[NCLUG] Satellite internet access (DirecPC)

[Michael Dwyer]

> My question is this: I live in Fort Morgan and as I'm sure many of you
> know, broadband residential internet access choices are limited (read:
> almost non-existent). I was curious if anyone has any experience with
> DirecPC and Linux. Can I connect my Linux box directly or will I need > connect my Windoze98 machine to the satellite and run WinProxy to 
> to my Linux machine? Being something of a newbie, I expended a lot of
> effort configuring IP Chains, DHCP, named, etc. I'd hate to have to 
> big step back into MS territory now.

I was just doing some research on that, myself.  Leadville was featured
in a Time Magazine article about the "Digital Divide".  It doesn't stop
people from TRYING to get bandwidth, though...  Right now, the solution
of choice is DSL over T1. ?!!  Anyway.... 

It appears that the two consumer satellite systems, StarBand (Dish) and
DirectPC (DirecTV/Hughes) are both Windows Only.  The Starband system
can have a hardware hack applied to it that makes it more or less usable
by Linux, but it breaks warantee, and I guess you still need a windows
box to christen the service.  Without the hack, the box is USB-only --
it wouldn't suprise me to see a solution out of Linux/USB soon.
A third one, Tachyon (or something) is expressly for business-level
usage, is significanly more expensive, but seems to support Linux a
quite a bit better.

The common complaint is the severe latency on satellite systems --
500msec, I've read.  Not much you can do about it, I'm afraid.  Usually,
the solution includes news spooling and web caching software to keep at
least some things fast.  Interactives, like gaming, telnet and SSH are
prohibitively slow laggy, but for news and web, it is at least somewhat
more reasonable.

It seems to me, unless you are daring enough to do some serious hacking,
then a Windows proxy is the best way to get DSS internet into a network.
:(  Sucky.