Some of you may remember me squawking about my microwave ISP and their constantly slow service - they can't even reliably give us 1meg even though we're paying for it. Supposedly the tech came out and confirmed that the re-sends were pretty high, but due to foliage (possibly) that there really isn't much to be done. I'm not too sure I believe the foliage explanation, as we've only had it for a little over a year and it is in the middle of the winter here. Also, foliage wont suddenly effect service late in the evening.
Anyway, yesterday I received a mailer from a local installer for Exede, talking about speads of up to 12mb. Sounded good, so I set out to find and read some reviews. What I found was a pretty solid mix ranging from "It's horrible, don't ever use it" to "Best thing since sliced bread"... Lots of common ground can be found with poor installation or installer communication with the parent company. One thing that does concern me is there are some reports of discrepancies in data tracking/usage. There is a bandwidth cap imposed and after you exceed it, they throttle your connection. Well some users were reporting 5-15 gig in one day! How is this possible? WiFi I know, but is there any other outside factors that could cause this? How about usage tracking errors on their end?
I know another cause for poor satellite performance is poor alignment. Can this be adjusted manually by me, if for any reason it is off?
Now I know that satellite has some inherent short comings, like weather fade and high ping times, but interestingly, many reviews remarked that weather fade has been less noticeable than with other satellite providers. From what I've read, it's a new satellite and is superior to the old ones?
Do you folks think that this is going to be a better value? Even if I don't get the 12meg, instead only receiving 3 or 4, it's better than .3 to 1mb. My current plan has no bandwidth cap, but instead has poor speed - effectively limiting bandwidth. Even so, I don't imagine my wife and I are going to exceed a 10gig/mo limit for the basic plan as we usually crawl our respective forums and surf youtube.
Does anyone have any input on this topic? Real world experience with this provider, or satellite in general? Average data usage for a husband/wife? Also, while I know roughly what ping is, could someone better explain it and how it would effect me?
Anyway, yesterday I received a mailer from a local installer for Exede, talking about speads of up to 12mb. Sounded good, so I set out to find and read some reviews. What I found was a pretty solid mix ranging from "It's horrible, don't ever use it" to "Best thing since sliced bread"... Lots of common ground can be found with poor installation or installer communication with the parent company. One thing that does concern me is there are some reports of discrepancies in data tracking/usage. There is a bandwidth cap imposed and after you exceed it, they throttle your connection. Well some users were reporting 5-15 gig in one day! How is this possible? WiFi I know, but is there any other outside factors that could cause this? How about usage tracking errors on their end?
I know another cause for poor satellite performance is poor alignment. Can this be adjusted manually by me, if for any reason it is off?
Now I know that satellite has some inherent short comings, like weather fade and high ping times, but interestingly, many reviews remarked that weather fade has been less noticeable than with other satellite providers. From what I've read, it's a new satellite and is superior to the old ones?
Do you folks think that this is going to be a better value? Even if I don't get the 12meg, instead only receiving 3 or 4, it's better than .3 to 1mb. My current plan has no bandwidth cap, but instead has poor speed - effectively limiting bandwidth. Even so, I don't imagine my wife and I are going to exceed a 10gig/mo limit for the basic plan as we usually crawl our respective forums and surf youtube.
Does anyone have any input on this topic? Real world experience with this provider, or satellite in general? Average data usage for a husband/wife? Also, while I know roughly what ping is, could someone better explain it and how it would effect me?
