Voip & Consumer Satellite Internet: Does it Work?

For a fairly small but growing group of individuals and small businesses, voip via satellite internet is the only phone service available for some areas of the U.S. and Canada. Regretfully it suddenly stopped working for consumer customers of DirecWay last summer and has never worked very well for Wildblue users in the U.S. The ka band users in Canada (Telesat Canada) seem to be able to connect some voip products without too much difficulty. Why does it work for some and not others? Why did it work acceptably for U.S. DirecWay customers for a couple of years and suddenly stop working in the summer of 2005? I think I partially know the answer - it's called maximizing profitability!

Yes, the most likely reason voip has suddenly gone kaput in the U.S. for DirecWay users has a lot to do with the way DirecWay has chosen to handle upload data packets. Without boring you with a level of detail that would likely get me in over my head, I believe that DirecWay (and Wildblue for that matter) have discovered that by increasing the "burstiness" and packet handling (dropping more packets and not resending them) of the upload or inroute traffic and making some other changes at the Network Operations Centers that completely elude me (Wildblue calls them Gateway's), the two internet providers can all but eliminate voip traffic. Additionally, they can probably give users a bit better speeds during "prime time" usage. Whether it was done purposefully or by accident remains unknown and no one to my knowledge has been able to give a detailed reason or for the sudden voip crash. Theories abound, but that is another article and better done by Engineers.

Both companies have stated publicly or privately that they don't support voip traffic; however, DirecWay has indicated they are going to offer a "proprietary" voip product sometime in early 2006...very interesting! No public word from Wildblue, but they are in fierce competition with DirecWay for market share and are probably working on some type of offering as well. How will they do it? They will likely "route" this proprietary voip traffic that you buy from them through different equipment at the NOC's or Gateway's so it will not be subject to the degree of burst and jitter that is now present.

There has been a lot of energy expended by former voip users trying to get some product to work over a DirecWay or Wildblue connection. The only products that are remotely successful are outbound only calling products which use the Crystal Voice ( http://www.crystalvoice.com/ ) technology. It seems to be more "adaptive" to rapidly changing conditions of a satellite connection. They have their own product available and sell the technology to Net Zero and perhaps some others...all are outbound only as far as I've seen so far.

If you are buying satellite internet in order to get telephone connectivity to a remote area the only satellite connections I am sure will work with outbound/inbound calls are all considered "Enterprise" connections. Satellite Ground Stations like ku Band Surfbeam, iDirect or the DirecWay 7700 series will work with most any voip solution out there. You can get more information about all of these solutions here: www.vsatus.com , email: randy@vsatus.com or call Randy Scott toll free @ 1-866-978-4613.

Ku Band Surfbeam - It Works Well...

I have been testing a Ku Band Surfbeam groundstation for a fairly new entrant in the vsat world, Unasat Communications LLC for the last 4 weeks. They are affiliated with one of the largest independent telephone companies in the U.S. - Wood County Telephone Co. out of Wisconsin.
The standard vsat internet setup is a 1.2 meter dish, the Surfbeam SM-1000 modem and either a two or four watt transmitter. I have tested both the 2 watt and 4 watt setup's and must say they are impressive. The speeds are dependable, pings are enterprise quality over 80% of the time and voip works flawlessly.
The 4 watt setup is downright enterprise speed and quality. I have 5000 kbps downloads and after some adjustments now see uploads in excess of 600 kbps regularly.
This is not a setup intended to compete with consumer products in price, although the most expensive equipment can be purchased for less than $2,000 and installed for about $500 or so. The two watt setup is priced around $1,250 with similar install costs.
The service ranges from a Small Office setup (500/128 kbps) to the Enterprise setup I have (5000/768 kbps). Monthly cost starts at $49.95 and tops out at $629.99. The service has no monthly limitation on usage; however, they do have the right to throttle you if you are an abusive customer. The nice thing about this approach is that for those who need to download an update to their operating system, the service will accomodate you without any throttling.
The satelllite used for this service is Intelsat's IA 8 which was launched last year and is state of the art ku band technology. The modem and uplink equipment is manufactured by ViaSat. This is the DOCSIS technology of packet handling which is proving itself to be a competitive, stable and dependable alternative to Digital Video Broadcast methods used by most of the ku band internet providers including iDirect.
For more information about this new product, contact Randy Scott at 1-866-978-4613 or email Randy
at randy@vsatus.com

Wildblue Communications....Ka Band Chaos?

The faithful early adopters of Wildblue Communications new ka band satellite internet service are trying their best to make the best of it these days. Seems the fledgling new satellite internet provider and first company to offer the long awaited ka band satellite internet service is having more than a bumpy “rollout” of new service – it’s downright chaotic right now by some users comments I've seen.

Customer equipment is failing after only 1-2 months in service; Regional Network Operations Centers are adding, replacing and upgrading due to inaedequate gateway equipment capacity; the installers for Wildblue have not been adequately prepared for the issues they have encountered in the field and the new customer base of just under 25,000 is growing impatient about the job being done by the NRTC and Wildblue to keep it all glued together.

With outages more frequent than the chief competitor DirecWay has seen in a while, a good number of new users of the Wildblue ka band approach are second guessing themselves right now. There are a few folks who changed to Wildblue’s new service and kept their DirecWay or Starband dish setup's having to rely on those connections now for connectivity during outages.

One of the original Master Distributors not related to the NRTC effort, RS & I , decided to pull out of distribution of the Wildblue products back in September and the CEO (and co-founder) of Wildblue has been replaced with a operations oriented executive from Liberty Media. He has his hands full…as problems are cropping up faster than the Wildblue staff can solve them. Customers are posting dismal upload speeds on the Wildblue user forums, reporting daily outages of 5 min to 5 hours and complaining of “clueless” tech support personnel and installers who don’t follow established procedures during installations.

Wildblue and the NRTC appear unable to solve the problems with several "beams" and in a rush to quell the criticism are sending technicians out to swap out transmitters, modems and cabling...it's beginning to look like they may not have an effective game plan for dealing with inevitable "issues" that occur in this industry. In their defense, Wildblue has been quick to admit to the issues and maintain they have a plan to straighten things out as quickly as possible...a most refreshing change to what has gone on for quite some time in this industry, but it remains to be seen if they can deliver advertised speeds and continue the rollout of this new service at a pace competitive with other service providers in the market now and those coming online soon.

On a separate but equally important front, Wildblue Communications is operating at a significant loss right now with so few customers and will need an influx of operating capital very soon to continue the introduction of services and handle the replacement and upgrading of so much field equipment. I would expect an announcement soon about Telesat or Liberty Media injecting capital or perhaps merging the company into their own…….I would be surprised to see any more money coming from the NRTC – the membership Coop's are also losing a lot of money on this venture and are not likely to be happy with how things have gone so far.

Stay tuned….this is an emerging story.