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 Review by SixOfNine 
UPDATED: 5.3 years ago
member for 7.8 years, 3736 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Sterling,Loudoun,VA
 $70 per month (12 month contract)
 about 45 days
 "Download speeds much faster then advertised in non-primetime hours"
 "Upload speeds less then one-third the advertised 128K"
 "Still a workable interim alternative for those of us without fast DSL or two-way cable."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Mail,DNS,News:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Update Feb 2004: Verizon DSL became available in my neighborhood last December. Direcway gave me over two years of decent broadband service, but satellite remains a good last resort for broadband. I am no longer a Direcway customer.
Update 27 June 2003: Hughes has done a decent job with their HTTP proxy to make web browsing bearable most of the time. The denizens of the Satellite forum here on BBR have done a fabulous job squeezing every last ounce of performance out of the connection with recommended tweak settings.
If you are considering Direcway, read the FAQs in the Satellite forum first. Next, check out the recent threads because usually there are areas of congestion -- sometimes it's a particular satellite, sometimes it's even particular transponders on a satellite. It takes time to fix these as Hughes rebalances the load. Use the forums to find out which satellite (and perhaps even transponder) you are likely to be assigned to if you sign up. Satellite assignment depends on your geographic area and transponder assignment is usually a workload balancing issue. There are some good installers in the forum who can tell you where you would most likely wind up. If it happens to be a bird that's having lots of problems at the current time you might want to postpone your order.
Update 25 June 2002: Not much has changed. I classify two-way satellite as a reasonable last resort for broadband-starved users who can't get DSL, wireless broadband, or two-way cable. High points have been the very fast downloads of large files such as software updates as well as the sometimes surprisingly fast browsing when the proxy is working well and and system isn't overloaded.
Whether you're happy or sad at any given point in time depends largely on the several factors, including the satelitte to which you are pointed, the transponder frequency assigned to you, and the overall load and these two items. Hughes frequently moves customers around to try to even out the workload, so horrible performance today can become reasonable performance a month from now (and vice versa).
Much also appears to depend on the competence and professionalism of your installer, something over which you have absolutely no control.
After almost one year, I'm happy that I have two-way satellite service instead of 28.8 dial-up, but I would be much happier with a decent two-cable, wireless broadband, or DSL service.
Original Review:
I was an existing Mindspring customer who had lost his Northpoint-provisioned IDSL connection. Adelphia, the cable provider in Loudoun County, Virginia, still offers download-only service here. Therefore, I was drawn to Earthlink's local ad in July to get a DirecWay satellite connection at a discount - $250 off the price of the dish and $51 off of the installation fee. With a DirecDuo dish also capable of receiving DirecTV programming, this came to $479 for the dish and $274 for installation. Monthly costs are $70 per month with a $300 penalty for breaking the one-year contract. Still pretty expensive, but the only broadband game in town for me at the moment, and I got to keep my long-time Mindspring e-mail address.
You are required to use a certified installer for a DirecPC two-way satellite system. This is enforced by the fact that the installer calls Hughes Network Systems to get your connection up and running, and Hughes will only talk to certified installers.
Advertised speeds are "up to" 400Kbps download and "up to" 128Kbps upload. A two-way satellite connection, aka "satellite return system (SRS)" is an offbeat way to get a broadband connection, but any port in a storm, right? The path is 22,000 miles from your dish to a satellite, than 22,000 miles more from the satellite to Hughes Network Systems' Network Operations Center (NOC) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The NOC in turn makes the land connection to the Internet. We usually have a non-public, dynamic IP address but every once in a while the NOC does something and we suddenly and temporarily have a very public IP address.
You get two relatively large satellite "modems" - a receive and a transmit. One short cable connects them to each other and you then connect the pair to one dedicated USB port on your PC. There's not much air between the receive and transmit boxes and they tend to get a little hot. Heat-related problems have apparently caused failures, so some users have developed homgrown solutions such as Lego pieces to achieve greater separation between the two boxes.
The installation process had its rocky moments. I agreed with the installer that the dish would be pole-mounted rather than mounted on the roof (this is a 10-foot steel pole, four feet of which are underground -- very stable). We agreed on the location of the pole and waited for the underground utilties to get marked.
The first snafu took place when the installer showed up to install the pole without making sure that I would be at home. The agreed-upon location was too close to the gas line, so on his own initiative he decided to move the pole closer to the front of the house. This was a showstopper because it would make the dish visible to more neighbors as well as from the street. The installer returned and cut that pole off (it can't be completely removed) and installed a new at an agreed-upon secondary location in the back yard.
Snafu #2 then took place when the installer ran cabling into my house. My PC is in a home office above the garage. The installer ran the cable up and drilled a hole in the side of my house. Unfortunately, he drilled too low and wound up drilling a hole through the ceiling of the laundry room on the first floor. He patched up and painted this extra hole, and although the color is a good match the paint is a lot flatter and you can tell that a portion of the siding has been painted over. I'm still trying to work out a satisfactory permanent solution to this problem. Earthlink runs and hides and says this is between me and the installer.
Fortunately the installer knew more about aiming the dish. I get a nice strong signal in the 71-75 range (31 is the minimum acceptable). When the proxy is working well, and it has been recently, web browsing can be so snappy that you can forget temporarily about latency.
However, this service is clearly still in the teething stage with improvements in service marred by the occasional relapse. Sometimes the transmission signal is lost on a perfectly clear day. I know the weather is also clear at the NOC because I live in the same area. We do know that somebody in the chain fails to notify users of any scheduled or unscheduled outages, so we are always in the dark about mysterious and temporary losses of service or declines in performance.
Performance has averaged out to OK, but that's an average with wide extremes at either end. Some of us in the DSLReports Satellite forum participate in a daily thread called "Current Status - [today's date]." It's obvious from these posts that:
1. Download speeds can be much faster than the advertised 500Kbps in non-primetime hours. For me early morning speed tests can exceed 1500Kpbs.
2. Download speeds are worse than the advertised 500Kbps in primetime hours (e.g., weekday evenings).
3. Upload speeds are NEVER close to the advertised 128Kbps - you're lucky if you get one-third of that number.
4. We're supposed to run a proxy. The performance of this proxy was very spotty in the early days and sometimes the only way I could connect was to turn it off. Proxy performance has improved lately, and when the proxy is behaving web browsing performance is very good, sometimes even when the download speeds are less than the advertised 500K.
5. Direct customers of Direcpc.com are getting better performance than customers of the "powered by" partners such as Earthlink. Hughes Network Systems continue to make tweaks, usually without telling us, such as transferring users from one transponder to another.
Technical support is an abomination. The best technical support for anybody using a Direcpc connection is the Satellite forum here on DSLReports. We've shared a lot of notes on tips and tweaks such as RWIN size, the inadequacy of the DSLR tweak test for satellite users, assigning higher priorities to certain software tasks, tweaking RWIN size under Windows 2000, etc.
Bottom line: an acceptable alternative if you don't have a good DSL or cable modem alternative and latency is not an issue (as it is for gamers), but expect the occasional unexplained decline in quality of service.
Brian
SixOfNine
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