I visited the DirecWay Web site to try and find out about it. Naturally, being a geek I wanted one number: bandwidth. According to the FAQ:

Q: How fast is the DIRECWAY System?
A: The experience with DIRECWAY high-speed Internet is astonishing. When comparing typical activities with a dial-up service, the difference in the amount of time you'll be waiting for what you want is night and day.



You can download software upgrades in just minutes, versus up to an hour. There's no more waiting for Web pages to fully finish loading; they are typically done within a couple of seconds. Getting your favorite song can be done in less than the song's length rather than three times as long.

As you can see this is a huge improvement...and broadband by satellite is the only high-speed Internet technology that's available everywhere in the continental U.S.!



Astonishing. Right....

So I called their toll-free number to talk to a real live moron.

R: "How fast is DirecWay?"

M: "Uhhh...fast"

R: "No, really, how fast?"

M: "Wadda ya mean?"

R: "You know, the number, the bits per second--like, a dial-up modem is 56 thousand bits per second. How many bits per second with DirecWay?"

[Shuffling of papers]

M: "Uhhh...a hunnerd n' forty"

R: "You mean, 140 kilobits?"

M: "Yeah"

R: "That's all? Wasn't your old DirecPC system 400 kilobits?"

M: "Uhhh, yeah, but DirecPC's obsolete. Ya gotta buy DirecWay"

R: "I can't upgrade?"

M: "No. You have to buy DirecWay"

R: "Why would I want to trade in my old DirecPC system " [I lied--I don't have DirecPC] "to get a slower connection?"

M: "This is better. It's two way."

R: "Oh. OK, how fast is the uplink?"

M: "Three twenty"

R: "You mean 320 kilobits?"

M: "Yeah"

R: "So uplink is faster than downlink?"

M: "Yeah. That's why it's better"

R: "But if I'm not running a Web site, why would I care about fast uplink?"

M: "Uhhh....it's better. And it only costs 579 dollars..." and blah blah blah from the prepared script.

It's never ceased to amaze me that a company like Hughes with so much satellite experience could get satellite Internet so wrong.

--Robert