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 Review by Island Jeff 
UPDATED: 112 days ago
member for 2.9 years, 906 visits, last login: 5 days ago
 Beaver Island,Charlevoix,MI
 Contract price not specified.
 "Speeds above advertised, rock solid connection, great installers, friendly helpful service"
 "latency of satellite, but much better than previous starband system"
 "wish I would have been able to sign up for wildblue years ago - living where no dsl,cable,wireless is available, this is GREAT!"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Mail,DNS,News:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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After another maintenance event, raw speeds for larger files are again as advertised and quite good. Significantly for me, FTP is now working again which is a very very good thing and much appreciated as well. However secure sites are still noticeably slower than they were prior to 11/17 -- secure pages that were taking 10 seconds are now taking 30, which is a large drawback in my view. Also the doubled latency makes ssh very slow now so it's difficult to type much less correct a typo. I would currently recommend a wait-and-see approach: we know the wildblue hardware is capable of a very responsive and nice broadband system, but it seems the loading on Beam 17 is now too great and everything except non-secure http performance has been de-prioritized and there is not enough bandwidth to support activities other than non-secure site browsing and file transfers. I have high hopes that the new satellite will allow them to once again provide the truly wonderful system that wildblue was between September of 2005 and November of 2006.
PING google.com (72.14.207.99) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=0 ttl=237 time=1458 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=1 ttl=237 time=1191 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=2 ttl=237 time=1740 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=3 ttl=237 time=1305 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=4 ttl=237 time=1459 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=5 ttl=237 time=1685 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=6 ttl=237 time=1240 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=7 ttl=237 time=1168 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=8 ttl=237 time=1324 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=9 ttl=237 time=1211 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=10 ttl=237 time=1413 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=11 ttl=237 time=1188 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=12 ttl=237 time=1178 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=13 ttl=237 time=1728 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=14 ttl=237 time=1279 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=15 ttl=237 time=1209 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=16 ttl=237 time=1643 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=17 ttl=237 time=1187 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=18 ttl=237 time=1605 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=19 ttl=237 time=1735 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=20 ttl=237 time=1300 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=21 ttl=237 time=1191 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=22 ttl=237 time=1530 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=23 ttl=237 time=1168 ms
64 bytes from 72.14.207.99: icmp_seq=24 ttl=237 time=1160 ms
--- google.com ping statistics ---
25 packets transmitted, 25 received, 0% packet loss, time 32029ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1160.896/1372.305/1740.754/205.001 ms
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November 17, 2006
On 11/17/2006 a firmware update was pushed to wildblue modems that reduced performance by 50% compared to the previous 13 months of service and introduced a number of glitches even browsing due to frequent stalls and 4,000+ ms pings. Until this problem can be resolved, I would not recommend a new wildblue install in this area.
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September 2005 until November 17, 20006
Midwest Energy ( »www.wild-blue.coop ) just finished my wildblue install today. After using starband for 3 1/2 years, I'm blown away.
Wildblue is awesome.
The installers were top-notch - very very smooth install and GREAT people to deal with! I can't thank Midwest Energy enough for an amazing job even in my difficult location!
:::.. Upload Stats ..:::
Connection is:: 239 Kbps about 0.2 Mbps (tested with 2992 kB)
Upload Speed is:: 29 kB/s
Tested From:: »testmy.net/ (server2)
Test Time:: Mon Sep 12 2005 16:12:38 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
Bottom Line:: 4X faster than 56K 1MB upload in 35.31 sec
Diagnosis: 90% + Okay : running at 100 % of your hosts average (123.148)
Validation Link:: »testmy.net/stats/id-UFRKYA4XC
:::.. Download Stats ..:::
Connection is:: 1555 Kbps about 1.6 Mbps (tested with 2992 kB)
Download Speed is:: 190 kB/s
Tested From:: »testmy.net/ (server2)
Test Time:: Mon Sep 12 2005 16:10:02 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
Bottom Line:: 28X faster than 56K 1MB download in 5.39 sec
Diagnosis: Looks Great : 2.71 % faster than the average for host (123.148)
Validation Link:: »testmy.net/stats/id-B2F1KTN8Z
I'm very very happy with both upload and download speeds. For $79 a month, it blows my previous staband $69/month system out of the water which was delivering ~450-510 down and 45-55 up plus required a windows computer to run the software.
I expected browsing, downloading, and uploading to be improved, but best of all, two things that I always had trouble on with starband, that I thought were just bad due to the high latency of any satellite connection, ssh and ftp, are working much better with wildblue! Much better! Secure sites are also performing 10x better than they did on starband - I can now use web control panels and online banking sites, shopping checkouts, and ebay without waiting an eternity for pages to load as on my previous satellite system.
Wildblue is very consistent for me right now:
ping -n 10 yahoo.com
Pinging yahoo.com [66.94.234.13] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 66.94.234.13: bytes=32 time=648ms TTL=48
Reply from 66.94.234.13: bytes=32 time=727ms TTL=48
Reply from 66.94.234.13: bytes=32 time=730ms TTL=48
Reply from 66.94.234.13: bytes=32 time=726ms TTL=48
Reply from 66.94.234.13: bytes=32 time=723ms TTL=48
Reply from 66.94.234.13: bytes=32 time=723ms TTL=48
Reply from 66.94.234.13: bytes=32 time=641ms TTL=48
Reply from 66.94.234.13: bytes=32 time=642ms TTL=48
Reply from 66.94.234.13: bytes=32 time=654ms TTL=48
Reply from 66.94.234.13: bytes=32 time=643ms TTL=48
Ping statistics for 66.94.234.13:
Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 10, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 641ms, Maximum = 730ms, Average = 685ms
ping -n 10 google.com
Pinging google.com [216.239.37.99] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 216.239.37.99: bytes=32 time=682ms TTL=238
Reply from 216.239.37.99: bytes=32 time=600ms TTL=238
Reply from 216.239.37.99: bytes=32 time=600ms TTL=238
Reply from 216.239.37.99: bytes=32 time=695ms TTL=238
Reply from 216.239.37.99: bytes=32 time=680ms TTL=238
Reply from 216.239.37.99: bytes=32 time=679ms TTL=238
Reply from 216.239.37.99: bytes=32 time=678ms TTL=238
Reply from 216.239.37.99: bytes=32 time=645ms TTL=238
Reply from 216.239.37.99: bytes=32 time=644ms TTL=238
Reply from 216.239.37.99: bytes=32 time=603ms TTL=238
Ping statistics for 216.239.37.99:
Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 10, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 600ms, Maximum = 695ms, Average = 650ms
ping -n 10 boatdesign.net
Pinging boatdesign.net [67.19.227.229] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 67.19.227.229: bytes=32 time=642ms TTL=48
Reply from 67.19.227.229: bytes=32 time=606ms TTL=48
Reply from 67.19.227.229: bytes=32 time=603ms TTL=48
Reply from 67.19.227.229: bytes=32 time=644ms TTL=48
Reply from 67.19.227.229: bytes=32 time=646ms TTL=48
Reply from 67.19.227.229: bytes=32 time=604ms TTL=48
Reply from 67.19.227.229: bytes=32 time=605ms TTL=48
Reply from 67.19.227.229: bytes=32 time=615ms TTL=48
Reply from 67.19.227.229: bytes=32 time=654ms TTL=48
Reply from 67.19.227.229: bytes=32 time=646ms TTL=48
Ping statistics for 67.19.227.229:
Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 10, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 603ms, Maximum = 654ms, Average = 626ms
What's interesting is that even with pings of 626-685 ms, ftp works much much better than it ever did with starband. The time between changing folders and getting the folder list is about 3x faster in wildblue. With starband it would often timeout before getting the remote folder list - with wilblue, no problem - click - it's there faster than the list was retrieved with dialup! (there's more latency obviously but the transfer speed makes up for it, and it works. With starband it would take 5x as long to get a simple folder list, with wildblue on a medium sized folder, it's a bit faster which is great!) Not sure how to explain this improvement, since the data being sent is small and one would think it would come down to latency, but somehow it just is much faster for me with ftp. Likewise, ssh lag seems noticably reduced when simply typing shell commands at the prompt. How? I'm not sure, but I have a wildblue system on one computer here and my old starband 360 system on the other, and there sure is a nice difference in favor of the wildblue system!
Thanks to Wildblue and Midwest Energy for a great system and GREAT service!!
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