Internet via Satellite

Last year I moved into a new house. It's nice, it's in the city, it has a nice garden, and it is in the neighborhood with the worst phone infrastructure in the whole town.

I wanted to install ISDN, but I couldn't. Since there aren't enough copper wires in my neighborhood, most wires actually carry four phone lines through a device called PCM. (I'm assuming that stands for pulse-coded modulation.) ISDN requires a dedicated copper wire for itself, thus no ISDN for me.

So I went for the next-best alternative: Internet via Satellite.

The Promise

The general idea is this: you put a satellite dish on your roof, and a special receive-only network card into your computer.

Then, you connect to your normal ISP using your normal modem and phone line. The packets go out through the modem, but the responses come back at high speed via the satellite.

Plus you get to watch satellite TV on your monitor, something I don't care for.

Setting It Up

The company that sells that stuff here in Europe is Europe Online. Their representative in Yugoslavia is Astralink. They sell the equipment plus service for the first year for DEM 1200 ($550) and DEM 360 ($160) every year after that.

The company that sells the service for them here in Belgrade is Blue Wave. I didn't like that. I remember once calling them in order to buy a plan D-Link 100-megabit network card. They told me they had it on stock. When I showed up 20 minutes later, they acted surprised and told me that I have to order the card two days in advance. Pffft. This is D-Link, as plan hardware as it gets. If they don't have that on stock, what do they have?

But I didn't have much choice. So I called Blue Wave and ordered the service.

The satellite dish service people came first. They placed 1.20 m dish on my roof, and said someone else will come to install the computer card and the software.

Sometime later someone named Filip called. Would it be OK if he came at around 5:30 p.m. to install the equipment? Sure it would.

Filip came at 5:30 and it was immediately obvious that he doesn't know what he is doing. He needed to install two drivers but installed only one, and then wasn't sure why the program that runs the whole show wasn't working. Then he removed and added the driver and the program a couple of times refusing to restart Windows. After numerous consultations with his colleagues, he remembered that he also needs the other driver.

After he installed the other driver, the thing still didn't work. He tortured my server for a while de-installing and re-installing drivers, until he managed to get a Blue Screen of Death.

After that, he couldn't remove the driver anymore. Any attempt to touch the driver resulted in a BSOD. This is a machine that has been running non-stop for months, and he managed to break it in less than an hour.

At this point, I was ready to use him as a chew toy for my dog. So I told him to go home and I'll take care of it.

I re-installed Window that night.

Really Setting It Up

Setting the whole thing up took only four steps:

Run the Add New Hardware wizard. Windows will find a new multimedia device. Point it to the Windows 2000 drivers on the disk.
Run the Add New Hardware wizard. Windows will not find anything. Tell it you want to install a network card, then point it to the Windows 2000 drivers on the disk.
Install the program from the CD. Run it. Select a transponder at random and type in its frequencies into this program.
In the Internet Explorer options, type in the proxy server that corresponds to the transponder you've selected in step 3.

And that's it.

This is a classic high-latency high-speed link. The pages take something like 3-4 seconds to start downloading, and then, whoosh, they are there.

I had a problem downloading large files. After 50-500 KB, they would stop. GetRight didn't help, either.

Since I didn't want to call anyone in Blue Wave, I called Astralink. They told me that there is a sync problem that most download managers can't handle. They said only FlashGet can do it. I downloaded FlashGet, and it was fast. I downloaded the 85 MB Windows 2000 SP1 in 50 minutes or so.

Everything works.

Lessons Learned

Don't let someone from Blue Wave install the software. Send them home and do it yourself. There is a manual that shows how to do it. It's not for Windows 2000, but it's close enough and you should be able to follow it.
You need FlashGet. No other download manager will work.
Long files on servers that don't support HTTP resume in general can't be transmitted. Turn off your proxy and download them using the modem line.
Put a proxy server on your gateway machine. That way the annoying username/password popup for the proxy server won't jump out every time you open a new instance of IE.
The service is unreliable. Some days it works great, some days it sucks. It mostly works great, but be ready to turn it off on bad days.
The driver for Windows 2000 seems to enter some weird state after a few days and the easiest way to get it to work again is to restart Windows.