anybody have experience with this outfit?

[dep]

quoth Jerry McBride:

| Here in New Jersey, the deal without the bullshit is: about $600.00
| up front for the equipment and installation and $60.00 a month. For
| that you get 50k uploads and about 500k downloads via sattelite. The
| downloads are monitored and one you exceed a daily limit of 169Meg,
| you can be throttled back to almost 50k download also via their fair
| usage policy... The equipment, regardless what you are told by
| Hughes, is OS agnostic...

this is useful to know. i presume it is fundamentally the same, on the 
user side of things, as a cable modem -- that one can run a router, 
internet appliance, whatever off of it, and that the setup under linux 
is fundamentally the same as a cable modem?

| For another $20.00 per month you can get the professional package
| which is pretty much the same as home user, but you get a 350Meg
| daily limit...

rare is the day i download 350 megs, and on such a day -- when, for 
instance, i'd be downloading a cd image -- having 350mb as opposed to 
169 wouldn't do enough of the trick to justify an extra $240/year.

| Basically, if you DON'T live in the woods, it's a very expensive, bum
| deal. If you live in the woods and you want internet... it's about
| all the only choice you have and it works quite well.

seems so, in that wildblue is still vapor; i anticipate living in the 
woods and do not look forward to dialup. one thing that does seem to 
speak in favor of the hughes setup is that there is apparently a 
package deal with directv that would bring the whole thing pretty much 
in line with what i'm paying for cable/cable modem now.

thanks very much to you and everyone else for the information and 
advice. in response to other posts: it is *highly* unlikely that the 
neighbors would be interested in going in on a t-1, or for that matter 
interested in getting a computer or, in some cases, indoor plumbing. 
we're talking a very attractive but very poor area -- which is to say 
an area very much like me.<g>

and yes, it is my last choice, too -- i've watched satellite teevee 
during a bad rainstorm and watched it turn into pixellated hell, for a 
start -- but i think it is the only alternative to dialup. it would be 
good if there were some competition in the field, and i guess there 
will be in due course, but for now they seem to be the only game in 
town today. the latency makes sense -- the bird is at 25,000 miles, so 
the speed of light alone guarantees close to a third of a second delay 
(that weirdness we seen on television in interviews with persons 
overseas and by sat phone). the upside -- the lipstick on this pig -- 
is that it is certainly bleeding edge, isn't it? something to look back 
on in a few years in much the way that we now look back on setting the 
interleaf on an mfm drive (or hard file, as ibm called it).
-- 
dep

The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists
have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.
				    -- G.K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy"