...NOW. Right now. Go on, you know you want to. The HughesNet/DirecPC lies and BS and rotten service and throttling down when you accidentally hit their daily limit, not to mention being on hold for one hour just to talk with Omar in Tent City, India as your tech rep, are enough to drive anyone over the edge. Go on. Do it.  Kill the damn thing. 

I confess: I have an agenda here today.  I hate the HughesNet/DirecPC satellite service, though I was one of its very first subscribers, back when it first started, about 12 years ago. Finally, I can get even with years of indignities and rotten service by cutting some of its revenue stream. 

For years, Verizon kept saying it didn't have DSL or ISDN service here in the sticks. Now, suddenly, it does - and with no changes whatsoever in the buried cabling or my house wiring.

I just installed my new Verizon DSL modem (late last night) and, though I have a few rough edges, it went easier than my satellite install. Hughesnet now has a standalone modem that connects directly to your LAN, of course. Verizon DSL requires a host server to work through, just like dialup or DirecPC used to require. That is a minor limitation, though. 

Verizon DSL shares on my house local area network just like any internet connection, but I've got a problem with a couple of the computer browsers not working so far and I have some firewall incompatibilities. These shall pass with time and effort. 

I need extra firewall and virus protection because I am under almost continuous assault by Jews from all around the world, not to mention our own government (but I repeat myself) planting trojan horses and monitoring spyware (like CyberSpy, a favorite of the JewBI) on my computers. 

You see, quite aside from my in-your-face-you-fascist-pigs writing style that keeps my material from being posted in very many places, I get regular communications from the most notorious and politically-incorrect people in the world. Never mind that they consult me as an attorney and that such communications are attorney-client privileged. Never mind that, even today, the JewBI is supposed to get a formal warrant, signed by a judge, to wiretap me. Never mind is par for the course around here.

Call Verizon. If they can deliver DSL over the ancient, decrepit and noisy phone lines here in rural (and I mean rural) North Idaho, where my fastest dialup connection that ever worked has been 28.8kbps, they can deliver it anywhere. It is nominally faster than satellite, but it seems much faster because the "latency" (time up/down to the satellite) is gone. In some areas, it is LOTS faster.

Verizon claims I get 768kbps, but my testing shows it averages right around 700, so far.

HughesNet, when it works, probably averages out to about 400kbps, not the advertised 700-900 kbps they claim. On its best days, I've clocked it at around 600 kbps (that is in the middle of a week night on a fair summer day, with no storms either here or at their uplink location back East).  Weekend nights at 6pm are almost always impossible, of course. 

Most maddening, however, is HughesNet's bandwidth limitation, which throttles you down to less than half of dialup speed when you exceed your allotted limit of 375 mb in a 24-hour period, thereby effectively cutting off your service for an entire day. One of my kids downloads a fifteen-minute movie and - blink - there goes my internet for the next day.

And, now I can drop my add-on dialup, necessary for travelling and backup to the satellite, which is down so much, because they allow add-on dialup minutes for travel. Total cost: about half what I have been paying for years to DirecPC/HughesNet.  Unlike HughesNet/DirecPC, you don't have to buy equipment ($700) or hire some no-nothing hack ($200) to come to your home to "install" their modem. I actually had to show the last guy I was required to pay for this "service" how to run the install for which he had the effrontery to charge me, anyway!

I might almost be able to drop one of the two remaining land lines to my house, but for my fax machine, which has shared duty with a modem on a rollover voice line, necessary when your home, like mine, is infested with teenagers.

Here are a few internet speed tests for you to try out (some will understate speed because they want you to buy their "optimizer"):

http://www.speedtest.net/ 

http://performance.toast.net/  

http://www.pcpitstop.com/internet/Bandwidth.asp 

http://us.mcafee.com/root/speedometer/default.asp  

http://www.speedmatters.org/speed-test/Test.html?src=avg_
ex_internet+speed+test&gclid=CLfGpc7gqYwCFRs_ggodtzhNRQ  

My personal favorite: http://www.internetfrog.com/mypc/speedtest/  

This is a no-brainer. Half the cost for twice the effective speed and no daily bandwidth limit. Do it.  Emulate the Chinese. Be a world power in your own right.  Kill the HughesNet satellite!

DIE, SATELLITE, DIE ..... hahahahahahahahaha ..... er ...... mmmph ..... ummmm .... well, you know ... New Internet. An idea whose time has come.

-ed