DIRECTWAY SAT INTERNET

TedLynn · Dec 20, 2002

I have used DirecPc (now called DirecWay) for a few years. Some days (or for a period of time) it is great. Other times, it slows to a crawl. This is one of those periods. I had to disconnect and use my dial-up to post a reply. DirecPc is also throttling back their customers after a period of time on large downloads. I have been told that AOL does not do this although they also use the Hughes satelites. If you have DSL available, I would go that route first. To sum it up: Sometimes my DirecPc service is great, but other times my dial-up @ 28.8 is better. I would sure like to have DSL available to try. Ted

wasabi · Dec 20, 2002

I have a Direcway dish at our farm for both TV reception and Computer link. Latency is an occasional issue, but once connected, I've had no complaints over download speed. I bought the dish outright instead of opting for a payment plan so that I could toggle service on or off as needed without penalty. All in all, though I would not say the speed is quite as dramatic as advertising claims, it is considerably faster than dial-up and acceptable (also basically the only game available to me way back in the mountains).

Mrwurm · Dec 20, 2002

I switched from dial-up to DirecWay about six months ago. I use it for surfing and online college classes. I use interactive classroom software that works like instant messaging. No problems with latency at all. It's the best decision I ever made. At my job at GM we are connected to the backbone and have incredible speed. Sometimes my DirecWay performs as well as my connection at work. Other times it is just a whole lot faster than dial-up. I understand the latency issue but it has never been apparant to me. (I.E. I've never noticed it)

Cacinok · Dec 20, 2002

The previous owner of our place had the Direcway One Way, which is sattelite down and phone up. According to him, the download speeds varied from 150 - 550kps.

I have been seriously looking into the sattelite. I had a cable modem before we bought acreage and our POTs is constantly going out so dial up is a painfully slow option. I have gotten the run around about upgrading the one-way sattelite to two-way. I had a Direcway technician tell me the upgrade was possible and I had a salesman tell me I had to buy the whole new setup.

An alternative sattelite company is Starband (at starband.com of course). Their pricing is similar to Direcway, they claim their downloads are up to 500kps. I have not heard much about them.

Clint

Cacinok · Dec 21, 2002

I just did some lurking at www.copperhead.cc on their message boards. It looks as if with some proper tweaking download speeds can rise to well over 1000kbps. Upload through the sattelite never seems to get much higher than about 80 kbps.

A big problem or not is something Hughes implemented to stop a lot of the heavy downloaders. It's called FAP, I forget what It stands for but when you download more than a certain amount (I believe about 169 mb) in a 1-4 hour period they ****** your download speed obscenely. A previous poster may have addressed this but it appears that your download speed may drop as low as dial up.

Clint

Hank · Dec 21, 2002

<font color=blue> It's called FAP </font color=blue>

The Fair Access Policy, designed to keep heavy downloaders from monopolizing the available bandwidth.

If you have problems with getting "fapped" (most people don't), you can download a FAP monitor which will permit you to adjust your download speeds to keep under the limit. Sort of like cruise control, I suppose /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

Mrwurm · Dec 21, 2002

Clint, I have only been subject to FAP one time. I bought some software online and downloaded it to my hard drive (about 100mb). The transfer failed and I had to do it again. This put me over the limit for downloads. I typically only download 1 to 10mb per hour so FAP is not an issue for me.

An hour of web surfing only produces about 1mb of download. The Direcway software provides hourly reports if you care to see them.

wallysue · Dec 22, 2002

Re: Hughes satellites

From what I can understand most of the sat internet providers use Hughes satellites. I had AOL's sat service but gave up on it. It worked real good sometimes but most times not. Best down load speed test was around 800K. They applied 20 MB cap for a while. The sat's aren't much good for online games, even cards. Like what was posted above dslreports.com has a great sat forum. If you read it you can understand what kind of problems happen. I went back to dialup, the sat service was not worth it to me. 802.11 wireless is getting closer.

Anonymous Poster · Dec 23, 2002

Re: Hughes satellites

One issue on the satellite internet services is that they will not work with VPN software due to the latency issue.

Hank · Dec 23, 2002

Re: Hughes satellites

<font color=blue> One issue on the satellite internet services is that they will not work with VPN software due to the latency issue </font color=blue>

This is dependent on the particular VPN software. The one our company has adopted does work over DirecWay, and I have heard that some others do as well. Slow? yes.

We are using an Intel NetStructure VPN gateway, with their propriety software client (formerly Shiva).