Satellite Internet

HughesNet once again proves worthless

The problems with HughesNet/DirecWay are never ending. We know that the service breaks basic web services like XML-RPC and that there are plenty of service problems but I will be so happy when I never again have need of their services. The story this time goes like this. I haven't used the network connection in days. What use the family has made has been minimal so we've had a total of 50-60MB downloaded this week. I have been thinking that I should start iTunes at midnight some night so I get to the FAP-free hours for downloading podacasts. After several days of waiting until tomorrow I gave up and started iTunes today. I stopped all the podcast downloads and went about my way. iTunes wanted to download iPhone 1.1.1 update and I allowed it this hefty file. All was just fine until the usually reasonably-sized Career Opportunities podcast sent out a hefty 80MB wiz-banger.

So now thanks to a bit of bad timing and HughesNet I'll not have internet connectivity for the better part of a 24-hour window. To top it all off their interface for checking when you're victim to the poorly named Fair Access Policy runs more than an hour behind. Thankfully the AT&T Edge network is much faster here.

DirecWAY and Ground Control Redux

I've written previously about the problem with DirecWAY which I purchase through their reseller Ground Control. DirecWAY has a problem with their web accelerator that breaks XML-RPC calls between this site and others. Today I found it breaks XML being sent to eBay through the eBay API as well.

The first response I get when I tried to approach them is that the application I'm using must be the problem. Since they don't know that XML-RPC is they figure it must be me. So, here's what I did. Setup a web-proxy that sends web-requests on a port other than port 80. XML-RPC calls work just fine when using the proxy. Switch to port 80 where DirecWAY has Web Accellerator running and see the web surfing speeds remain the same but now all your XML-RPC calls will be truncated.

Sometimes a VAR such as Ground Control can be very helpful in these situations. On the other hand they can do what Ground Control has done and say that well, they're not sure what to do. DirecWAY tells them everything is working correctly. So, of course it is. Neither Ground Control nor DirecWAY seem to understand networking well enough to appreciate the testing that I've done and accept the meaning of those results. I guess it is time to redouble the effort to get DSL out here.

DirecWAY and Ground Control Redux

I've written previously about the problem with DirecWAY which I purchase through their reseller Ground Control. DirecWAY has a problem with their web accelerator that breaks XML-RPC calls between this site and others. Today I found it breaks XML being sent to eBay through the eBay API as well.

The first response I get when I tried to approach them is that the application I'm using must be the problem. Since they don't know that XML-RPC is they figure it must be me. So, here's what I did. Setup a web-proxy that sends web-requests on a port other than port 80. XML-RPC calls work just fine when using the proxy. Switch to port 80 where DirecWAY has Web Accellerator running and see the web surfing speeds remain the same but now all your XML-RPC calls will be truncated.

Sometimes a VAR such as Ground Control can be very helpful in these situations. On the other hand they can do what Ground Control has done and say that well, they're not sure what to do. DirecWAY tells them everything is working correctly. So, of course it is. Neither Ground Control nor DirecWAY seem to understand networking well enough to appreciate the testing that I've done and accept the meaning of those results. I guess it is time to redouble the effort to get DSL out here.

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