Satellite Internet (Direcway)?

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noremacyug

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 15, 2004
Messages
1,641
do any of you guys have first hand experience or know someone who uses this service? im out in the boonies and can't get dsl or cable, this is my only option for broadband. im prolly gonna get it but id like some input from some actual users rather than a sales rep. im curious how well it will game, if at all. the dude i talked to said i was gauranteed 400k down and 200k up. in either instance it still beats the pants off my current 3k download. what do ya'll think?
 
what kind of ping do you think id see? i didnt figured id be able to play games such as cssource, but i thought mmorpg might have a chance.
 
Your ping can be as bad or worse than dial-up, but for browsing and downloading files, it's lightyears beyond dial-up of course.
 
i think this service is horrible. I setup a network with this service in a small company because they had no other choice. Signal would get lst everytime and some of that has to do with how well the dish is placed. Overall i pretty much think it sucks.(they finally transferred to cable when it was demanded for availability).
 
well, that sucks. ive signed up for a signal survey for land based microwave wireless internet. im right on the outer area of their 35mile radius.... so ill prolly catch the shaft with that too.
 
I can tell you from experience that you'll have a ping of at LEAST 400-650ms on average. It's the worst thing you can get for games. They shouldn't sell it as "broadband" but "high latency broadband" instead.

Although, you can trick the system (at least you could when I had it). They advertised 400kbps downstream. Well, what most people didn't know was that was per-stream of data. So if you were downloading a file and using a dowload manager like d/l accelerator, it would split that file into multiple streams and you could get up to 400kbps on each part. But then again, they're assholes and cap your bandwidth. They don't give out the specifics, but I can tell you that I couldn't even d/l a linux iso without them cutting my speed in half due to "excessive use" or some crap.

If you can avoid the satellite internet...do it. It can be fast, but at the same time, it's more expensive and if you d/l a lot, you'll get pissed for them jacking with your speeds.
 
See, i deal with that same problem... i live in a small ass town in the middle of thumb of MI...
We wont have Cable or DSL for atleast another year.
We had Dway.. god it sucked.... I have an 4 PC house and at times it was worse than dialup.
Thank god for Wireless, finally an company got High-Speed Wireless up and running, i currently use that, i have an 484 upload and meg of download, i love it :D
But... i am still waiting for Cable ;)
 
ISDN or iDSL is a better option. You will have to pay more for 128k/128k or 144k/144k, but at least it's low latency. I had iDSL for about 1.5 years before standard aDSL araived where I used to be. It's still loads better than dialup, and for things like websurfing(and at the time at least, gaming) it works great.
 
I've had direcway for a few years. I don't online game (never have), but everyone here is right - don't get your hopes up. It's great for surfing the net and occasional downloading...that's it.
Definately better than dial-up though.
 
worse latency than dial-up, so surfing is not much better if any, and games are worse.... downloads are what this thing rox at.... the 3 I used would download sustained at almost 200KB/sec from Microshaft.

QJ
 
noremacyug said:
well, that sucks. ive signed up for a signal survey for land based microwave wireless internet. im right on the outer area of their 35mile radius.... so ill prolly catch the shaft with that too.
Click to expand...

This is the much better option.
 
Scot Finnie has done a lot of homework on this. You can find his results here. SOme of those are pretty old links, But check some of his archived issues on the main web site.
 
gosh reading this im starting to appreciate my 1.5mbit line that can give me a ping of 15 in CS:S
 
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