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We're thinking about going with direcway hughesnet since we're stuck with dial up, but the site says we might (will) need extra hardware, like a network interface card (NIC) which I assume serves the purpose our current router serves. Anyone familiar with how hard it is to set up for connecting via satellite?
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We had DirecWay for about a year. It requires a satellite dish that's pretty big (2-3x as big as a DirectTv Dish), and (legally) requires a professional to install. The NIC would just be to connect to the modem that hooks up to the satellite dish if you don't already have a LAN port. If you're connected to a router already, it shouldn't be an issue.
If you can get any other broadband access, I would suggest against DirecWay. Snow on the dish, or heavy rain/snow can interrupt your service, and high winds can knock it out of alignment requiring a service visit. I ended up having to re-align* our's several times in the year we had it, and all winter long I had to clean the snow off of it. Not fun
*Since this service is usually used out in the middle of nowhere, service personel aren't generally available on short notice. It took 3-4 days the first time to get it re-aligned, and after that I wasn't going to wait. Be very careful if you try that yourself... it's a microwave transmitter... and it's rather difficult to align properly unless you have a laptop up there on the roof with you, running the diagnostics. Even then it can be tough to get right, the guy who set it up took ~2 hours to align it. -
ouch, thanks for that. We've been advised to look into sprint mobile broadband. Apparently its about half the cost but we'll need a 2 way transmitter/receiver and an Ipod for some reason.Comment
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