Direcway Satelite Internet

[EEE55]

For the past year I have used and become pretty much addicted to my super high speed charter cable internet connection. However, my brilliant family has decided to place an offer on a house in the middle of our west michigan countryside, miles away from cable. The best high speed option I have found is DirectWay, the satelite internet thing. I was wondering if anyone has any experience with it, how fast it is, how easy to use, how reliable etc. Thanks in advance.

[AMCMoe]

I used to have it a few years ago before cable connection was available in my area. I had 1-way access, recieving with the satellite and sending with a 56k modem. :chills: Although it can't really compare to cable speed, it was fast enough to not have to take a break from the computer to download something. I remember the speeds varying a lot as the internet traffic changed. Back when Audio Galaxy and mp3's were just catching on :and there wasn't really any controversy about that: my uncle and I would queue up a bunch of songs and come back to find them all downloaded and ready to play. If you get the 'unlimited hours' :they probably still have that, right?: plan you'll be good. I seem to remember it downloading faster than it was stated at times too. Use a good download accelerater like FreshDownload and you'll get some good speeds from it. During busy times of the day it didn't seem as fast as 1:50am at night like I'm posting this message right now. It's a good broadband internet access if there isn't anything else in the area, as I know it's not too cheap compared to cable that can be faster. I'd recommend it, it was really reliable and never really gave me any problems. Hope you can get a discount on the satellite and equipment though usually they have a plan that costs a little more per month but you don't have to pay the huge price for the satellite and everything. Or maybe check ebay for a sat. Anyway, I'd recommend it. It was great for me while I had it. :thumbs up: Good luck!

Adam

[AMCMoe]

Forgot to mention the speed: I can't remember Exact numbers, but 120kb/s comes into my head for some reason. I may be off, they might have changed it, who knows. It was fast enough though. Being addicted to super fast high speed cable like you, :and me : may be a disappointment for you, but like I said, if theres nothing else in your area, satellite would be the best way to go. It's reliable. Easy to use, yeah, pretty much like cable. The hardest part I remember was trying to position it in view of the satellite and get a good signal. I remember once it found it, it got like 98/100 quality or strength or whatever it was. If you play games online sometimes people say it gets sorta high latency. I never had a problem with that though...

Adam

[EEE55]

Thanks for the info. Actually we called up our cable company; and it turns out that there is cable in the 2000's and 7000's and the house is in the 5000's so it will actually be cheaper to have the cable run to our house and transfer our current plan over then to have the directway installed. I'm sure happy now

[CatchClaw]

We had direcway installed a couple of months ago at the office. We're in a rural area and had 4 or 5 people sharing a dialup connection on a peer-to-peer lan. The new ones are 2-way. It works great; downloads real quick and I haven't heard any more whining about slow outgoing files either.

Once in awhile the system has to be rebooted. We've gotten in the habit of turning the hub off at night and on in the morning. Especially when we add a wireless access point to the hub we don't want it all running 24 hours anyway.

Equipment & setup cost $600 and it's $60 a month. We got the home edition even though we have 4 people using it at a time - it just plugged into our hub. They told us that the difference between the home service and the professional/business service was bandwidth. Most of our internet stuff is surfing & the usual stuff. They told us we could upgrade to the business service with a phone call if it was necessary. So far it hasn't been. All is well.

Carla