Well it's now time to dispose of the Direcway/Earthlink Satellite system we bought last year.
In September of 2002 we paid about $700 USD to purchase the equipment, and have it installed. The cost was broken down as: $495 for the equipment, and $195 for the installation. Having signed a one year access agreement with Earthlink, we also paid $69.95, plus tax/etc per month. The system provided decent service, only going down for brief periods when it rained, or snowed. The only real gripe about it was the latency involved, and the terrible upload speed which hovered around 38kbps or less than a standard 56k analog modem. Sure, the download was reasonably quick in the 250k-300k range; but the online experience quickly became a nuisance, especially since we had DSL service at our store location.
Taking a quick run to eBay, it appears the current selling price for the complete system is around $300 plus $50 for shipping, so we bought a product that did not depreciate that much: ($495 to $300); but when combined with the "lost" installation fees, we can only hope to recover half of our outlay for the unit.
Comparing this to the DSL we obtained from Alltel shows why the satellite option only should be used by folks who have no likely access to DSL or Cable service. With DSL, we received a small package in the mail containing a tiny Ethernet/USB modem, a few patch cords, software, and a couple inline filters. With almost no experience with this equipment, we had the unit setup and functioning within 30 minutes tops.
When we used the Direcway satellite system, we had to designate a "Gateway" machine as a server, and then attach it to our in-house network. The installation of Microsoft ICS, (Internet Connection Sharing) on this "Gateway" machine made it possible with the aid of DHCP to then have each machine on the network be able to access the Internet via the "Gateway" machine. It worked fine, although it took well over two hours to set it up correctly as we did not want the "Gateway" machine to "see" the other machines for security reasons. The Speedstream 5200 DSL modem came with both an Ethernet and USB connection, either of which was simple to configure. The only thing that took time was getting the modem attached to the network. We kept trying different configurations, different wiring schemes, but could not get the other machines on the network to see the Speedstream. After the third call to tech support, we found out that the reason we had the problem was we were installing the software on each network machine when that was not necessary, and would not work in that manner.
Instead, we removed the Alltel installation software on all the machines, used IE to address the modem, set a few standard parameters, rebooted and voila, each machine on the net was able to see the DSL modem, get a IP address from the DHCP function in the modem, and go online. Piece of cake. It would really have been so much better if the documentation has said, or even implied that the software was not necessary for the installation, instead of showing how to install it. Anyway, our mistake for not thinking about the necessity of the Alltel software for networked installations.
Regardless, the difference between the Direcway Satellite vs the DSL is significant. DSL offers better upload speed, much better latency numbers, it's highly resistant to thunderstorms, and it just works. The only issue of any kind we had is with the default setting of the Speedstream unit which activated a firewall thus causing a problem with Kaaza; but that was easily corrected.
posted by Richard at
Saturday, October 25, 2003
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