firefly
join:2007-10-09
Grantsburg, IL
 ·SkyWay
| reply to mwarney
Re: Skyway vs. StarConnect
Hi mwarney,
No, your not totally reading that correctly, there's more to it that needs explanation. I have the Gold plan and can do over 500MB in one night easily without affecting my speed or monthly limit. I've had my Skyway since September and use it all the time and I don't think I've ever been throttled. On the Gold plan, what Skyway is telling you is that, you get up to 768Kpbs speed for the first 500MB of usuage without counting the Midnight Madness usage. Then after using between 500 to 1GB of usage your speed is then up to 576Kpbs and so on. In other words you could use 2.5GB of data and then be dropped down to 64Kpbs, which works out to be around 83MB per day of usage "before Midnight Madness usage." Midnight Madness is every night between 12am to 6am your local time and you can download as much as you want without it affecting your speed or monthly limit. That's 6 hours every night! Hughesnet and Wildblue don't give that much free time. You could surf the net for some time each day with that 83MB during the day, and save your major downloads for the nightly Midnight Madness time zone. Sometimes, I get burst rates near 1Mbps during downloads.
Even after surfing the web for several hours a day and then downloading alot of stuff at Midnight Madness night time I've never noticed Skyway throttling my speed. From what I've noticed Skyway uses traffic shaping on your connection which helps manage your speed alot better. I can download a couple of gigabytes of stuff in a couple of nights or so without any problem. Youtube videos play great, etc. And from my experience with them, it would seem that the RUP is more of a loose guideline than a "set-in-stone" policy. I'm very happy with the service, it works great, very nice customer support, easy to install. Click on my Skyway review link under my username for more information. That's my two cents.
--
Ron Paul 2008 For President
www.ronpaul2008.com |
|
mwarney
join:2007-12-16
edit:
December 19th, @05:25PM
| I guess I don't really have a good handle on what my usage would be. I've always had cable for my internet so I've never had to keep track. 500mb just seems like a very small number these days. I mean, just about every web page I open has some sort of streaming media coming at me. I'm guessing I would hit that 2500mb withing the first week or so which means that most of the time I would be running slower than dial up (I'm actually getting between 80 and 90 kbps both up and down on my dial up). I do like the pricing, and the easy installation. I guess I should run some kind of monitoring software to see what my traffic is like now for basic email and web surfing. I can always do the software downloads after midnight.
Do you know if I can connect this system directly to a router for a shared connection on my network? How about the satellite... How high is it above the horizon? How would I know if I can "see" it? I have Dish Network for my TV and that is no problem but I've heard some of these satellites are very low on the horizon.
So if you spread this out evenly over 30 days, (83 mb per day) wouldn't you be running at 64kbps all the time? In any case, it looks to me like you will be getting reduced bandwidth the majority of the time. |
|
u2builder
join:2007-12-20
Alstead, NH
| Firefly, I have a question. I downloaded Leechget which you mentioned, but can't figure out how to schedule the download. I find the schedule icon, but I set it and then it changes back to current time. This may be impossible to explain, but if you have used this and know, please give me a hint.
Mwarney, I think the Skyway Sat is higher than Wild Blue. I didn't want to try Wild Blue because it was marginal and the installer wanted $100 just to tell me if I could actually get it. Skyway and Direct TV seem to have exactly the same coordinates. I think Skyway is on AMC 4. Somewhere on the Skyway site you can punch in your zip and get the azimuth and elevation. Or if you email them they will tell you. Or call them. Real people answer the phone which also helped sell me. I have always gotten a real person without listening to any messages, pushing any numbers, or waiting.
I have my computer connected to a Linksys G router, which connects to the Skyway modem. It works great. My son and I can both be on our separate computers at the same time. This is a huge advantage over dialup. Years ago I bought a router, only to find out they didn't work with dialup. |
|
mwarney
join:2007-12-16 | Thanks... I think I'll gove them a call |
|
