Do you use TBN from dial-up or Broadband?

[Trev]

Bob,

<font color=blue>Sorry to hear your connection isn't all it was expected to be but I bet it is still better than 22.5 </font color=blue>

No, I can't really say it is, except in a few situations. Downloading a large file is clearly faster, but normal operations like surfing are slow and painful.. all that latency time for every single packet. Don't even dream about gaming. At work, and for work, we have ten T-1 lines. While at work, and for my own use, I pay for my own 56K dialup which normally gives me about 49K. The dialup is far more enjoyable than our home satellite connection, and I try to do most of my Internet stuff at work (I run a helpdesk, so between help calls I have lots of time to play /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif.) It's more reliable, they don't routinely lose my mail, it's generally faster for mundane tasks (again, like browsing), and it's a lot cheaper.

I don't recommend satellite for anybody. Our experience has been horrendous ... and the second something else becomes available in our area we plan to turn our satellite dish into a bird feeder! If you want more data, go to :

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/sat

news://alt.satellite.direcpc

DirecPC users and other satellite victims discuss (but mostly cuss) their connections and the feeble and witless support they get. Oh, and let's add that it requires Windows software to work ... and this software keeps crashing the entire system at least 5 times a day (as if Windows needed any help in crashing.) I hear they now offer a box that will provide a plain TCP/IP signal so other operating systems can be used.. and it's "only" $600 /w3tcompact/icons/shocked.gif ... and will still have all the other problems I noted above (lousy service, lousy latency, routine loss of email, etc.)

The average latency time is about 800ms!!!!!

Suggest you save your money.. /w3tcompact/icons/frown.gif

Sorry, but that's my honest assessment....

Bob

 

[dourobob]

Thanks Bob
Great advice.

 

[sleepyhollow]

<font color=blue>we have a satellite connection, and I "don't know" if it's fair to call that broadband or not. It's slow, the latency is horrendous...</font color=blue>

Trev,

Satellite communication is broadband - it is an analog signal modulated on a carrier, as opposed to baseband which is a digital signal and does not have a carrier.

Latency and broadband are not related. The latency you are experiencing is a function of the distance the signal must travel.

To be fair - most people do not understand the distinction and it is no wonder the way things are marketed and technical terms are morphed into meaningless marketing fluff.

Take "digital cable" for instance. Digital cable is marketed to appear better than "old fashioned analog cable" just because it is digital. This is a load of hogwash!

Digital cable as it is marketed and implemented is actually inferior in signal quality to the old fashioned analog cable. Here is why:

In the traditional cable system, the signal at the TV network is generated in digital form. To be broadcast over the cable network it must be turned into an analog signal, modulated on a carrier. The analog signal arrives at your house and is demodulated.

With digital cable, the signal is generated in digital form at the TV network, translated into an analog signal, modulated on a carrier and when it gets to your house it must be demodulated and then translated into a digital signal.

The process of going from digital to analog and back is imperfect and although a plethora of filters and other techniques are employed, translation is inferioir to a native signal that travels from end to end.

The reason for this is that trying to make a sine wave into a digital signal involves breaking the sine wave into slices. The more slices you break it into the more accuracy you can achieve, but at the expense of requiring extra bandwidth to accomodate the more precise sampling. Transforming an analog signal into a digital one is akin to forcing a square peg into a round hole. You can do it, but you will lose the corners on your peg (think accuracy of the signal here). It's all about compromise and the less transformation you do the more accurate your signal will be, barring line noise, attenuation and other real life factors.

This is not to say that there aren't benefits to doing the translation, but it is unfortunate to see people misled by half truths and misconceptions promulgated by marketing types.

Sorry I got on my soap box, I'll get off now. I hope this cleared up the issue for you a bit.
Sleepyhollow

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Dialup from my farm and my place in town.

 

[Trev]

Hi Sleepyhollow,

Thanks for the technical data!

My wife tells me (she has been wrestling with this issue a lot since she uses the home connection exclusively) that what happens with the DirecPC connection is that they use something called "Fair Access Policy", or FAP for short.

I guess Hughs got sued a while back for not providing what they promised to the customers. They had apparently over-sold the service.. they had many more customers than they could actually handle. The result of the lawsuit was the FAP.. whereby anyone downloading more than X amount of data was *deliberately* reduced to something about the speed 28K connection. They misimplemented this for a while, so people were being FAP'd unfairly (if you consider any of this fair.)

The FAP is still in place.. and people feel this is unfair.. it isn't their fault that the service was over-sold in the first place.

With two-way satellite, my wife has never seen higher than 32K upload speeds.. this isn't part of the FAP.. it's just the speed it seems to work at. It cannot be tweaked any higher.. believe me, she's tried everything!

She also says if you do decide to go satellite, make sure you go DirecWay instead of the "powered by" stuff like Earthlink or AOL because people report the service is even worse.

We understand that the latency problem isn't one that can be gotten around, but nonetheless it makes the whole experience quite unpleasant.

Tech support never has a clue what's going on, and their standard line is to tell you to reinstall the latest version of their software.. even if you just did this before calling them. /w3tcompact/icons/eyes.gif

So, while I appreciate the greater understanding of the technical points you gave me, I still have to maintain that I don't recommend a satellite connection to anyone. As my wife just said "from the customer point of view, don't go there!!" /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

Best,
Bob

p.s. As I tried to upload this message, the DPC software crashed again.. so now we're waiting for the reboot/scandisk and so on before I can try again. This is typical with this setup. /w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif