By Gregory Bruell, Concord resident. We asked Greg to tell us about his experiences with a satellite Internet connection. He was the only person we could find who had used this type of service here, and while it would have been nice to have gotten a report from a current customer for the most up-to-date info, we simply could not locate one. We are therefore particularly grateful for his response. This is another installment in a occasional feature about Internet techologies available to Concord residents and businesses.
I had a software business I was running out of my basement and needed higher bandwidth than a modem or ISDN could deliver.
What equipment did you require?
A card in a PC running windows 95 (I wanted NT but they didn't have it)
and the dish.
Overall I was not happy with the service as I did eventually shut it down. I had the service in use for a year and found it too unreliable and too difficult to debug and fix. For instance, the satilite Galaxy IV had a malfunction at one point and it was replaced with the Galaxy III. This meant I had to go up on my roof an re-aim the dish at the new satilite. Aiming the dish was very inconvenient as there was no feedback directly on the dish to zero in on the satilite. In addition the system depended on the reliability of the phone line up-link which was not very reliable either. The tech support was not great. For instance at one point I was asked to read off all of the files in a directory which was part of the standard installation. When I asked why I had to do this the answer was basically "to jog my memory."
The best thing about the service was that it was 400kbs of bandwidth.
What made you stop using it?
This is a combination of the reliability issue I described above
and the cost which was ~$150/month ($130 for the satilite and $20
for the local ISP). People in Arlington are paying $40 a month for
24x7 service with twice the bandwidth in the down the direction and
10 times the bandwidth in the up direction from MediaOne cable.
At the time there was only DirectPC.
Did you receive other services from them? Is this the same type of
satellite you would use for TV, etc?
What advice would you give someone who is considering this service?
I only used the DirecPC not the combo DirecPC/TV.
This is not a very good solution in the end. It's very tricky to
got up and running and to maintain. It's fairly expensive and other
technologies such as xDSL and cellular are starting to be used that
provide much better product for the money.
See your message here! More info
Contact us
|
Check it Out Yourself
A variety of links from commercial and educational sources about satellite Internet (thanks, Ron Porter for researching this for us).
-Editor
|
Art: ©1999 Hometown Websmith
