Random Thoughts

[l0st]

Oh the stories I could tell you about dealing with cable and satellite providers!  We had DTV for a while and they couldn't keep their shit working, so I told them to come get it.  Well, that was a big fight (which I won).  They never did come pick up their junk.  I wound up tossing it in our dumpster.  Then we got Dish.  They wanted to hook up to our phone line.  Nope!  Another big fight (I won again).  Dish's problem was, they couldn't keep their hands out of my wallet.  Throughout all of this we were using Hughesnet for internet service.  The Hughesnet stuff worked okkay, but there was a lot of latency which was a major problem if we were working on a remote host.  I could type almost a whole sentence before it would show up.

I've had Dish before as well. Not bad for the price, but picture quality not nearly as good as DirecTV.

I believe Hughes is operated on the same 6Mhz TV transponders that were used for Analog C-Band. That's UHF broadcast to space and back, so 500ms RTT is expected. If you think that's bad, try working with someone on a private polar orbit satellite with 6Mbps total bandwidth that only comes up for a few hours when the bird is over the horizon. It was a mad dash for all things download when the link came up!