anybody have experience with this outfit?

[Matthew Carpenter]

dep wrote:

>http://www.direcway.com
>
>i'm contemplating a move to a place where there's no cable, no dsl. this 
>appears to be the lone alternative. almost sounds too good to be true. 
>anybody know about these guys?
>  
>
I'm offline here, so I can't check it out.  Is this the DirecTV 
Satellite internet?
 From my understanding, for non-chatty traffic (HTTP, FTP,etc..) its 
quite good.  The downside unfortunately is that chatty traffic (NetBIOS, 
VPN, etc...) doesn't work very well
Evidently the space-travel thing introduces quite a bit of latency, or 
time between sending and receiving.  TCP protocols which go mainly one 
direction are good.  One reason is that the Satellite companies spoof 
the TCP ACKnowledgement packets to mask the fact that link is so far 
behind.  Consider it as an extra-long garden-hose.  The speed of water 
through it is just as fast as a short hose, however the dead-space 
between turning on the flow and it coming out is considerable.

Why, Matt, since you don't have Satellite, are you so opinionated?
I have been responsible for satellite communication in our company for 
the past few years.  Our normal VPN solution has not been acceptable for 
satellite use.  The latency actually breaks IPSEC.  Instead we had to 
purchase a special SSL VPN solution made specifically for satellite.  
And that doesn't allow real network connectivity, like UDP-based NTP, 
SNMP, NetBIOS (Windows Filesharing), DNS, and other goodies.

I'm still using ISDN at my house because we don't have cable/dsl 
available.  My company would probably cover Satellite for me.  I'm not 
saying I'd be significantly less happy with satellite.  At least I'd 
have fast download speeds.  But since there are negatives both ways, I'd 
rather have full-network capabilities.  At least I know what slow-speeds 
are (ok, sorry to those of you who are still doing dialup).