Being as I helped engineer the Starband sat service in 2000, and it was 50 percent owned by Echostar, I'd have to say this is one monumentally sloppy reporter.
what about DirecPC?
Re: "one monumentally sloppy reporter."
Sloppy reporting is monumental.
Any time I have detailed insider information about a news story, I am amazed at how bad the reporting is. I try to assume a similar level of reporting in everything I see, where I don't have insider information.
I have Starband. Normally get 85kB/sec or about a megabit/sec on the download, but about 30-50kB/sec on the upload. The ping times are long because of the satellite hops. Would I rather have DSL? Maybe. Better than dialup? No question.
Would I switch to Wildblue? Only if there was a meaningful increase in bandwidth. Starband runs a "winmodem", where the satellite portion of the service must run in conjunction with their proprietary software on a Windows machine. I just dedicated a junker 233mhz motherboard to the task and run WinProxy. WildBlue uses a hardware box that runs everthing. The Starband winmodem is of course vulnerable to any Windows attack and since it has an IP address visible to the outside it invites hackers to try putting zombies on it.
Any satellite service will degrade or be cut off during heavy rain or snow fall. It all depends on droplet size and density. But the link rarely goes down for more than a very few hours. When your phone line goes down, it can go down for much longer.