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I have had no real problems with Starband except that the modem went out a couple of months ago and I had to argue till I was blue in the face with them that it was STILL under warranty because I hadn't had it for a year yet.

You see, when I signed up in March 2001 it was for the "Starband 180" equipment, which worked pretty well and allowed me to use the broadband router that I had from when I used DSL at my previous address.

Then, in September of last year they "forced" people to upgrade to the Starband 360 modem. It was okay on the surface because the upgrade was free (except they did charge you for shipping).

The downside was that the modem's compression software was now on the connected PC instead of as firmware on the modem, and bye-bye to my nice broadband router. It meant I could no longer host email and stuff (for reasons which I won't go into at this time).

But it worked okay, and once I got ICS set up on my Windows 2000 box, it did allow me to share the connection throughout my LAN, just not as spiffily as before (and, since the 360 didn't support Linux, my Linux box has been cut off from the 'Net ever since).

Anyway, so it worked fine from September 2001 till April 2002, when the Starband 360 modem just quit.

I tried everything with the tech support folks, but to no avail. Finally tech support said "we'll have to swap out the modem. Sorry."

So I waited for two weeks, no modem. I called them back and that's when the hassle began: They kept claiming I had to pay $500 for the new modem!!!

It took a couple more weeks, but I finally wore them down with my argument that I had NOT had the Starband 360 for a year--they were trying to claim that my warranty period was from the first installation of the 180!

Anyway, once they sent me a new modem--and didn't charge me for it--things are back on track.

But as soon as DSL or Cable Modem are available at my address--probably later this year--I'm ditching the Starband.

In summary, it is a great solution if you have no other broadband alternatives, but it cannot compete with DSL or Cable.

153 posted on 7/27/02 9:45 AM Pacific by Illbay (to Starwind on a different thread)

Thanks very much for your information.

I took the liberty of transfering your post here where it is more on topic.

Could you comment please on what kind of download/upload response you get and complications from weather?

Could you also comment on something called the Fair Access Policy? (see HAL9000's comment in post #25)

The worst thing is that the satellite companies have some hard limits on how much you can download. If you exceed that limit, you get "FAPed" (Fair Access Policy), which reduces your connection to dial-up speed for several hours. The FAP rules are vague, so you can't really tell when it will take effect or end.

What has been your experience with FAP?