Thread: Satellite CAN work!

In May I changed from dial-up to satellite broadband. Big improvement - used up all my data allowance pretty rapidly though, so I upgraded to a higher plan.

However, in late September, performance seemed to drop markedly. Eventually I worked out that the problem was not the speed but a delay of a minimum of fifteen seconds on every request for a web page or part thereof. (the delay got up to eighteen minutes). The strange thing is that it did not affect email (mostly), and did not affect ping. FTP worked OK, just with a delay at the start.

From early October this became the subject of 32 emails and numerous phone calls to the ISP. These got suggestions that the problem was "because you switch the modem off when not in use", "you need to reboot your computer", "keep a diary so we can see the problem", "your problem is because you are not using IE", "reboot the modem by switching it off and then on after a minute", "try using Open DNS","problem is you are not using Windows", "It happens to all our clients on solar power", "satellite is always like this - its not the same as ADSL", "The DBCDE speed test for ABG customers does not work with satellite", "we have updated the software in your modem". (None of these suggestions made the slightest difference) Just about the last straw was when I ran over my data limit last month and got shaped to 56k (instead of 1000/512kbps) - and couldn't tell the difference; and then they kept me shaped for thirty hours after the end of the month!

By Friday last week my emails to them were getting rather terse, to put it mildly. I also sent them annotated screen shots of the network activity graph, clearly showing the delay.

Then yesterday I got the following email :-

"I have reviewed the contents of all 6 cases raised. ....

To say I am NOT happy with our progress on this matter would be a major
understatement.

I have credited your account for 6 weeks worth of your service being in
a poor state.

I have also contacted (our satellite provider) for after hours support -- an expense that will be borne by (my ISP).

We'll get this fixed."

And this morning performance is better than it has ever been - delay seems now to be consistently no more than the ping time (1-2 seconds). I hope it stays that way. Tomorrow I'll see if I can find out what they did to fix it, and also try and find out why it took over two months to fix it.

John

It only lasted a bit less than two days, then back to what it has been. Now they are telling me that it must be my setup. Which is a bit hard to fathom. There is no setup - just a lead from the modem to the ethernet port on the computer, and DHCP sets it up automatically. As far as I can see the only settings on my machine are the address of the modem and the addresses of the DNS server, and these are all correct (this is apart from the manually configured email settings - but it works perfectly).

John