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 | Anon |  Huh?
For crying out loud, if they would have quoted me that price I would have laughed in their faces. | |
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SixOfNine
Brake In A Ladylike Manner.
Premium
join:2001-08-30
Sterling, VA
 ·Verizon FIOS
|  Re: Huh?
Seriously, that's the going rate for satellite, and it's the only broadband game in my neck of the woods, even though I live in a fairly new development full of high-tech workers in eastern Loudoun County, Virginia. If you were here you would have to laugh all the way to your 26.4 dial-up connection or your dial-return cable modem service.
Due to the rapid expansion in this area Verizon's local central office (CO) was forced to deploy fiber optic cable to more easily handle the volume and distribution of phone lines. The good news is that in the long run fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) Internet access will be easier to deploy for our neighborhoods. The bad news is, most DSL technology requires a continuous copper loop from home to the CO.
That's the amazing paradox of our area: we can't get broadband because we have a lot of fiber. Adelphia keeps making noises about deploying its two-way cable modem service here, and Verizon is actually laying copper in some fiber-laden neighborhoods, so perhaps the short-term picture will improve, too. In the meantime I'm happy to have any broadband connection, and $70/month is a good price in this area.
Brian
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Earthlink SRS 1410 Win2K SP2 IE 5.5 SP2 | |
| | | caseless
join:2001-12-24
Beaverton, OR | Re: Huh? I've heard that in some instances Covad can provision DSL over fiber. As to how they do it, I am less than informed, but I do know that it is possible. Just a thought... | |
| 
SterlingJ85
Obama 2008
join:2000-11-19
Millville, NJ | :) Very nice review Brian! | |
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SixOfNine
Brake In A Ladylike Manner.
Premium
join:2001-08-30
Sterling, VA | Re: :)said by BuggyBoyCA:
Very nice review Brian!
Thanks - hope it was of some use to you.
Brian
--
Earthlink SRS 1410 Win2K SP2 IE 5.5 SP2 | |
| liontamer
join:2001-11-28
Glen Ellyn, IL
| How do you get a 71???
I wish I would have read your review before buying. Paid about same costs for dish, install etc.
First time I fired it up, Direcpc ran great. Download speed was awesome (tested it - a 5MB file in about 29 secs).
Question - I have a signal strength of just 31. I was told by tech support that was appropriate. Anyway I can get a stronger signal, or do I have to have someone "official" come out here and do it?
Liontamer | |
| pbytor
join:2001-12-14
Cleveland, MO
| Great review! I was surprised at how well your own experiences mirror mine. I just got the Earthlink flavor of DirecWay a few days ago and though I was very unimpressed in my first few hours of using it (100-150Kbs) which, of course, was during prime-time, I couldn't believe what started happening as it got later into the night. I visited ZDNet and started downloading everything in sight and each download was getting faster and faster until I pulled one large file at 1.8Mbs at about 1 in the morning. Or better than 4 times the advertised speed. Amazing!
You really said it perfectly when you commented about the overall performance being satisfactory with extremes at both ends. Kinda like standing close to a fire in extremely cold weather; your front is way too hot and you're freezing your backside off, so on average you're quite comfy.
I'm only getting about 30kbs up, no matter what time I try it. That's a bit of a problem as I was really counting on getting something close to 128k.
The other problem is very frequent outages. I use mine a lot during the day, and in the 2 days I've had it, I've had it go completely silent no fewer than 5 times per day. I was rebooting until I figured out today I could just disable/re-enable it. It's also not quick enough realizing it's died and falling back to dialup. I saw it automagically do it one time (I still have to enable ICS manually), but every other time I've had to do it manually.
Tech support at Earthlink tells me basically that my problem is that I'm using ICS, which they characterize as "a bad thing" (funny, since they sell a "home networking" package which is completely unnecessary with modern operation systems, and since ICS never missed a beat in over 2 years of dialup use) and that my USB driver is likely at fault and not compatible with Windoze2K AS. Which is also funny since it's digitally signed and provided by Softie.
Didn't occur to me until I read your message that the real problem is likely that Hughes is having outages and not telling anyone.
As long as the outages don't last too long, I can live with it. I can live with it much more easily, though, if it'll get better and quicker about switching to dialup as needed. And if I could figure out a way to automate the process of switching the ICS enable/disable on devices as needed.
There was a problem with the initial installer because it was a one-man outfit with the one man only fielding phone calls in the early evening, and 2 weeks elapsed while I played a futile game of phone tag. Earthlink assigned me a new installer, who came out a couple of days after the switch, and the installation went off without a hitch. He put on the add-on to let me get DirecTV via this dish instead of the old one (dual LNB, at that) and handed me the modems while he finished running the cable. This machine (my W2KAS box) was literally surfing the net less than 5 minutes after he had the cable run indoors, and the other machines (XP boxes) were surfing via ICS only seconds later. They automatically figured out which machine was now providing the path to the internet (previously, it'd been my personal XP box via dialup), and got with the program with absolutely zero effort on my part. Finally, with XP, I've got an OS from Microsoft that I really like a lot!
So, I'm overall at least "satisfied" with the DirecWay setup. I'm not too happy with Earthlink on a number of counts (long hold times, online tech support people who go silent once they've given you the "make sure the USB plug hasn't been pulled out" type of answers, email tech support telling you "Call our tech support line", etc) but consider them at least "acceptable" for now.
As someone else pointed out, yes, it's a really expensive way to go. But compared to what? For a lot of us, there simply are no other broadband alternatives. $70 per month only seems too steep when you know city-dwellers get it cheaper (and most can't match the off-peak throughput). For a lot of people, it's a perfectly acceptable price to pay for always-on (usually-on) broadband access.
Another "beef" of mine is the lack of a static IP address, but since I want it for the same reason I wanted 128k upstream (to run a few minor websites and test larger ones before moving them to good ISP's), it's really kind of a moot point right now. 30k up PLUS awful latency? Nah. Too painful.
Speaking of the latency, I've found that I usually don't mind it at all. The worst part is retrieving email, and I get hundreds of messages per day. Every "RETR message"-"Here's the message"-"DELE message"-"The message is deleted" transaction having to deal with that huge round trip makes for extremely slow email fetching.
And I did find today that it was impossible for me to use my online brokerage (Quick&Reilly), likely because of their secure connection and Java-intensive setup having a problem with the latency. I'll have to try it out on other brokerages.
Fortunately, I was able to glom onto my friend's cablemodem-connected machine via Terminal Services to do my trading, but even that, with the latency, is pretty painful.
So, at the end of this horrifically long message, what I can say that matters most is that the DirecWay solution is overall pretty cool. If you can handle the latency, frequent outages, very slow uplink, and comparatively slow peak-time downlink. For me, the amazing off-peak speed, always-on, and faster-than-dialup peak-time speed offsets the big negatives enough to make the whole package "acceptable" for people who have no alternatives.
One last thought: Way out here in the sticks, the net-savvy have a running joke about the phone lines. Judging by the quality of our connections, it would seem they're using all the barbed-wire fences out here for phone lines. But at least it's twisted pair. | |
| Erich710
join:2001-07-07
Raleigh, NC | Your Review That was an excellent review. Thanks | |
| | 
pSyCo
@ca.u
| Re: Your Review Well, although this was posted in 2k1 .... i would like to say that this is an awsome review ... and I will be ordering Direcway through earthlink very soon. In my area, I can get nothing higher then 14.4 dialup, so direcway seems like the only alternative ... a nifty one at that =) | |
| charliev
join:2001-07-18
Arvada, CO
| VERY Nice review
I bought the Earthlink on the same type of deal you did, one of the first users in the Leesburg area, and for exactly the same reason. After the first year, I asked to have my account de-commisioned and re-commisioned under Optistreams who charge me a little more but I have not had any problems and they are willing to help me when my 2000 Server flakes. They say they have alternative software for the routing and NATing I'm doing because the M$ version causes problems but I don't do a heavy amount and it's working for me.
One thing I would like users of the Sat system to know is, if your like me and are using the sat -> to Win2K system -> to a home network, the sat's interface on my USB does not seem to handle my 10/100 ethernet card autosensing.
When I have re-installed drivers and forgotten to hard set my ether card to 10Mb matching the USB I receive bluescreen memory dumps. This is VERY annoying until you realize it's just a setting. Then it even MORE annoying when you think how much time you have wasted...because it's JUST a setting.
That has been the only terror I have had and then it's not even their issue but mine. Now I hear Leesburg has DSL on the other side of town but it ain't on mine yet!
One thing I remember is I will likely move to another place that won't have any DSL again and I can take this with me!
Good Luck!
charliev | |
| 
mujahid0
join:2003-08-09
Hayward, CA
| Cost Starband, a competeing Satellite Broadband Company, charges even more than that! But not substantially more. If my memory serves me right, they charged me somehwhere around 500. for the equipment, 250 to install with a 500. penalty for early withdrawal from the contract, which I got them to waive after threatening legal action! I am bloody greatful I dont have to depend on satellite anymore! | |
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