About Satellite Internet

UPDATE (4/13/2007):

Last November we finished paying off our equipment costs, and at the some time I upgraded to the ProPlus package. That means we get 200k/1.5Mbps up/download speeds (max), 400MB threshold (before FAP kicks in, see below) for about $80/month.

I've really learned to loath the FAP, so call "fair use policy". We got hit by it the other day, inadvertantly, when my son was downloading a new game (500MB)-- downloads were running slow from 9pm to 1am, about 20 or 30MB per hour (far from the limit of 400MB over any consecutive 4 hour period) so we just let it run overnight. Then between 3 and 4am, it shot up to 345MB that hour which pushed us over the FAP limit. For the next 24 hours we were throttled down to dial-up speeds. Aaaaargg!

I wrote a loud, detailed letter to Hughes, and (gratefully) received a call back from someone in their executive offices, who told me they "had a conference call this morning to discuss your issues"! Anyway, she says among other things they're launching new satellites this August (2007) that will really boost performance, reduce the latency, and provide a more fair Fair Use Policy. Cool. But, we'll see...

Hi,

Here in the boondocks, I use Direcway satellite (now HughesNet). It costs about $110/mo for "home professional" bandwidth, which is supposed to give 1.0Mbps download and 200Kbps upload. Performance is pretty reliable. Its noticeably slower when several people are on the network, like when the kids are home IM'ing.

For web browsing its fine. Faster than dial up. Slower than cable modem.

Outages are directly related to weather, really only when thick rain clouds roll in, but that's also thunderstorm time too so its probably best not to be on the computer then anyway. Snow is not as much a problem as I had expected, though again whenever there's "thick" moisture in the air, I'll lose connection. I do have a modem setup in case of "emergency".

A new competing service is called WildBlue. I dont think they were around when I signed up for Direcway. I'm told they're a little faster and a little cheaper. A neighbor is getting it, but I haven't seen it first hand. When comparing prices be sure to consider the up front "equipment cost", that really levels the playing field.

The most noticeable issue is the latency between sends and receives, the time it takes for your click to go up through the atmosphere to the satellite (20,000 miles), down to the NOC, to the website, back to the NOC, up, and down again is about 1/2 sec or more. Round trip is close to 100,000 miles!

For telnet/ssh terminal sessions, it's painful. Each keystroke is one roundtrip, before you even hit Enter. But I've learned to live with it (and to work on local servers as much as possible).

Another annoying factor is Direcway's "fair use policy" which (under my plan) limits me to 300MB of downloads within any 4 hour period. If we exceed this limit, download slows down to 56k for several hours. In this day and age of open source application downloads, operating system and browser updates, and multimedia, its pretty easy to inadvertently reach this limit. One workaround, I found a download utility (iGetter for iMac) that lets me pause/resume so I can spread large downloads over several hours (it also splits downloads into multiple streams which helps optimize download performance).

The dish itself is pretty large. And ours is right in the front yard, though partially hidden by a large lilac bush fortunately. I wanted to mount it on the back side of the house, where our TV dish is mounted but the line of sight angle wasn't right. Also, the shorter the distance from the dish to the modem the better. In our case, the modem is in the cellar (and then routed through the house LAN) near the front of the house.

I'm told if you use a higher grade coax cable from the dish (like that used by the cable companies to wire your neighborhood, rather than what you use inside your house, i don't recall the code though), you can move the dish much further away. I plan to do this when we put in the addition to the house, and run the cable underground.

Hope this helps,

Jonathan