We live outside Little Rock and there is no other high speed options. I've seen mixed reviews in the past, but have not actually tried the system. Please let me know your experiences. BTW, we have had Direct TV service for several years.

Anybody?

I work for the competition [;)]  I dont know much about their broadband service.  Do you know if the dish they give you is two way?  Or do you still have to use a phone line for the uploads?

They are using a two way system.

Who's the competition? Please tell me about your service.

Some friends of ours who live well outta town recently purchased the bidirectional package. I tried it out a couple of weekends ago and was favorably impressed. I'm used to ADSL here in town (640 down/ 256 up), so that sorta should tell 'ya what I'm used to. I think the dish is rated at 128 up and 512 down (or something along those lines). All figures are in Kbps.

Anyway, it ain't cheap, but it does seem to be effective.  I'm curious how things will turn out this winter when wet snow sticks to the dish. My friend also used the Internet Connection Sharing facility built into Xp (and others, BTW) to connect a second PC to his main PC that is connected to the dish.  BTW, the modem (or whatever they call it for satellite) is connected to the PC via USB. I presume it's USB 1.1 rather than 2.0. Shouldn't matter though, 'cause 1.1 @ 12mpbs shouldn't be a choke-point. But I digress...I'm not sure of the degree of degradation caused by sharing.

StarBand is the only satellite competitor that I'm aware of.

Good luck,
Kevin

Thanks Spudgunner,
Here in Arkansas, snow is rarely a major problem. We may get a couple of inches two or three times per winter. Every now and then we will get one of those 8"-12" blizzards and the town will close down for a week.

When we have had snow on our Direct TV dish it has not affected the performance. Thick ice will mess it up, but, when that comes dish service is the least of our problems. Last year we were out of power from Christmas Day until New Years Day. Many people were out longer.

Frog Legs standing by...

Couple other things I thought of later...

If you plan on using Internet Connection Sharing, you might see if that will also provide peer-to-peer networking services. I don't think it will, but hopefully I'm wrong.

The DirecWay system must be professionally installed.

There's a section in the DirecWay online help that details the use of ICS with DirecWay.

A phone line is needed for setup; but after that it isn't used unless you need to re-setup.

If you use ICS, the CAT5 cable used between the PC's need to have a "crossover" configuration, I seem to recall.

I'm going to get another chance to try it this weekend, if I have anything to add, I'll post some more.
Kevin

I have starband with Dish Network.
I used to advise strongly against it.
The reason was the setup. It only works on windows (not my first choice) so I put 98 on a clean box.
It crashed everytime and their tech support was horrible. They kept telling me how I had other software that was causing the problem. I kept saying that they only software causing a problem was 98.

Finally I just bough a new 2000 box. It doesn't have any problems.

One negative, they block port 80 from coming in.

It's also a little expensive.

I don't have weather so I can't give an opinion on that.

Rusty

What kind of $ are we talking about?  I am seriously considering it.

Direcway Service Cost:
579.98 Equipment Cost
59.99 Monthly service fee

Alternate 99.99 installation fee and 99.99 per month for the first year. The cost reverts to the monthly service fee after the first year.

Link to their site [url]www.directv.direcway.com/main/index.html[/url]

Pretty expensive stuff for internet service, however, this dial up is wearing me out!

I was looking into it as well. cant get High speed here eather but it is damn expensive