Understanding Skyway USA
Satellite-assisted dialup service
First let us note that the story of SkywayUSA is a bit different from the other stories here. I would not consider it to be a scam or fraud and they definitely don't treat customers like dirt, but as you consider it you will want to determine if it will be useful for your circumstances. Skyway uses a standard modem link for the "up" portion of your internet connection, and a satellite to provide the "down" portion. In theory this is superior to two-way satellite service because the latency can be much better because only one round trip to the satellite (approximately 1/2 second) is required.
The Customer Support appears to be all US based. Good 'ole Kentucky redneck folks with an accent to match. Nothing wrong with that! They generally know their stuff (from my experience) and are some of the friendliest CS people I have dealt with in recent years. WordPerfect they are not, but they are good and a real pleasure to work with.
Equipment and Delivery was all timely and sufficiently complete. As some others have noted, the aiming of the dish is a bit tedious but do-able. Sometimes the beeper would light and sometimes not. I had best success by hauling laptop to the dish and watching the signal while listening to the beeper.
The SW-20 "Modem" is not too shabby. Mine died about a month or two after I got it and was diagnosed and replacement sent. Software shows some signs of flakiness even though it runs Linux. A daily power cycle seems to help it. The device happily serves up an address via DHCP daemon. As long as you don't mind being at 192.168.30.x it is fine. I connected to Lan port in a WRT54G running Tomato and it served up addresses to whatever I connected. Windoze not needed; it just works. If you select "dialup only" though, it seems to be quite an effort to get it back to satellite service. We never figured out an easy way to get the seemingly straightforward task done. Fortunately we didn't dump our regular dialup so we could just use that if this system seemed not to be working. Holding on to another service and regular modem was prudent because if SW-20 is dead you are off the air because it does straight dialup too. We never figured out howto use regular modem to connect to Skyway for regular dialup.
Connectivity. A straight "ping" usually gives response of around 250 ms. This is fairly typical of dialup service, and indeed is done both ways on the wire. If the satellite was in the loop on a ping, it would have to be at least twice that. This shows that the service is capable of routing some downstream traffic back over the wire line. Unfortunately they do not do so where you really need it, like IM traffic. If you are accustomed to sending back and forth 2 or 3 little bitty IM packets a second, this just flat will not cut it. Same thing would be true for any sort of online game using little bits of data that need to be timely delivered. All attempts to use VPN did not work. One kind did work briefly then timed out. Both the thru put and latency mean that VoIP should not even be considered. Typical response to start loading a web page seems to be on the order of 2-5 seconds. Thereafter you do get an accelerated download though.
Speed. Skyway has a few tiers of speed for different prices. Entry level "Bronze" is advertised at 250k. That kilobits, not kilobytes. It translates to a typical 25-30 kB/sec when downloading. This is going to be 5-10x faster than straight dialup. Our dial up never exceeds 24,000 so it is quite a boost when it works.
All RUP'd up. We will leave this for the reader to consider. Skyway enforces a Reasonable Use policy (sometimes called FAP) that throttles user's speed in tiers, from the nominal maximum all the way down to dialup speeds. If you hit the top mark, you have sub-dialup speed plus satellite latency making it the most miserable way ever to connect. Whether setting it to "dialup only" would let you go at full dialup speed I know not; we just went to backup service when it happened. The policy is here: http://www.skywayusa.com/rup.php
Now here are some excerpts from that page:
We've assigned a download threshold for each service plan that limits the amount of data than may be downloaded during a normal day.
The download threshold SkyWay USA has established for each service plan is well above typical usage rates based on our analysis of subscriber usage data.
Subscribers who exceed that threshold will experience reduced download speeds until the begining of the next monthly cycle.
Then we have the numbers:
Bronze RUP
Policy Total Download Download Speed
Level 1 500MB 256K
Level 2 1000MB 192K
Level 3 1500MB 128K
Level 4 2000MB 64K
Level 5 2500MB 32K
Sounds good, no? I think we can live with 500 megs a day. Takes something like 5 hours at advertised speed to do that, right? And the 2500 mB is just flat not achievable unless you get faster than advertised speed. It is only after we hit the policy and make an inquiry that we get informed that the "Total Download" is your threshold for a full month of service! Let me repeat that: Numbers are your allowance for a WHOLE MONTH! Thus your daily allowance is about 16 megs. Something on the order of 15 min worth of 192 kb MP3 files. More than that and you are heading for the RUP.
My friends, if you have no need for any more data than in the RUP table, this service is worth considering. If you want to add some micro$oft "security" patches or download a power point or watch a few youtubes, you will be disappointed.
Conclusion: Not doing this any more. Did my year and refuse to continue. Even if I could get no better, I would still have taken it down in favour of straight plain old dialup. Fortunately I convinced a local wISP to put me in a 900 mHz link. Now for the price of "bronze" skywayusa plus the required POTS line, I have 5x better ping times, 6x better speed, and no stinking UnReasonable Policy (URP). It would appear the only thing to do with skywayusa equipment is to scrap it. I cannot imagine that anyone would want to buy it.
The Customer Support appears to be all US based. Good 'ole Kentucky redneck folks with an accent to match. Nothing wrong with that! They generally know their stuff (from my experience) and are some of the friendliest CS people I have dealt with in recent years. WordPerfect they are not, but they are good and a real pleasure to work with.
Equipment and Delivery was all timely and sufficiently complete. As some others have noted, the aiming of the dish is a bit tedious but do-able. Sometimes the beeper would light and sometimes not. I had best success by hauling laptop to the dish and watching the signal while listening to the beeper.
The SW-20 "Modem" is not too shabby. Mine died about a month or two after I got it and was diagnosed and replacement sent. Software shows some signs of flakiness even though it runs Linux. A daily power cycle seems to help it. The device happily serves up an address via DHCP daemon. As long as you don't mind being at 192.168.30.x it is fine. I connected to Lan port in a WRT54G running Tomato and it served up addresses to whatever I connected. Windoze not needed; it just works. If you select "dialup only" though, it seems to be quite an effort to get it back to satellite service. We never figured out an easy way to get the seemingly straightforward task done. Fortunately we didn't dump our regular dialup so we could just use that if this system seemed not to be working. Holding on to another service and regular modem was prudent because if SW-20 is dead you are off the air because it does straight dialup too. We never figured out howto use regular modem to connect to Skyway for regular dialup.
Connectivity. A straight "ping" usually gives response of around 250 ms. This is fairly typical of dialup service, and indeed is done both ways on the wire. If the satellite was in the loop on a ping, it would have to be at least twice that. This shows that the service is capable of routing some downstream traffic back over the wire line. Unfortunately they do not do so where you really need it, like IM traffic. If you are accustomed to sending back and forth 2 or 3 little bitty IM packets a second, this just flat will not cut it. Same thing would be true for any sort of online game using little bits of data that need to be timely delivered. All attempts to use VPN did not work. One kind did work briefly then timed out. Both the thru put and latency mean that VoIP should not even be considered. Typical response to start loading a web page seems to be on the order of 2-5 seconds. Thereafter you do get an accelerated download though.
Speed. Skyway has a few tiers of speed for different prices. Entry level "Bronze" is advertised at 250k. That kilobits, not kilobytes. It translates to a typical 25-30 kB/sec when downloading. This is going to be 5-10x faster than straight dialup. Our dial up never exceeds 24,000 so it is quite a boost when it works.
All RUP'd up. We will leave this for the reader to consider. Skyway enforces a Reasonable Use policy (sometimes called FAP) that throttles user's speed in tiers, from the nominal maximum all the way down to dialup speeds. If you hit the top mark, you have sub-dialup speed plus satellite latency making it the most miserable way ever to connect. Whether setting it to "dialup only" would let you go at full dialup speed I know not; we just went to backup service when it happened. The policy is here: http://www.skywayusa.com/rup.php
Now here are some excerpts from that page:
We've assigned a download threshold for each service plan that limits the amount of data than may be downloaded during a normal day.
The download threshold SkyWay USA has established for each service plan is well above typical usage rates based on our analysis of subscriber usage data.
Subscribers who exceed that threshold will experience reduced download speeds until the begining of the next monthly cycle.
Then we have the numbers:
Bronze RUP
Policy Total Download Download Speed
Level 1 500MB 256K
Level 2 1000MB 192K
Level 3 1500MB 128K
Level 4 2000MB 64K
Level 5 2500MB 32K
Sounds good, no? I think we can live with 500 megs a day. Takes something like 5 hours at advertised speed to do that, right? And the 2500 mB is just flat not achievable unless you get faster than advertised speed. It is only after we hit the policy and make an inquiry that we get informed that the "Total Download" is your threshold for a full month of service! Let me repeat that: Numbers are your allowance for a WHOLE MONTH! Thus your daily allowance is about 16 megs. Something on the order of 15 min worth of 192 kb MP3 files. More than that and you are heading for the RUP.
My friends, if you have no need for any more data than in the RUP table, this service is worth considering. If you want to add some micro$oft "security" patches or download a power point or watch a few youtubes, you will be disappointed.
Conclusion: Not doing this any more. Did my year and refuse to continue. Even if I could get no better, I would still have taken it down in favour of straight plain old dialup. Fortunately I convinced a local wISP to put me in a 900 mHz link. Now for the price of "bronze" skywayusa plus the required POTS line, I have 5x better ping times, 6x better speed, and no stinking UnReasonable Policy (URP). It would appear the only thing to do with skywayusa equipment is to scrap it. I cannot imagine that anyone would want to buy it.
