Now that you know my home business quandry today, here’s a review of one satellite broadband provider.
Using the satellite connection required me to change my Internet habits. First, the IP traffic latencies are very high (averaging well over 500 milliseconds—ms), making online gaming impossible. The DirecPC software also caches much of your Internet traffic, meaning that if you use sites that update frequently, you might not see updates. I eventually turned off the software caching. In fact, I quickly stopped using all of the software features except for the Internet access.
Because of the way the software works, you need to use a good FTP client for uploading data—one that can handle satellite latencies without timing out and that works well in passive mode. I tried several products and eventually chose GlobalSCAPE’s CuteFTP Pro, which lets me do Web site maintenance with little trouble.
The bimodal nature of the connection also means you need to think about the size of the files you want to transmit. You can send multimegabyte files (either as FTP uploads or email transfers), but the process takes time. You might want to run uploads in the background. Large uploads don’t seem to affect the speed at which you can browse the Internet from other sessions.
Download speeds range from acceptable to incredible. Even though DIRECWAY product literature claims speeds of “up to 400Kbps downloads,” my average download speed is usually about 800Kbps. I’ve seen bursts of speed up to 1.2Mbps on individual downloads, and I’ve had sustained data transfers at 1Mbps or greater when simultaneously doing multiple downloads from different computers. Download speed is measured at the satellite adapter on the host computer.
The flip side is that I’ve lost satellite connectivity completely at times—although not often, and when you lose connectivity you can switch the software to a “terrestrial only” mode in which all traffic is sent over the 56Kbps modem connection. Connectivity failures usually happen because of bad weather conditions. In my experience, weather-related interruptions usually lasted only a few minutes; the longest outage was just under an hour during a major blizzard.
I’ve also had persistent email problems. (I use Hughes as my ISP; you can use any ISP.) Hughes claims to have fixed these problems with an email upgrade that the company completed last week.
Hughes recently released a Windows XP-compatible version of its DirecPC 3.0 software, and I switched my host computer to XP. The software still seems a bit buggy; using the non-XP version of the software on XP works more reliably. Hughes states that it will be fixing that problem, too.
Technical support has been suspect at times. Hughes uses a three-tiered support model. Level 1 provides support from people who can ask you basic questions about how your equipment is set up but don’t have any real technical knowledge. If they get stumped, they can pass you on to level 2. The level 2 support people can answer more detailed questions and know the product fairly well. I’ve waited on hold for up to 90 minutes for these folks, but the call is toll free and they’ve been able to solve some complex problems. Level 3 is engineering support, and these technicians are available only as a call back. I’ve dealt with them twice and had a 50 percent success rate. The first time, they called back promptly and found a solution to my problem. I’ve been waiting for the second situation to be resolved for a week, and I’m still waiting for a call that was supposed to come within 48 hours.
Would I use DIRECWAY if I had another reliable, cost-effective broadband Internet access solution? Probably not. But given the situation I’m in, and one that isn’t uncommon, DIRECWAY beats dial-up access.
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