Finally, I have real broadband. We moved last weekend to a town that has actual real cable high speed internet. Unfortunately, it is the apparently increasingly dastardly Comcast, but it is so way much better than satellite by Hughesnet, that I can’t really find it in myself to complain. Traffic is flying at four plus times the speed, I can actually do remote shell sessions that aren’t painful. I can Skype again (once I figure out how to use my USB headset on Linux.) I have to admit to being a very happy camper.
I promised updates on Satellite internet, and here are my impressions so far. In general it works well. We’ve been getting download speeds from 1.5 Mbps (the advertised) to 300-400 Kbps during peak moments. The latency isn’t too much of an issue for email or the web. It makes shell sessions basically impossible for all but the simplest stuff. FTP seems to work fine, as do streaming video and audio. I haven’t bought anything from the ITunes store, yet, or tried skype for a voice call yet either.
The one caviat to all of this is what is called “FAP” or “Fair Access Policy.” In this regard, satellite broadband is fundamentally broken for any of the data heavy applications that many people want out of broadband. Basically, FAP is a threshold, and once you reach the threshold, your bandwidth is throttled down to what they say is dial-up speeds, but in fact, is much worse. If you recall my last post on this – what I had experienced was FAP. On my plan (the highest plan), if I try to download more than 400 MB of anything “at one stretch” (this is the term I was given by a tech support person) I’ll get throttled. On the “home” plans, the threshold is a measly 175 MB.
Here’s my (minorly edited) transcript of my chat with tech support:
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:13:34 PM): Michelle, I have been through your usage data.
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:14:38 PM): I have learnt that, you are subject to FAP, because you have downloaded 71MB,122MB and 211MB of data at a stretch.
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:15:30 PM): The sum results to 404MB, which is greater that 400MB.
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:15:56 PM): that’s over 3 hours …
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:16:35 PM): is there a way that you can exclude necessary software updates?
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:17:02 PM): I thought it was 400 over 1-2 hours
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:17:14 PM): I am sorry. There is no way that we have that option for excluding the software updates.
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:17:39 PM): I am sorry. You should be able to browse after 8-12 hours.
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:17:44 PM): So over how much time do I have to space the dowlnloads then?
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:18:07 PM): 404 over 3 hours is too much. What about 404 over 4 or 5 hours
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:18:20 PM): Your download should not exceed above 400MB at a stretch.
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:18:42 PM): at any one stretch? How long is a stretch?
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:19:22 PM): If you try to download any data which is above 400MB at one go, you will be subject to FAP.
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:19:55 PM): so if I wait, say, 20 minutes between downloads I should be fine?
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:20:07 PM): but then doesn’t regular web browsing add into that?
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:20:50 PM): like if I download a 50 M file, then browse, then another 50 M file, an hour later, I might still be in trouble?
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:20:49 PM): I am sorry. If you try to download any data which is above 400MB at one go, you will be subject to FAP.
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:21:35 PM): If you stop downloading data before it hits the Download Threshold, you will not be subject to FAP, irrespective of the time taken to download.
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:21:46 PM): but if I am using the net constantly, that’s one go, isn’t it?
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:22:22 PM): no matter whether I’m downloading files or doing email or browsing the web?
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:23:28 PM): After your account has been restricted by FAP, you need to wait 8-12 hours for the FAP to be lifted.
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:23:43 PM): Logging off of the HughesNet satellite network does not remove the FAP from your account, it should cause it to be lifted sooner.
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:23:49 PM): I do totally understand why this policy exists, but the truth is, there has to be some way to distinguish between people who are downloading music and games and such, and people who are downloading necessary software updatees, which, unfortunatley, get bgger and bigger every year.
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:24:57 PM): I understand your concern over this issue. I will try my best to forward this concern to the concerned.
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:25:30 PM): You should be able to download the 211MB update once you have been uplifted from FAP.
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:26:22 PM): yeah, but then once I download the update, I have to pretty much stop everything for a while. Sigh. OK, thank you very much for your time.
Notice, 400 MB is smaller than a Linux ISO. It’s smaller than any movie, and is about as big as one TV show video at decent resolution. It’s smaller than the sum of the Apple software updates I had to do. I have to plan my downloads carefully, and downloading an ISO requires a download manager I can pause and resume.
Am I happier with satellite? Sure. Because nobody these days designs websites for dial-up. 20% of websites didn’t load at all. Another 40% were so slow I could go make tea and come back. It just wasn’t going to be viable in the long term. Someone who also lives out here said that with dial-up, the internet feels broken. That’s certainly true. But, satellite isn’t really broadband. I hear it’s improving, but it will never really be the broadband everyone else has.
Technorati Tags: broadband, hughesnet, satellite
Dial up just wasn’t going to cut it. As someone I talked with today said, “with dial up, the internet feels broken.” Someone else said that it would be good for designers to be forced to live with dial up for a while.
Anyway, it just got to be too much. I spent lots of time reading the reviews (many of which were BAD), but we decided to plunk down the dough (lots of it) and go for it. I figured I’d start a chronicle of it. We got Hughesnet. They did have some really bad reviews on dslreports.com, but the other folks, WildBlue, weren’t installing anything in our area.
Day 1 started out good. The install was very smooth, except the guy had to chip off a bunch of ice off of the roof. At first, he thought he’d have to come back in spring when the ground had thawed, to put in a pole. But the roof works fine. He connected the modem, which I happily connected to my Airport Extreme – and we’re off and running.
It didn’t start out bad. The advertised speeds are 1.5 down, and 256K up. As you can see, the download speed is fine, the upload speed is positively zippy compared to what they say it’s supposed to be. Pandora works dandy. YouTube ain’t bad. It even snowed a bit – and everything seems fine. Shell sessions are basically not doable, unless I am amazingly patient – the 4 second latency is definitely a problem in that case.
But it didn’t stay good. About 5:00, the bandwidth hit the floor. It bounced back up a couple of times. Now, it’s at:
That sucks. At least I’ll be able to upload this blog entry.
More on this saga soon.
Technorati Tags: broadband, hughesnet, satellite
I’m facing a reality that many people live with every day (like my parents.) And I thought I could live with it. I thought it would be fine. I thought …
What is it? No broadband.
Where I’ll be living quite soon is in, as some have called it, “the land time forgot” – Shutesbury, Massachusetts. It’s a great rural town, with not a lot of people (population 1900). But the people are spread out far enough that neither the cable company, nor the phone company finds it worth it to install the infrastructure for broadband. And, cell phones don’t work there either, so any cell-based broadband is out, too.
My options seem to be:
- Live with dial-up and wait for the powers that be (Verizon, Comcast, someone else) to finally offer broadband
- get really sucky satellite internet at astronomical prices with long contracts, and very extreme download limits (possibly too low to even bother with)
- become my own ISP by getting a T1 and sharing it by WiFi or some other method (if that will even work, given how far our neighbors are from us.)
So, all I can say is that this seems to be a great opportunity for thinking deeply about what’s important to me. There are things I take so completely for granted, like Skype, downloading big Linux ISOs, bittorrenting video files, etc. that I won’t be able to do anymore, unless I pretty much go with option 3. Options 1 and 2 will limit what I can do fairly dramatically. Is all of that worth it enough for me? I can pretty much do any work I need to do with dial up (in fact, satellite will make things like doing SSH sessions impossible – so that’s another mark against it.) I could rent an office in town. I can go to Rao’s, or the Book Mill a few times a week. I could be patient – waiting for technology to catch up.
As a Buddhist teacher might say: it’s all fodder for practice. In this case, practicing patience, and getting used to going to get tea while websites load.
Technorati Tags: puppy
Since I’m travelling, I haven’t had much time to think in depth about much of anything. However, in my snippets of time reading my blogroll, there are a few technology snippets that I’ve come across that are interesting.
Beth Kanter has been investigating vlogging – that’s video blogging. It’s pretty interesting – and I imagine that once high bandwidth connections are truly ubiquitous, vlogging might get pretty popular. But the barriers to entry are pretty high. I’ve done a little video editing, etc. myself, and the time and energy it takes to do it well is pretty daunting. I think I’d be lucky to get one or two vlog entries a year actually done. More power to Beth, though! And great to start thinking about this new technology and how nonprofits might use it. I also have been watching her coverage of Blogher – something I just learned about, and sounds really interesting. I wish I’d known about it sooner.
There are rumors that Palm is going to move off of the Palm OS platform, to possibly to Windows Mobile. Case in point – the new Treo 670 has been seen running Windows Mobile. Anyway, this is all rumors and innuendo, but the truth is, if Palm moves to Windows Mobile, I hate to say it, but I dump Palm. Sad but true. I’ll hold on to my Treo 650 until it falls apart, then figure out what to do next.
Unintended consequences: The new energy bill has in it a change in the daylight savings time, which hasn’t changed since 1987. So there are a fair number of devices that have programmed in them the old schedule. I imagine this will be worse for devices not connected to the internet in any way. Could have some interesting side effects.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised in my travels how much I’ve been able to use wifi, most places. Most of the chain motels are sporting Wifi, tons of cafes and the like are, and even rest stops seem to have wifi. I think the days of ubiquitous Wifi are coming. The question is, ubuquitous free? Will that grow, or will it move to become ubiquitous, but you pay for it? Not clear yet.
I just found this very cool tool, called MacStumbler. It’s a wifi network sniffer. It will tell you what networks are around, and whether they are open or not, and what’s their strength. It’s useful to troubleshoot home hotspots, and find ones out in the world.
So I’m sitting at my now most favorite free wifi hotspot (Bart’s in Amherst - it’s quiet and easy to find an outlet) and I happen to be looking at MacStumbler at the same time as a bus drives by. The busses around here are called PVTA – for Pioneer Valley Transit Authority.
Anyway, as the bus rolls by, I see "PVTA_0333" come up on the MacStumbler, then leave! Yeah, really, really! It reminds me of the time a friend of mine and I were driving to Rhode Island on the highway. I had her laptop open, and I saw a "Ford_F350" network come, and go.
There is something called a "Stomp Box" – a wifi hotspot connected to a cellular 3G network. I think it’s a great idea for, say, an RV or something. But a car? Hmmm…. So when does this become ubiquitous? Maybe faster than we think.
