anybody use directway?

[Thomas D Arman]

James,

I have a remote employee who did not have cable service nor DSL available. 
 She investigated DirectWay and found that the biggest problem was the 
"Fair Use" Policy (I think that was the name.)
Anyway what that meant was that you have to be a nice person and share the 
satellite bandwidth.  If you downloaded a couple of big images or 
applications, your bandwidth would be cut back (often drastically) for 
some period of time so that you "played fair".
Seems like you could be in the "penalty box" for hours or days at a time 
depending on how bad a girl (or boy) you had been.

She ended up using one of those line-of-sight microwave setups for a few 
months until cable arrived.  (Microwave was $$)

Buyer Beware and YMMV and "things may have changed since then",

Tom

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Thomas (Tom) Arman


xtensionlist-bounces at shed.com wrote on 04/21/2005 01:26:32 PM:

> Hi Folks,
> 
> sorry, off topic. My mother has finally gotten fed up with her modem :) 
> I've been bugging her to pursue something faster and constant for years 
> so I'm excited by the prospect. And I'll be able to setup XTension and 
> monitor her house remotely too which will be great.
> 
> There would appear to be 3 options for broadband to her house in 
> Arizona. There is DSL via quest, but she is so mad at the phone company 
> for being completely unable to keep their regular phones working that I 
> think that it might be better to use avian carriers for packets 
> <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html> than to try to get DSL working. 
> The second option is a small company that offers wireless from several 
> small transmitters in the area. Their neighbors have this and like it, 
> but the company is a mom and pop shop and they are rather busy and 
> won't even be able to come out to survey the area and make sure there 
> is a line of sight for more than a week. Though that is my personal 
> favorite, the other possibility is directway service from direct tv. 
> (there is no cable anywhere near them at all)
> 
> The startup costs for that service though is like $600+ for the 
> equipment and install, and I don't know what the upstream speed is like 
> or how well it actually works. What is the latency like? do they throw 
> away the ack packets and such in the tcp protocol to get better 
> throughput like other similar services? (and does that cause corruption 
> sometimes in the tcp data that would normally be error free?
> 
> Has anybody used this thing? What do you think of it?
> 
> Thanks!
>   James
>