Is DirecWay (HughesNet) any good for High Speed internet?

[jayson]

Is DirecWay, now HughesNet, any good for High Speed internet?
Because we live out too far on an unpaved street, so we can't get
DSL or Cable. (Yeah, we live out half a mile on this unpaved street :wink: ) So we've been using Dial-Up for years, (Yeah and it's the 24kbps :cry: ) But we just ordered the HughesNet Satellite, and i don't know if it's any good, the download speed is 700kbps. So i'm wondering if it's a good deal. I know it's a lot better than Dial-Up though. So it's a great deal for us. Thx!!!!!!!


Jayson

[ADBrown]

It's useful if you go in with your eyes open. I've been a DirecWay "customer" for some years, and

Pros: The speed. It's actually considerably over the 700 Kbits for most people. I usually get between 1 and 1.5 megabits downstream.

Cons:

The FAP. They don't advertise this, but they try not to let you use that fast connection for anything. You can download a maximum of about 160 MB at a time, then your connection has to rest while your "bucket" refills. They recharge your download alotment at around 11 Kbits per second, so to completely refill it takes about 6 hours.

If you go over the 160 MB limit, you're subject to the "Fair Access Policy," or FAP, wherein they basically drop you down to dialup or below speeds for several hours.

Lag. This is a big one. Lag on a DWay system runs anywhere from 800 to 1500 milliseconds, several fold even a bad dialup connection. This means that any kind of time-sensitive usage like games is out, and web browsing is much slower than on a real 1.5 megabit broadband connection. I've had to do some tweaks to bring the speed up to a satisfactory level, simply because otherwise every time that it had to load an ad or something the connection would pause for a second.

Reliability. The uptime of the service is somewhat dubious. I've had many problems in the past where the connection simply stopped working at times, and there's nothing to do for it but to wait for it to come back up.

Upload. While the newer systems are a lot better in this regard, upload speed still sucks, in the 6-10 Kbyte range. Don't envision running any servers, or broadcasting with a Slingbox or anything.

All this said, it is better than dialup. It's just nowhere even close to real broadband. If all you want is better speed for browsing and a very few file downloads, you're good to go.

Depending on where you are, you may want to look at an alternative service called WildBlue. They're supposed to have better reliability, and a monthly FAP of between 6 and 16 GB of traffic depending on the plan.

[jayson]

Wow,

Thanks for all that info. So it would be really bad for me to download a 600 mb file. (oh man! :roll: ) And we would have a couple people on.
So i was wondering with the router, would that slow it down too?
Thanks so much!

Jayson

[jayson]

wait, one more thing:
then your connection has to rest while your "bucket" refills.

Does that mean you can't use the internet?

[ADBrown]

So i was wondering with the router, would that slow it down too?

Not really. I run mine through Internet Connection Sharing on one of my PCs, and I still get the full speed. A standalone hardware router shouldn't be any different.

wait, one more thing:
then your connection has to rest while your "bucket" refills.

Does that mean you can't use the internet?

Depends. If you've gone over the FAP threshold, then your internet connection will be in a pretty sad state for awhile, worse than a dialup modem. You can try to use it, but it may not neccessarily work. If you stay above the FAP level, you can continue using your connection while the "bucket" refills, so long as you don't download enough to put you over the line. There are programs available such as FapGuard that let you track exactly how much breathing room you've got left at any given time.

An interesting anecdote that may give you a better sense of the company and their business practices: when they first started up the service many years ago, they refused to tell anyone about the existence or details of the FAP. They had to be sued before they would even admit that it was there, or the level at which someone's connection would be shut down. And in the last 8 years, they have not increased the FAP level for basic customers even once, despite the increasing cheapness of bandwidth, despite the increasing demand for bandwidth. They HAVE increased prices, though.

[jayson]

So you have DirecWay right (HughesNet)? I'm hoping that the new modem that they just released is making it better! Well i ordered it
and it's getting installed this friday! Hey ADBrown, Thank you soooo much
for taking your time to help me! I really appreciate it! :D

Jayson

[ADBrown]

So you have DirecWay right (HughesNet)?

Yep. Got my system way back when it was still called DirecPC.

I'm hoping that the new modem that they just released is making it better!

The new modems may bring some improvements, but the nature of a satellite link is always going to mean high lag and slow uploads, and the nature of Hughes/Direcway is always going to mean a restrictive FAP. It's much better than dialup, but there's a reason that it's treated as a last resort after cable and DSL.