Does anyone use Direcway or Net2dish?
How well does it work for you amd how much does it cost?
We had Direcway for several years as we lived out in the mountains with no broadband alternative other than satellite.
The cost wasn’t so much. I think for the TV and broadband it was about $85/month (this was two years ago).
Performance wise it was touch and go. Not as fast as cable (which I have now) but WAY better than dial-up. Call it an average of 400K or so. And it’s tremendously vulnerable to atmospheric conditions. A thunderstorm will drop you offline most every time.
Was there any start up costs for Direcway? I am thinking of getting it at my hunting lodge. I already have a Direct TV Satelite. Direcway is their broadband offering isn’t it?
It looks kind of expensive to me. Especially if I’d lose connectivity like I lose satellite TV in rainy weather. 
Here’s a link .
There are several on EBay.
It cost me about $600 to install 2 years ago and I am paying about $70 a month. My parents have Dish network TV and frankly my direcway dies in bad weather long long before the TV does. A good ping time is in the .8 second range so online FPS, video chat, or even audio chat is pretty much out. On a good day I can get downloads at 3Mbps and I am almost always well above the 400kbps mark. but there is a thing called the fair access policy that only allows you to download roughly 159MB in any 4 hour period which can quickly put a damper on some of the new services. Oh and the best upload speed I have ever gotten was 64kbps and I generally get closer to 54kbps. In short it beats dialup but it is for surfing the web more than using for streaming or downloading or gaming.
It’s not cheap.
But for myself there is no other option.
Works pretty damn well I think. Make sure you can get to the dish if you get lots of snow, you will need to clean it off. I use a 20’ piece of ¾” copper pipe with a snow brush duct taped to it. The dish is gonna move when I get an addition done.
I use it for both DTV and Direcway. Gotta say I’m happy with it.
I hear that you can’t really use it for gaming because of the latency, the second or so that the signal travels.
I have Direcway internet and Directv television. Having both costs me about $110 per month. I understand there is some connection between the two companies, but I have separate dishes and systems, the dishes point at different satellites a few degrees apart, and I pay separate bills - if the names didn’t sound similar I might not know there was any relation between them.
You’d have to be dumb as toast to use these things if cable were available; they are much more expensive and somewhat more trouble, and they do disappear in heavy weather.
I had alot of extra work making mine function because I don’t have a view of the southern sky at my house; I had to mount both dishes out on the barn, and run CATV cable plus network the barn. I have had a fair amount of trouble with this due to lossy cable and large distance and the usual networking hassles, but that’s not their fault.
The high latency prevents me from setting up a VPN, according to the networking guy at work, so I use dialup to a modem in the plant when I need access to my office files from home (I have a bad back and often work from home these days). But when I visit the discussion forums at Broadband Reports (great reference, http://www.dslreports.com/forum/sat) it sounds like I should be able to have this. FWIW a fixed IP would cost me an extra $40 per month.
Direcway internet service is way faster than dialup and I am very glad I have it. When downloading big files I average about 100 kbps, about 1/4 of what I hear I should get, but with dialup I was at around 3 kbps. I often had to find 2400 baud lines because phone service here is often too noisy for 4800 or 9600.
One option that may be available if your in a rural area and can’t use DSL or cable is wireless internet–at least in some of the “exurbs” around Dallas there are several ISP’s that provide it.
Also, if satellite is the only way to go, these guys look interesting. I believe they’re using a newer set of satellites, they claim their latency is less, and they’re cheaper (start at $49.95 a month).
I saw on Direcway’s site that they have a “VPN accelerator for teleworkers”. It involves a server that has to sit in the data center, so you’d have to see how your IT department would feel about it.
I’ve been hemming and hawing about getting direcway up at my cabin. I just can’t get over the expense, though (especially the $600 setup), so I continue to muddle through with dial-up. I also have to look into ISDN. Between DirecTV and Direcway I’d be looking at $100 and a good chunk of change per month for TV and internet, on top of my ISP. It’s all a bit much!
Can you get a Cell Phone signal at your cabin?
It’s legal to use a satellite receiver in a camper or trailer. I wonder if you could have a satellite antenna at home and the cabin and carry the receiver with you.
Nope.
At first I thought “forget getting a regular phone we’ll just use the cell”. My cabin’s in a hollow, so if I hike a quarter mile up a mountainside I can get a signal. Otherwise it’s no dice, so I had a couple of land lines put in. No DSL either.
My cell phone is ancient, though. Maybe the technology and reception have improved since whenever I got it. It’s a StarTac 7868.
Beware ISDN! I was going this route, even had equipment installed, before discovering that the local phone company puts all its ISDN residential customers on one exchange and all its ISDN ISP’s on another. Although the two exchanges are actually inside the same building, they call access betweeen them a “toll call” and charge $185/month for the number of usage hours that the ISP’s are charging $35 for (I forget, maybe it was 10 or 20 hours a month). This pushes the price from $35/month for ISP plus $30/month for the ISD line = $65/month, what I was expecting, all the way up to $240/month. At this price I could barely get a shared second home someplace with cheap cable internet…