owakroeger
29th May 2006, 02:52 PM
I just recently purchased and installed the Wildblue satellite internet dish/modem. Those who live in remote areas might be interested in this. We priced the installation of telephone land-line service with dsl and basic telephone service, and compared that cost with the cost of the satellite. Installation costs were just a bit higher for the satellite dish and installation, but we own it. If you already have land-line telephone service available, i.e. all that needs to be done is hook up the line to your house and turn on the service, the cost difference will be much greater, but when/if you move, the telephone/dsl lines remain, even though you might have had to pay to have them installed. With the satellite dish and modem, you take them with you.
Typically, Wildblue does not support anything but MSWindows or Mac. They freak out when they hear Linux. So, if you need help getting the connection set up and fine-tuned, if all you have is your Linux os, youre pretty much on your own.
In our case, the company laptop runs on WinXPPro, and our personal computer runs on FC5. So, we first set up the service using the laptop. Then, I made the necessary changes to eth0 on our FC5 box, and duplicated the changes to Mozilla/Firefox which had to be made to Internet Explorer.
Fairly standard, the eth0 just needs to be set up for DHCP and check the box for DNS automatically provided. Not-so-standard are the changes made to your browser.
In Edit > Preferencces > Advanced > Proxies check the button for Manual proxy configuration. Then enter the following into the box for HTTP
http://wpad.wildblue.com/wpad.dat
Then in Edit > Preferences > Advanced > HTTP Networking select HTTP 1.1 under proxie options and check the boxes for both Keep Alive and Enable Pipeling.
So far, we're really pleased with the performance. Download speeds have been averaging between 790Kbs and 1.2Mbs. Uploads are quite a bit slower 256Kps, but we don't do much uploading. We chose the mid-range service. They offer 3 choices, Basic, Select, and Pro. Select suites our needs pretty well.
This is offered as information for any who might be considering satellite internet service for whatever reason. I hope it might be helpful.
owa
Typically, Wildblue does not support anything but MSWindows or Mac. They freak out when they hear Linux. So, if you need help getting the connection set up and fine-tuned, if all you have is your Linux os, youre pretty much on your own.
In our case, the company laptop runs on WinXPPro, and our personal computer runs on FC5. So, we first set up the service using the laptop. Then, I made the necessary changes to eth0 on our FC5 box, and duplicated the changes to Mozilla/Firefox which had to be made to Internet Explorer.
Fairly standard, the eth0 just needs to be set up for DHCP and check the box for DNS automatically provided. Not-so-standard are the changes made to your browser.
In Edit > Preferencces > Advanced > Proxies check the button for Manual proxy configuration. Then enter the following into the box for HTTP
http://wpad.wildblue.com/wpad.dat
Then in Edit > Preferences > Advanced > HTTP Networking select HTTP 1.1 under proxie options and check the boxes for both Keep Alive and Enable Pipeling.
So far, we're really pleased with the performance. Download speeds have been averaging between 790Kbs and 1.2Mbs. Uploads are quite a bit slower 256Kps, but we don't do much uploading. We chose the mid-range service. They offer 3 choices, Basic, Select, and Pro. Select suites our needs pretty well.
This is offered as information for any who might be considering satellite internet service for whatever reason. I hope it might be helpful.
owa
