From...

August 3, 1999
Web posted at: 3:55 p.m. EDT (1955 GMT)

by Tom Spring

(IDG) -- I'm siding with the critics. Hughes Network Systems' DirecPC satellite Internet access service is expensive, not always reliable, and sometimes slower than my old 9600-baud modem. But Hughes Network Systems will sell loads of its DirecPC service.

I know, because I've been testing the service for the past three months. And in that time I've been shunned by customer support, seen access speeds reduced to a crawl, and struggled to get satellite "push" services working properly.

But I'd gladly cough up $50 monthly for Hughes' brand of fast Internet access, simply because it blows the doors off my old dial-up account. For me and millions of others geographically stuck in bandwidth purgatory, broadband services like cable modems and Digital Subscriber Line aren't available. Hughes offers the next best thing.

DirecPC delivers high-speed access via satellite dish and Universal Serial Bus modem. It provides 400-kilobits-per-second throughput, with a 56-kbps return via phone line. That allows me to suck down Web sites and files off the Net nearly ten times faster than with my 56-kbps modem, but data upload speeds remain the same.

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Now Available Everywhere

Hughes maintains that the service is available to anyone in the United States, as long as the company can hang a 22-by-33-inch satellite receiver off your house and point it south. Today an estimated 100,000 households use DirecPC, and 40,000 of those are in the United States.

Hughes offers a number of options. By way of a vendor partnership, new Compaq Presario buyers can purchase hardware for satellite access to the Net for $349. A one-year service contract earns a $100 rebate from Hughes. The package includes a modem and an Internet-only satellite dish receiver.

The service offers 25 hours a month of surfing for $30, or 100 hours for $50. The service is also available directly from Hughes. America Online, as part of a $1.5 billion investment in Hughes, plans to begin offering satellite access to its customers early next year.

Nice, but No Walk in the Park

My tests found the system was definitely faster than a phone modem. Downloading individual files, like movie trailers and hefty software programs, was lightning fast. However, average Web-site surfing speed wasn't quite as breakneck as direct file downloads. And uploading files like large e-mail attachments was as slow as ever.

Because of this harsh disparity between download versus upload speeds, applications like Internet telephony and videoconferencing, and networked games like Quake remain chained to the realities of the narrow-band world of dial-up modems.

The DirecPC installation process can only be described as unwieldy. Not only do you have to futz with a satellite modem and temperamental proprietary DirecPC software, you must install a satellite dish outside your house.

Hughes has made things easier by upgrading its technology to support USB modems, so you don't have to open your computer and install a SCSI card modem. But still, you can't get around climbing onto your roof and mounting a satellite dish (or paying a professional about $200 to do it).

Almost Always On

Unlike its cable and DSL broadband rivals, satellite isn't "always on," which is perhaps the one less-desirable feature in my book. This means I need to log on each time I want to check e-mail. Cable and DSL offer persistent Net connections, or always-on connections, removing squealing, temperamental modems from the picture completely.

Because DirecPC is still tethered to phone-line modems for Web page and e-mail requests, I must dial into my regular Internet service provider to get started online.

However, DirecPC tries to deliver the next best thing to a persistent connection by offering a service called an Electronic Program Guide. It works regardless of whether I'm on the Net via a dial-up connection.

In theory, if I leave my computer on, DirecPC will automatically blast down to my computer any one of 26 predefined Web sites and any of 30,000 newsgroups. Once DirecPC knows what sites and newsgroups I frequent, it will update subscriptions on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. I can choose how much hard drive space I want to dedicate to the sites that are saved locally for offline surfing.

But even when I maxed out the Los Angeles Times page to cache 30MB of the site on my hard disk each day, I could surf only about one link deep from the front page. Worse, I found that if DirecPC failed to update the site on my hard disk because of a glitch in its service, or I didn't leave my computer on, the news would be a day old.

The service seemed to work much better with downloading newsgroup messages than it did Web sites.

The FAP Flap

Gauging e-mail responses to my initial review of the service, I didn't address a huge gripe by a vocal minority of users regarding Hughes' policy of a mysterious bandwidth rationing of sorts.

Hughes says 2 to 3 percent of DirecPC's most aggressive Web surfers are penalized periodically without warning for gobbling too much bandwidth too quickly. These users download disproportionately large amounts of data off the Internet, and hamper the other 97 percent of DirecPC users, Hughes representatives claim.

To discourage bandwidth bingeing, DirecPC enforces a Fair Access Policy, which punishes these users by throwing them into a kind of bandwidth penalty box.

The FAP policy, as it is called, reduces the bandwidth allocation by as much as 50 percent for customers deemed to be abusing the service. However, many users who claim they've been FAPed say they've seen speeds drop to as little as 7 kbps.

Hughes doesn't warn users before enforcing its FAP and, oddly enough, issues no guidelines regarding bandwidth usage. For an unspecified time, "abusive" users stay on a bandwidth leash. To determine whether you've been FAPed or the network is down, you must call technical support and ask, Hughes says.

For some users, the bandwidth brouhaha is no petty matter. Last July, five DirecPC users filed a class-action suit against Hughes Electronics. The case is still tied up in courts and goes to a judge in September.

Worth the Headaches?

The FAP issue remains an enigma to me. It's a mystery why Hughes is tight-lipped about a policy that irks so many people. And it's puzzling why so many people get so upset about the policy.

Even when I downloaded practically half the Internet during my first month of using the service, I never got FAPed (that I know of). Service quality varied, but when I called Hughes, it attributed my problems to heavy user demand of its network, not to its FAP.

All told, DirecPC is both as reliable and unreliable as most other Internet service providers. When DirecPC is working right, downloading Web pages and files occurs like a flash.

There are a growing number of ways to get broadband access. Until cable modems or DSL access comes to my neighborhood, I plan to pay for satellite access. But who am I fooling? I'm still waiting for two-way, always-on high-speed access. As soon as I can get it, I'll ditch my satellite dish and start complaining about something else.