Uncreative Labs

Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2009 11:04 am

We just got rid of our Satellite Internet. The phone company finally provides DSL here, and it's going to save us $75 a month and be faster also! We also get rid of the annoying (un)Fair Access Policy, where if you download too much your speeds are restricted to Commodore 64 speeds.

Wildblue "grounds" fair access policy violators for a month. A whole month of having useless internet that you still have to pay $70* for. NNTP access becomes ineffective, and many websites time out when loading. Plus, you risk being kicked off between 5pm and 8pm if they determine the network is too busy.

The signal tends to be fairly reliable, that includes most of the downtime. If it's extremely cloudy or raining (just about the time you want to check the doppler), the signal goes out. Once in a while it drops out on clear days; apparently it's cloudy where the signal is relayed to.

The satellite technology includes latency. If all you do is load webpages and read e-mail, you might as well stay with dial-up. The pages will take as much time to load (maybe less in some cases), and you won't have to deal with the latency.

Satellite Internet is NOT an alternative to Cable or DSL, it's a last ditch effort for when nothing else is available. Terrestrial wireless might be a practical alternative, if it's available in your area.

We're finally free!

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Congrats! Thought about satellite just before BellSouth introduced DSL to my area, but the (un)fair access policy seemed too incredibly stupid to comprehend. As you mention, binary NNTP would be useless under that policy, and even updates would likely get aborted as well. Welcome aboard...