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 Review by robrisner 
Posted: 7.1 years ago
member for 7.2 years, 1322 visits, last login: 8 days ago
 Republic,Seneca,OH
 $69 per month (12 month contract)
 "Available anywhere"
 "Lots of problems"
 "I would not recommend this"
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I had Starband for a year before i got my wireless service. Starband was decent at the very beginning, 600Kbps download, 40Kbps upload, email & newsgroups worked, no corrupt downloads, 600ms ping times. But around the end of August when i got rid of starband it got so bad that service was almost unsable. Corrupt downloads, email & newsgroup problems, 1300+ms ping times. The Tech support was horrible for this service, the sat had a bad LNB and it took three weeks to get it replaced because the tech support people couldn't do anything because they didn't support windows xp at the time. I would not recommend this service to anyone at all, even if they dont have anything except dialup.
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Review by Briarcliff
UPDATED: 7.1 years ago
member for 7.9 years, 120 visits, last login: 6.1 years ago
Briarcliff Manor,Westchester,NY
$85 per month (12 month contract)
 about 30 days
"Always on. Can do 1 Mbit/second down on a good day."
"Restrictive in what they let you do. Can only get 50 kbit/sec up. Has data errors."
"Get it if you can't get cable or DSL"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Mail,DNS,News:
Value for money:
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My year's contract is nearly up, so I thought I'd write down my considerations in whether to renew.
Good points:
1) Can sometimes download at 1Mbit/sec sustained (more often 800 kbit/sec), as much as a whole CD's worth.
2) Lets me run Apache as a cacheing proxy, to provide web service around my house at no additional charge. »www.apache.org/
3) Lets me run xmail as mail host, to provide email service around my house at no additional charge. »www.xmailserver.org/
4) Lets me use a dynamic DNS service, such as »www.no-ip.com/, if I want a DNS entry (to try direct inbound e-mail, and a kids' web server)
5) Always on.
Bad points:
1) 'Undetected' errors occur in the download data stream. I have to 'md5sum' every file, to check whether it is the same before and after download. Typically a CD will have to be downloaded 3 or 4 times to get a good image, which wastes my time and wastes the satellite's bandwidth.
2) Only supports Windows as satellite-attached machine (and not all versions of Windows, either). It's my money paying for the satellite to carry bits; why restrict what I can do with it ? "Linux and Windows95" would be nice; "any machine which can do TCP/IP" would be better.
3) Doesn't support VPN (encrypted access to my employer's internal network). An IP-over-HTTP protocol like »www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3093.txt would work fine, if there are technical problems with the obvious way of doing it.
4) Inbound mail service is unreliable. Often, the Starband mail server will reject a PASS (password) command with 'Server too busy -- please try later'; this causes Netscape to think it has an invalid password, and requires manual intervention to resume.
5) Outbound mail service is too aggressive at preventing spam. My christmas card was rejected because I tried to send to too many destinations at once; and no, I don't have thousands of contacts.
6) Technical support have never once resolved a problem. I have had problems; some I have resolved myself, some are ongoing gripes.
7) Leaves me with the feeling that I would be on my own, if I needed to install WindowsXP Service Pack 1 and found that something broke. (See above re download reliability)
8) Has vague threats about what will happen if I 'overuse' the network, but does not specify what 'overuse' means. Much better would be assurances along the lines of " Over every 5-second period, you will get a fair share of the available upload bandwidth, and a fair share of the available download bandwidth. The average upload bandwidth per user is expected to be xxx, and the average download bandwidth per user is expected to be yyy"
9) Disconnects when there is snow on the dish; no advice as to whether it is an iced-up dish or snow in the clouds, or exactly what needs cleaning/de-icing to restore service, or if it is possible to shelter the dish somehow to prevent service interruption.
10) Disconnects during thunderstorms and snowstorms. Starband might usefully contract with a dial-up ISP, to allow customers to continue to access the Internet (for which customers are paying) when prevented from using the satellite due to weather conditions.
11) Completely un-coordinated installing. Getting a retailer to send me a dish and modem was like pulling teeth; getting an installer to put my dish up was similarly painful. Looking back, I think the reason was that both expected me to complain.
With satellite, I'll always be limited in responsiveness by the speed of light hopping up and down to geosynchronous orbit a couple of times on the round trip; I understand and accept that. Starband do some of the things to reduce the impact of that; but not everything possible. In my opinion, if they want a thriving business, they need to be much more open; take the view that they need to enable/empower customers to get the best out of the satellite link, in the way that the customers choose.
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Review by JAWilliams
Posted: 7.3 years ago
member for 7.3 years, 6 visits, last login: 5.7 years ago
Sandy,Salt Lake,UT
$99 per month (12 month contract)
about 4 days
"Very fast (with a bit of help from DrTCP)"
"Ping times and latency, high start-up cost, big dish!"
"If dial-up is all you can get then this rocks"
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This is the DirecWay service purchased straight from DirecWay.
Apart from having a fairly sizeable dish on the house now, this service is pretty good. Two-way Sattelite service so dial-up is only needed once to get the service activated.
Installation *must* be done by a professional installer and so you are at the mercy of the company involved (in my case pretty good).
Once installed, immeadiately visit the tools page and run the speed test and download DrTCP. This *really* improved things instantly.
Major down-side for non-Windows users is that it's a USB system and has a special piece of software so no Max, Linux or anything else for that matter.
Ping times are high because of the latency involved, but for general surfing and particularly for streaming media it cooks.
There are no News Servers and you get 5 e-mail accounts but at POP3 only it's not that useful.
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Review by jhah2326
Posted: 7.3 years ago
member for 7.3 years, 1 visits, last login: 7.3 years ago
Parksville,Boyle,KY
$99 per month (12 month contract)
about 1 days
"good internet speeds"
"crappy p2p speeds"
"if that is all that you can get,its ok"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Mail,DNS,News:
Value for money:
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I didnt know that my Kazaa speeds and Winmx speeds would be as terrible as they are. They told me that I would see speeds around 80kbs on downloads on these programs and i am not seeing close to that.the fastest that I have ever seen is around 45 which yes is faster than dialup,but when you are paying 100.00 a month and give them 400 upfront,it does upset you that you cant do what you think that you can with the p2p programs. i mean honestly direcpc has a good satellite but they limit you to 179MB per however many hours they want you to have.I think that it sucks that I didnt know this at first,even the installation guy said that he could get awesome download speeds on Kazaa but I dont know how he is getting them at all.Does anyone else have this problem with Kazaa or Grokster or any of the p2p programs out there?????IF SO please email me,and help me please.
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Review by Sierrra_matt
Posted: 7.3 years ago
member for 7.4 years, 173 visits, last login: 3.5 years ago
Soulsbyville,Tuolumne,CA
$69 per month (12 month contract)
about 14 days
"Always on, Ubiquitous Access"
"Mail servers seem unreliable"
"If you cannot get anyother broadband, Starband is the way to go"
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I have heard so many negative comments about Starband, that I felt compelled to report good news. All satellite based ISP's have thier warts. They all suffer from high infrastructure costs (Alla space segment) plus backbone connectivity. Consider also, that satellite ISPs, like any other ISP must make a business case and ultimately profit from the service they offer.
I actually cobbled my system together from an eBay modem for $100 and an antenna/outdoor unit from work. The install took longer than expected, however, it was done very well, and have a sig quality of 8.0 most of the time.
Unfortunately, Starband requires the customer to have a "Host PC" which is the gateway and controller for the modem. This causes some people grief for some reason. I have the gateway setup with Windows 2K ICS and share the connection with 4 other PC's in my house.
Good News: It works. I have had a few troubles and 1/3 of them have been self inflicted. The others were solved by looking at Starbandusers.com. I get 33-56k up and 450 down. While not blindingly fast, it's better than I could ever get here in Soulsbyville CA. It's always on, doesn't tie up a precious phone line (Again a real commodity here) and performs to my expectation.
Bad News: There are some warts. If you end up on an oversubscribed cluster/sub-cluster, performance may be lacking. It is possible to get reassigned to a different group. Mail servers have some reliability/accessability issues. I have seen some issues with HTTPS on rare occasion where pages refuse to load. By bypassing the gateway proxy however, the pages worked fine.
Misc News: Starband has filed Chapter 11 for re-organization. That really means that Starband was trying to force Echostar to pay some back owed subscriber fees, and re-organize some debt.
There are some on the News groups who have nothing better to do than slam Starband and will immediately say that I am a Starband rep or employee. I actually build competetive networks and systems, so nothing could be farther from the truth.
Bottom Line, the Gilat/Channel Master hardware of Starband is superior to DirectWay - most knowledgable installers will verify this. The service is not 100% top notch, but is a reasonable solution to run your home/SOHO with. Thier technology is, in my opinion, superior to the other home 2-way offerings.
If you can live with dial up one way, satellite return, Then I recommend Nebulink.net. Entry costs are much lower, with potentially higher download speeds., downside - you need a dial up connection.
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Review by gwdotcom
Posted: 7.5 years ago
member for 8.7 years, 252 visits, last login: 2.4 years ago
Texarkana,Bowie,TX
$69 per month (12 month contract)
about 14 days
"Good download speeds"
"No gaming... No Win Mx music downloads"
"Better than dial up..but too expensive"
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I'm running Windows XP Home Edition with Athlon XP1800 processor 384mb of ram on an Epox board. The Starband software seems to make the system unstable and I keep getting freezes? I didn't have this problem while running Windows Me.
As far as the actual service that I receive from Starband, my speed tests are usually around 650 or so and the surfing speed is pretty fair. If they could just figure out how to cure the latency problem so you can play online games it sure would be a lot better value.
If it gets stormy I'm pretty well down for the count untill the weather clears. Like I said... better than dial up, but not even close to DSL or cable.
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Review by Illinoisboy
Posted: 7.6 years ago
member for 7.6 years, 29 visits, last login: 224 days ago
Bloomington,Mclean,IL
$60 per month (12 month contract)
about 365 days
"After one year of service, I couldn't see any."
"Expensive, unreliable, bad customer service. It stinks."
"Unless you enjoy self-flagellation avoid Slowband"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Mail,DNS,News:
Value for money:
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I was an early adopter of Starband. I had it installed January 15, 2001. I cancelled my contract the day after the twelve month contract expired (i.e. January 16, 2002). It hated Starband so much that I gave the $600 worth of equipment back to the installer just to get it removed from my house. I'm sure he'll resell it to some other hapless sucker like me.
Installation was a nightmare. It took three consecutive 8 hour days and dozens of calls to customer service for the installer to make Starband work. Although my installer was a nice guy, he didn't know squat about computers or internet services. As I soon discovered, just because Barney the local satellite installer can make Dishnetwork or DirectTV work doesn't mean that he can make Starband work. And once it works you better hope the wind doesn't move it a tenth of a centimeter or you will have to pay Barney another $150 to repeak the dish.
Now on to Starband performance (an oxymoron). To be fair, Starband can download files fast. It can compete with consumer level DSL on file downloads.
Sadly, that is Starband's only redeeming quality. It is worthless for almost every other internet related activity.
VPN, internet telephony, internet gaming and the like simply do not work. Don't believe anyone that tells you differently (the latency is just too high). Secure Socket Layer (i.e. secure websites like banks) doesn't work or is so painfully slow that you could hand-deliver your payments to you credit card company in a shorter time period than it would take to pay them online with Starband.
Browsing is generally slower than dialup. The only advantage is that graphic intensive pages load more quickly. The actual time it takes to reach a page is slower than dialup - because of the latency involved with the satellites (23,000 miles above the Earth). Starband made a feable attempt to accelerate browsing, but the protocols are so fragile and the Network Operations Center so poorly run that the acceleration protocols are unreliable. A yo-yo has fewer ups and downs that Starband http protocols.
I never was able to make streaming broadband work. I eventually gave up. It didn't work any better than dialup.
FTP just plain sucks. Dial up is much faster for uploading any files or web pages. Starband would be a nightmare for anyone trying to maintain website.
The Starband 360 modem is junk. It is a dumb modem that can't be used with a router. The original Starband 180 was a nice piece of equipment. Sadly, Starband forced everyone to upgrade to the cheap toy 360 modem that could be manufactured more cheaply. The "third generation" as they call it Starband 360 is, was and will continue to be a malfunctioning, overheating and feature poor pile of trash.
Customer Service is down right madenning. The service reps are rude, clueless and they lie as often as necessary just to get you off the telephone. Every problem is the fault of someone other than Starband. You name it - the installer, Windows, your computer, your mother, the Taliban ... anyone but them. They take no responsibility for any system performance problems. And when then the chat rooms and newsgroups reflect hundreds of people complaining about the same system problem, the customer service reps will say, "Gee you are the first to report that problem." The Internal Revenue Service looks likewarm and cuddly bunny rabbit compared to the Starband organization.
If you are considering Starband, then you may as well set 6 one hundred dollar bills on fire. The result is essentially the same as having Starband installed. Unfortunately, however, Starband leaves four bolt holes in your roof. Before you piss away all that cash you should know that Echostar (the owner of Dishnetwork and the prospective buyer of Hughes/DirecTV) has walked away from Starband. Many say it is to coerce the FCC into approving the Dishnetwork/DirecTV merger. Buried in the finanial news, however, is a report that Echostar wrote its 100 million dollar Starband investment down to a value of 32 million dollars. That tells me that Echostar thinks Starband is not long for this world.
Keep in mind also that Dishnetwork is known for excellent customer service. I personally think that Dishnetwork was ashamed to have any further public or private association with the Starband organization.
I cancelled Starband and went back to MSN dialup. Yup - and thats the gods honest truth. I hated the Starband service and I couldn't in good conscience continue to support a company of its ilk. I'll be simply gleeful when I read about Starband's bankruptcy - an even that has to be less than 6 months away. They have burned through their cash and customers are cancelling in droves. With the end of Echostar's support for Starband the writing is on the wall .... Buh Bye Slowband, Stinkband, Suckband or whatever you want to call them.
Walk away .. no run away ... from Starband if anyone tries to sell it to you. It is simply a horrible fraud in every sense of the word.
P.S. I always got a laugh out of the early days of Starband when someone doctored Starband's logo which said "Just look up" to say "Starband: Just Throw up!" Yes, I do have a raunchy sense of humor. But hey - thats the only positive memory I have of the Starband experience and the $1400 it cost be to provision is for one year.
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Review by krueger6
Posted: 7.6 years ago
member for 8.7 years, 153 visits, last login: 5.6 years ago
North Liberty,St Joseph,IN
$75 per month (12 month contract)
about 2 days
"Download speed"
"Everything else"
"Waste of money"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Mail,DNS,News:
Value for money:
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I have had Starband for over a year now, the longer I have it the worst it gets. When I first got the service it rocked. Their ads promised 500/150. I have never seen the 150 up. They are in the bad habit of changing the FUP, even when it means breaching contracts with the users. They also enjoy using bait and switch, where they promise you one thing and deliver another. Tech support is a real joke, the problem is never theirs, they admit nothing. When they are having problems they tell you that you should format and reinstall. They use Pronto for the mail service and it goes down at least once a day for a few hours. Again they will tell you that the problem must be in your settings. This review won't mean anything to them nor will it to me. MediaCom has brought cable to my area and I will be hooked up on the third of April. The cost will be $40.95 a month, almost half what I pay for Starband, and in turn I will be getting a real broadband connection. The only thing they block is port 80 and that is fine to me since I won't be running a server. I have a feeling that Starband will not survive much longer, they are indeed having a cash flow problem and with many customers leaving when their contracts are up, is not a good sign.
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Review by larryg0124
Posted: 7.6 years ago
member for 7.6 years, 2 visits, last login: 5.7 years ago
Sandy,Salt Lake,UT
$69 per month (12 month contract)
about 28 days
"Alternative to Dial up if DSL is not availalble in your area."
"Signal has to go 88,000 MILES roundtrip, so there is always a lag time.. Bad waether (snow) kills signal. Be prepared to clean."
"Only good if no other broad band solution is available"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Mail,DNS,News:
Value for money:
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Snow storms are hell. YOu are a slave to cleaning the snow off the dish. those covers are useless! don't waste your money.
I now have a different (terrestrial) broad band supplier, so if anyone wnats to buy my Starband 360 system (24 X 36) dish, with 2 dual LNB's for Dish Network, and a brand new Starband 360 Hybrid modem, WITH OSITIS WinProxy, let me know.
Larry Green
801 944 0804
larryg0124@earthlink.net
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Review by moparkid
Posted: 7.7 years ago
(review was emailed from domain starband.net)
Houston,Washington,PA
$70 per month (12 month contract)
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Mail,DNS,News:
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I have had STARBAND for 6 months now,, and I have to
tell you, it is AWESOME!!!!
Sure, everything goes down, and life is full of mishaps,
but after being on starband and have the speeds that I get
downloading, it is well worth the little incontinence that you
might get every once in a while. Once you have STARBAND, you will
hate your dial-up service.
In the 6 months that I have had starband, I have had
some times when it was slow, but I can only remember
once maybe twice that the it was totally down.
I even have it wireless networked in my home so I
can use the satellite with me desktop, which starband is
connected to, or my laptop any where in the house with
the wireless network and it works GREAT!! I get the same
fast downloads on my laptop thru the network as I do
on my desktop.
Please free to email me with any question or reasonable
comments that you might have on my experience with
starband.
HAVE A NICE DAY!!! 
ED P.
MOPARKID@STARBAND.NET
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StarBand Communications Inc.
