Satellite Broadband, Day 1
March 5th, 2007 | Published in Wifi/Internet/Broadband | 1 Comment
Dial up just wasn’t going to cut it. As someone I talked with today said, “with dial up, the internet feels broken.” Someone else said that it would be good for designers to be forced to live with dial up for a while.
Anyway, it just got to be too much. I spent lots of time reading the reviews (many of which were BAD), but we decided to plunk down the dough (lots of it) and go for it. I figured I’d start a chronicle of it. We got Hughesnet. They did have some really bad reviews on dslreports.com, but the other folks, WildBlue, weren’t installing anything in our area.
Day 1 started out good. The install was very smooth, except the guy had to chip off a bunch of ice off of the roof. At first, he thought he’d have to come back in spring when the ground had thawed, to put in a pole. But the roof works fine. He connected the modem, which I happily connected to my Airport Extreme - and we’re off and running.
It didn’t start out bad. The advertised speeds are 1.5 down, and 256K up. As you can see, the download speed is fine, the upload speed is positively zippy compared to what they say it’s supposed to be. Pandora works dandy. YouTube ain’t bad. It even snowed a bit - and everything seems fine. Shell sessions are basically not doable, unless I am amazingly patient - the 4 second latency is definitely a problem in that case.
But it didn’t stay good. About 5:00, the bandwidth hit the floor. It bounced back up a couple of times. Now, it’s at:
That sucks. At least I’ll be able to upload this blog entry.
More on this saga soon.
March 6th, 2007 at 6:08 am (#)
Looking forward to more tales from satellite broadband.
My verizon speeds vary a good deal and windy days, like today, the service is intermittent.
Verizon sales folk promise the moon, the tech guys explained I’m at the far end of dsl access. What kind of neighborhood do I live in? Non-deseving of dsl apparently.