<OT> How many Boxen?

[Michael Hipp]

Overall I'm reasonably happy with it. It works much better than I thought it 
would. It is the *only* affordable broadband out here in the stix.  Costs 
$60US/month and speeds often exceed 1Mbps. Cost was $650US to get it 
installed. (I had 128k ISDN for 4 years before that at $190US/month.)

It does have several drawbacks:

- It must gateway through a Win box via a USB connection. Dumb. But my W2k Pro 
box does an ok job so it isn't really a big problem. Hughes has announced a 
DW4020 gateway/router box that would do the job currently filled by the Win 
host box. I'll buy one if they ever ship and price is reasonable. That would 
put my Linux box on equal footing with Win.

- Linux (several distros) really seems to hate the latency aspect. Kmail and 
Mozilla mail both frequently hang when trying to check mail. Even browsing 
(Konq, Opera, Moz) is frustrating. I need to learn how to turn the Linux IP 
stack to better cope with it.

- Hughes has something called FAP. Fair Access Protocol. Except it should be 
called Punitive Punishment Protocol. What it does is throttle you if you use 
too much bandwidth in a given time. Like when doing a 650M download of an iso 
of the latest version of CalderaSuseTiva, I have to set GetRight to a "speed 
limit" of 10kB/s or Hughes will FAP me. And the link essentially dies when 
FAP kicks in. Even browsing stops working, for all intents.

- Hughes forces you through their proxy server. "To accelerate performance". 
Yeah, right. But the accelerator frequently dies and browsing stops 
altogether.

- A high latency link causes web pages to sometimes seem slow to load (scads 
of little tiny files means lots of round-robin requests). But that's mostly 
not a problem compared to the alternative.

Some good points:
- The sucker is really, really fast on moderate download sizes (say, <50M). It 
will often do 150kB/sec.
- Hughes tech support is pretty good as ISPs go. And the best part is that 
they are not Earthlink.
- The thing works in all but the most inclement weather. It takes a heavy 
downpour to stop it.
- It beats 24,000 bps dial-up "8 ways to Sunday" - which is what I would have 
otherwise.
- They're supposed to soon have a $10/month option for a static IP. That would 
be nice for some things I need to do.

If I could get a landline (cable, DSL), I'd take it in a NY minute. But the 
Sat is a lifesaver otherwise.

Michael

On Tuesday 28 May 2002 09:36 pm, Andrew Mathews wrote:
> Michael Hipp wrote:
> <snip>
>
> Gotta ask, how's the satellite connection? Fast? Slow? Latency? I know
> they don't support anything but MS & USB (or didn't). Did you have to
> gateway everything to a Windows box?