OT: Direcway Satellite For Business

[Larry Macedo]

We're unable to access DSL at our shop and ISDN is well over $100 a month so I've been battling dial-up for months. We once had satellite @ home years ago, but the connection was poor during inclement weather. Does anyone here utilize this type of service and what could we expect, good or bad? Besides, when you guys/gals drop by the shop it would be nice to have Speedvision Thanks!

 

[AG98RT10]

I have Direcway here and it's ok when the weather isn't foggy or rained in. Bear in mind the upload speed is like a phone modem though.

 

[GCHDEALER]

Hey Larry,
I have DSL but my neighbor has Dircway for his internet and it works great and is very fast. The only time he has a problem is when the weather is very bad (heavy rain and thunderstorms) all other times it seems faster than my DSL.
Hope a little North Flordia input with a slow Viper helps
Chad
Snake Hydes

 

[Cudaman]

Larry here is something for you to think about, use the Sprint phone you have. It is very fast and you will not drop because you are not moving like we are driving down the road on our racing trips. Also Orlando has great cell phone Sprint coverage at your shop. Mine unlimited web service cost me an extra $5.00 a month on top regular phone service. We can try with my setup next time I am at your shop.

Cudaman

 

[joe117]

I have Direcway. The connection speed is fast but there often seems to be a delay between the keyboard stroke and the actual start of whatever you told it to do.

This seems more the case during what I believe are peak usage times. Just after 7am or 8am or noon or 5pm or 6pm seem to be times when everyone is checking their mail.

I believe that the system is bogged down at those times due to heavy demand.

The weather, as others have noted, is a big factor.

The Direcway system is down from time to time. This has happened to me for as much as a day at a time. If you get them on the phone, they will tell you that the problem is on their end.

All in all, the Direcway service is better than dial up. If there were any way for me to get high speed other than Direcway, that other way would be my choice.

 

[Andy]

It depends what you need to do. Direcway has pretty good throughput (1Mb/s + at times), but has a high latency (delay) as Joe117 mentioned.

The problem is that the satellite is relatively far away. Geosynchronous orbit is like 22,000 miles in space. When you access the internet, the packet has to go from your house, to the satellite, back down to Maryland (where Hughes is), over the internet to the web site, back from the web site to Hughes, up to the satellite, and back down to your dish. The two round trips to the satellite are about 100k miles. Lights goes 186k miles/second. The math works out to about 1/2 second just in speed of light delays, so you get about 750 milliseconds for a response time, where typical cable modems/dsl, and even dialup are usually under 250 milliseconds.

Hughes has done some clever things to hide this delay on web surfing, but can't hide it for all things. VPNs don't work well. Upstream speed is comparable to a modem too. But the downstream (to you) throughput is pretty good. Don't even think of playing a real time game on-line with DirecWay. Also, Hughes has someting called a Fair Access Policy (FAP) that automagically slows you down to modem speeds if you download a gig or so in a day.

I have DirecWay and a cable modem, so this is real data. DirecTV rocks over Cable TV. Gotta put in a plug for their DirecTivo while I'm on the subject.