pilot_in_fla
join:2008-04-29
 ·StarBand Communica..
| reply to bajadudes
Re: educated consumers are good customers
As I indicated in my review, the Starband service has been in slow decline for some time. It was in calls to support that I found out about the bandwidth limits which they indicated were new. It was in the second call to complain that they told me about the connection limits -- those are not documented at all as far as I can tell but they do explain the extremely poor performance I have been experiencing.
I'm not aware of anything that I am doing that would use substantial bandwidth. When I use dialup, it looks like about 10 mb/hr doing typical light browsing. I asked Starband tech support if they had tools to identify high-bandwidth situations and they indicated they had none. I don't think the after-the-fact bandwidth data are accurate since sometimes a light usage day will show 0.0 mb and other times in excess of 250 mb.
I did evaluate the usage policies for HughesNet and Wild Blue -- the HughesNet policy seemed to be a bit better but I wouldn't buy without having some questions answered.
Fortunately, I didn't have to explore the options of another sat provider or even another analog phone line with a couple of bonded modem connections although the latter would equal the performance of Starband at a much lower cost. Instead, for something less than 1/3 the cost, I am a happy new Embarq DSL customer! |
