Is Starband's Satellite Internet Service Palatable?

George Thomas asks: "Since Centurytel bought out my local teleco, my internet access has been limited to about 14k compared to the 48k I previously enjoyed. I am interested in reader experiences and/or comments about internet access by satelite dish, specifically Dish Networks, because they offer 128k up and 350k down. I live in a rural area and cable is not a viable option. I am currently running Red Hat 7.2 on an old Supermicro LX series dual PII MB. I have USB ports native to the board, but don't have a clue whether they will work with the USB modem supplied with the hardware package. Also I can boot to Windows95 with LiLo, but my copy of Windows doesn't support USB. I can replace the MB if necessary, but would rather not if I can avoid doing that. Any help will be gratefully appreciated." Of course, Dish Network used to be a reseller for Starband. Now, it appears that things have flip-flopped and Starband is now offering 'upgrades' for Dish Network service. So are any of you Slashdot readers current Starband customers? If so, please share your thoughts on the service.

Over Usage?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard of problems with Dish Network setups before. If your a power user and love to suck down MP3's, Divx and porn.. umm I mean demo's. They will eventually throttle your bandwith back to 'balance' the usage. Of course this means it might eventually be faster to keep the 14kbps. Of course they may have changed there policies since then to.

Anyone wanna verify this?

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Go ahead, hit me, no ones looking.

ethernet option

[hajmola]

the 360 model modem has both USB and ethernet interfaces (connection w/crossover cable). the problem isn't with the hardware and line of sight crap - even with a shitty signal i still pull in at damn fast speeds. it runs over a proprietary packet control protocol that combines multiple requests into a single big request sent to the starband gateway. unfortunately, no drivers for this have been released for linux so you're stuck using windows. if you DON'T directly connect the starband modem to a windows machine you'll get really shitty speeds like others have been posting. using their proprietary software, however, speeds stuff up TREMENDOUSLY (6 KB/s without and unreliable - steady 300 KB/s with!)

Re:Viable?

[duffbeer703]

He lives in the sticks, if he has a cable company it is some nearly bankrupt mom-and-pop that can't afford the upgrade to be an ISP.

I would suggest biting the bullet and buying a Windows 2000/XP machine. It may cost money, but your time should be worth more than fiddling to get a decade old OS to work with new equipment.

Re:Not for gaming...

[Shamanin]

Though ping (ICMP level) results may be high, TCP/IP level communication can be optimized by the modem vendor using higher level protocols such as TCP-PEP (TCP with Performance Enhancing Proxies) which minimizes the traffic that has to traverse the modem => satellite => modem path. These optimizations along with IP QoS (Quality of Service field in IP packets) is what to look for when shopping for IP over Satellite vendors.

I'm ok with it

[refactoringdr]

I have starband, and I, too, live in an extremely rural area. I'm satisfied with it. I haven't seen the reliability issues that others complain about and I get anywhere from ~150kbs to >600kbs download times depending on the time of day, etc. Web surfing feels pretty snappy modulo the initial start time (due to satellite latency). I also have never seen any bandwith throttling by the providers, (and I've downloaded a couple .iso's).

Having said all of that, you need to realize the following facts:
- You can't beat physics. The signal has to travel 45,000 miles. Your ping times will never be below 600ms. Therefore, this cannot be used for real-time, reaction-based gaming.
- Heavy rain kills the connection.
- PtP stuff seems to only work marginally (I have had some success with it, but also, I haven't experimented extensively).
- The 360 modem (the only option) does have both USB and ethernet connection, HOWEVER all of its acceleration is done by Windows drivers and the modem must be DIRECTLY CONNECTED to the windows box. If you want to home network, you have to install a second network card and use the windoze box as your gateway. Therefore, linux boxes can be on your network, but you have to have a windoze box to drive the modem.

Hope this help.

Don Roberts
[e-mail]
The Simplest Consultant That Could Possibly Work