roof

The Direct TV Promo's About 40 k UPLOAD IS TOTAL BULLSHIT

By The Way If You Have A Storm You Have To Re Align This Thing Every Time It Rains Hard Ect With A Professional Visit To Your House For About $150.00
This Happens here About 3 Times a Year

DO NOT GET THIS SERVICE !
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED


Dial Up With 2 Modems Is Much Much Better

Set up wireless With Friend In Line of Site
piggyback off some other person's DSL
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010628.html

Excellent this is also an option I have been looking into :)

Thanks

Lars, how far is the house?

When I was 15-16 I worked in the summer with an electrician, he had the same issue with getting a T1 run to one of the jobs, they just wouldn't do it. See how far they will go -- you may be able to just get it out of a box they set up, and hire a contractor to get the line to your house. Just make sure the electrician has network training, so he has a proper understanding of the equiptment needed for what distances. I imagine it would be cheaper than 5k to do...

I have direcway . It's better than dial up. :)

I have had problems trying to downloading videos from a provider in Europe because of the relay difference..Other than that, it seems to work.. :)

Do whatever you can to avoid satellite. DirecWay made me old.