Help with Dish for PC

me | me

[Dubya]

Thanks. I can't afford to exp.

[Gore_ War_ Vet]

I use DirecDuo and LOVE it. DirecTV and DirecPC on one dish, purchased from OrbitSat for $199. Upgradable to 2 way. Go for it I generally get speeds of 800 KB (twice what they advertise) on my dial return system (one way).

Good luck, you won't be sorry!

[eddie willers]

Gilat got out of the consumer business and Dish bought controlling interest and renamed it StarBand

Be sure that you order Dish Network at the same time as it is virtually "Free" equipment to you but pays the installer double.

Starband by itself does not pay the dealer/installer enough to make it worth his while, so if you don't order the Satellite service, he will probably be conveniently 'sold out'.

[spycatcher]

Good resources here:

Is Starband for me?

DirecPC Uncensored

DSL Reports

[DeSoto]

I have been a customer of Starband for nearly a year. I have not been disappointed at all. Their service is very fast, they have had minimal down time, and they are everything that they said that they would be.

Starband is partnered with Dish Network and I have a package deal where I get hundreds of stations of TV (which I don't watch much, but my family does) and I have Satellite connection to the internet, both upload as well as download.

The cost for this is slightly more that I was paying before. We used to pay for two connections to to cable TV (for my house and my mom's mobile home next door), we paid for an additional dedicated telephone line, and for monthly ISP charges as well. After cancelling all of the above, installing the dish, we are paying about $10 to $12 per month more than we did previously.

We have several times more TV channels, including Fox News (which was unavailable from our old cable company). We have internet speeds usually in the range of 500 kbps upto 1 Mbps.

Their tech support has been excellant as I have been having computer problems ever since I bought this junky computer and they have been very helpful in helping me.

I hope this helps and if you have any questions please feel free to ask.

[Bogey78O]

I just remembered. You could look into getting an ISDN line. There's no real range limitation on that. Are you sure you can't get ADSL? You only have to be 18,000ft from a Remote Terminal. They put those in rural places all over nowadays.

[Gore_ War_ Vet]

See my post 22.

[sasquatch]

Help with Dish for PC
Dish=Ann Coulter

[VinnyTex]

Click here

[doglot]

Since the high speed subject has been raised....anybody got speculations as to when the price will come down to earth? No pun really intended.

I don't have as much love for Dish as I did. They have gone right along with the NC legislature to tax satellite TV with no opposition, but when they want the "right" to carry local channels Dish is more than willing to cry, whine and beg for support.

[Bogey78O]

DSL is an intermediate step. It'll probably replace the 56k Bell standard in the next 20-40 years. It's technology is developing rapidly and by my guesstimate of what I've dealt with I expect to see nearly 100% availability in the next 10-13 years.

I'm pretty happy. I have my DSL via BellSouth, who I also work for, and they rank consistantly in the B/B+ from DSL Reports.

[SlickWillard]

I used DirecPC last year, before we got cable modems in this area. It is a BEAR to set up (I was using the SatServ router product), but once you get it going, it's OK. Know before you call that NO ONE in the DirecPC call center knows ANYTHING about the product. I ended up teaching myself everything - and when the most senior engineer in the company finally called me back about six weeks later, I knew more about the product than he did.

There was a thread at SlashDot last December that included some comments about DirecPC tech support:

1) The "Glory" Of Tech Support
2) Re:It is all so very true.
3) Anyone out there ever use DirecPC
4) Re:Anyone out there ever use DirecPC

From the third of these:

I would go so far as to say that DirecPC is a worse service than PacBell DSL because it has no potential for doing what is is purported to do. We were explicitly instructed to lie to customers and tell them that the reason their bandwidth was so low was a "problem with IRQs" or anything else under the sun other than that we were intentionally restricting their bandwidth. We even had a page on which we could enter the customer's account information and it would tell us that they were, in fact, having their bandwidth massively throttled. This was to let us know when to stop troubleshooting and when to start lying. I absolutely kid you not.

I used MindSpring as my terrestrial ISP; their IP tunneling seemed to work fine, when I didn't get a busy signal. A warning about MindSpring, though: at that time they had TERRIBLE DNS servers; their DNS would go down for two or three hours a day. MindSpring has since merged with Earthlink.

[Bogey78O]

DSL is an intermediate step. It'll probably replace the 56k Bell standard in the next 20-40 years. It's technology is developing rapidly and by my guesstimate of what I've dealt with I expect to see nearly 100% availability in the next 10-13 years.

I'm pretty happy. I have my DSL via BellSouth, who I also work for, and they rank consistantly in the B/B+ from DSL Reports.

[Dubya]

Thanks so much. You have helped me a lot. I will be checking all these out.

[2Trievers]

Dub, stop! Think this through. I have an AOL dish ... most we ever got was 52K ... Switched to WinXP recently and no mattter what ANYONE tells you, AOL 7.0 and their dish are NOT compatabile w/ WinXP. I have abandoned it. In it's prime, with the dish, a moth, cloud or one raindrop suspended the service. I am too in a remote area ... so I thought this was the solution ... big mistake. The regular modem connection is more reliable, IMHO.

[Gore_ War_ Vet]

They're going to come down with the proliferation of wireless Cloudburst Broadband

[Gore_ War_ Vet]

DO NOT use a DirecPC system "Powered by" AOL or Earthlink both have serious problems.
Use DirecWay.

[Dallas]

Try the newsgroups...

alt.satellite.direcpc

alt.satellite.starband