A friend of mine just switched from cable modem service to the Dish satellite internet service. Apparently his neighborhood suffered from a lot of cable outages and he says the dish service is great. I asked him what the upload speed was, but he had no idea what I was talking about. He claimed that the service used sat transmission for both up and downloads. I had understood that the sat isp's used a landline for uploads. He swears there is nothing but the sat box connected to his pc. Can this be right? Anyone using this service?
The downloads are super quick, the "uploads" are Very slow, I cannot give you a precise speed, but it is more than 50% slower uploading.
AAA - I have used the satellite for about 18 months and love it. It is a two way service or you can have a one way service. Mine does not use a land line and is super fast or two way. You do need a backup line as there are satellite outages at times. Mostly in the afternoon between 4 and 6. It seems to be when the sun aligns with the satellite. We do not have cable access so only a 26.4 bps line is available so the satellite is a dream. The download is very fast 1000+ bps. A fairly large file that would take more that an hour at 26.4 is only a minute or two. I am not sure of the upload speed but at even half of the download speed it is very fast. They just introduced the DW6000 modem which lets you network several computers to the same satellite, even mix Macs. I will order that soon. In our very rural setting it is the only way.
Directv has a service called direcway: www.direcway.com that is a two-way satellite connection. Don't know much about it though.
I used a DirecPC two way satelite for a couple of years and there are several disadvantages with the system. Latency a big problem with active trading, snowstorms would cause major disruptions, cost was $500 for the dish and $70 a month for the service. I would not recommend the service to anyone who actively trades. http://www.direcpc.com/
There are a couple of threads on this subject. Upload speeds are pretty slow due to "latency". Do a google search on this as there is quite a bit out there on the subject. When I had satellite I used it for incoming data and it did a good job but for my execution I used a phone modem. Hopefully they will correct this problem someday.
I've had Direcway 2-way sat service for a year. Besides the other problems mentioned, I notice quite a few IB "pink screen" log-offs/log-ons. I suspect it is from packet loss. I only swing trade with limit orders so it doesn't bother me that much, but I wouldn't want to try to day trade with the satellite. When it works well you do get blazing fast downloads, I've hit nearly 2M-bit, but when it is acting up it really is a bummer. I've had it not work correctly for days at a time. It will have to do as I can't get cable/DSL here. Read the forum here for a better idea of what to expect: http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/sat
I have traded a lot over direcway for nearly two years and have never had a problem with orders or any trading issues. I use IB and several others and with our phone lines I have had many more problems with the land based lines than the satellite. One reason may be that in the west the satellite outages usually occur late in the day after market hours. Very heavy cloud cover or fog can cause problems but very very rarely in the arid west. I keep a spare computer running and hooked up to the land line as backup but have only used it for backup once in nearly two years and that was a power outage and the spare was a laptop.
So how does it manage to uplink to the sat? Is there a transmitter in the box? I guess it uses a bigger dish like a one meter but still that sat is sitting out there a long way. Or do they uplink to lower level sats? I used to use a sat data service, actually I had both DTN and FutureSource. But those were download only. How good the service was depended hugely on the satellite they used. When I started, they used the same sat and it was great, then that sat blew up and they had to change to different ones. I think that was when I dropped DTN, as I didn't want to have two big dishes on the side of my house. The second sat was ok, but it was out over the atlantic ocean and people on the west coast had trouble with it. So they switched to a third sat, and that one was no good at all for me. The slightest rain storm and I got blanked out. That was about the time internet data services became useable and I kissed the sat's bye bye.
Mine has two modems - TX and RX - connected to USB. Then two cables run to the dish. They use several "birds" and different transponders on them. Your setup, if 2-way, has to be installed by a certified tech because if you aren't aligned correctly you can cause interference to the other transponders and they'll shut you off. Mine was installed more than a year ago and hasn't needed any adjustment.