Satellite Internet access on a Mac, part I: the costs
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Jan 25, 2007 at 3:29am
I’ve had satellite Internet installed, and, after three days of test driving it, I’m pleased. It’s not a cheap option, but some of us have few broadband choices. I live on a small road in a suburb of Nashville, TN, that, though only 15 minutes from a major mall, isn’t serviced by DSL or cable. I can take advantage of Sprint wireless thanks to products such as the Franklin Wireless USB Modem, the first wireless broadband USB modem that supports the Mac. It’s a great product, but I wanted something faster. So, after being dissed by DirecTV I turned to HughesNet.
The company offers five satellite Internet options. The Home plan is US$59.99 per month and offers download speeds of 700 Kbps and upload speeds of 128 Kbps. The Pro plan is $69.99 per month with download and upload speeds of 1000 Kbps and 200 Kbps, respectively. The ProPlus plan (the one I chose) is $79.99 per month with download and upload speeds of 1500 Kbps and 200 Kbps, respectively. The Small Office plan is $99.99 per month and offers download and upload speeds of 1500 Kbps and 300 Kbps, respectively. Then there’s the Business/Commercial plan, which is a whopping $179.99 per month with download and upload speeds of 2000 Kbps and 500 Kbps, respectively. The first three options use a .74 meter with one-watt dish, while the latter two use a .98 meter with two-watt dish.
Speaking of which, another cost of satellite Internet access is the dish itself. The smaller dish is (with HughesNet’s current promotion and rebates) $274.98, while the bigger dish is $549.98. You can upgrade among the first three service/price plans with a software update, but can’t upgrade to the Small Office or Business plan without replacing your satellite. All the plans include the new HN7000s modem (more on it tomorrow). You’ll probably also want to spring an another $125 for a rock-solid pole mount for the dish. It can be installed on your roof, but you’ll have to sign a waiver that HughesNet isn’t responsible for potential problems—such as, if your roof starts leaking. The serviceman who installed my dish said that roof installations usually went well, but pointed out that the dish weighs about 75 pounds. When it’s sitting atop your roof and the wind is blowing 60 mph, that’s like having the dish shaken by two hefty men. You can see why damage is possible.
I’ve found the speeds on my Pro plan to live up to HughesNet’s claims. Neither an overcast sky nor a thunderstorm had an apparent effect on my uploading and downloading abilities. I’ve been able to easily download movie trailers from the QuickTime Movie Trailer site and videos from YouTube, something I couldn’t do with dial-up (though “streaming” video is still jerky). I can download system updates from Apple and sizeable software products with ease—something that would take hours (and hours and hours) on dial-up, assuming my connection didn’t “choke” before the download was completed.
I can use Skype to make calls, even long-distance ones. The audio quality is good, but there’s a noticeable lag in the conversation as data is uploaded and downloaded. Sadly, I’ve been unable to do video chatting with iChat. Though I have 1500 Kbps download speed and 200 Kbps upload speed (which seems to fall within iChat’s requirements), I keep getting a “lack of bandwidth” message. I plan to try another video chat product to see if the results differ. As for online gaming, sorry, but satellite Internet just doesn’t cut it.
So how does its speeds compare to other options? Many cable companies and Internet service providers argue that cable modems are as much as 100 times faster than a dial-up Internet connection, running at 5 million bits per second (mbps). In theory, it’s possible, but a more realistic speed is 1-2 mbps, or about 20 to 40 times faster than a typical 56,000-bits-per-second (kbps) dial-up connection.
One type of DSL technology, VDSL, can match cable’s performance. However, Internet service providers generally don’t offer VDSL, but rather the cheaper and slower ADSL or SDSL services. Your DSL speed can change depending on how you use the network.
DSL providers often advertise speed of their service using a combination of two bandwidth numbers; pretty typically, “1.5 Mbps (downloads) / 128 Kbps (uploads).” The rated maximum bandwidth of a DSL connection often can’t be reached and actual DSL speeds vary between households based on a variety of factors.
Mobile broadband providers claim they can provide users with typical speeds of 300-500 kbps and bursts of up to 2 Mbps. In my experience with Sprint’s mobile service, I’ve found that the latter speed burst never happened.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at the HughesNet 7000S modem.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
