Broadband of Brothers

More Wild Blue Broadband Avilable in March

Russ Steele

Aviation Week reports that Wild Bule will turn on a dedicted satellite in March 2007. Details below.

New U.S. Satellite Showcases Two-Way Broadband Market, Michael A. Taverna

WildBlue Yonder

The first dedicated commercial Ka-band broadband spacecraft will commence operation early this year, underscoring the sudden maturing of this long-awaited new satcom application.

The 4.7-metric-ton, 9.6-kw. spacecraft, WildBlue-1, was orbited on the night of Dec. 8 from the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, atop an Ariane 5 ECA booster. From its perch at 111 deg. W. Long., WildBlue-1, built by Space Systems/Loral, will provide 1.5 Mbps. of data down and 256 kbps. up to rural and small town households and small businesses underserved by terrestrial telecom lines. Its 35 spot beams will reach all 48 contiguous states of the U.S.

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WildBlue claims it has already attracted 100,000 subscribers and is adding new users at a rate of 10,000 per month. Service starts at $49.95 per month and $79.95 for full data rate service, plus $7.95 per month for remote dial-up. Equipment, including 26-in. dish antenna, retails at $299 and installation costs an additional $129.95 plus tax.

Link to  Wild Blue Web site

Wondered if satellite Internet will work for you?

Russ Steele

The Sierra County Business and Economic Development Committee is holding a workshop on bringing high speed internet services to Sierra County Saturday, September 23, 2006 at the Calpine Community Hall. The Plumas Sierra Rural Electric Cooperative will have a hands-on van with their “Wild Blue” satellite service on display.  This is an opportunity to get a real world demo of “Wild Blue” and some opportunities to win some hi-tech toys. More details here.

It is also an opportunity to check out Sierra County economic development activities and opportunities. If you have not been to Calpine and Gray Eagle, you are missing a great some great scenery and some great food, and maybe an economic opportunity.  We used satellite based WiFi at some really remote camp sites in the Canadian Rockies.   It has some lag time, but it works a lot faster than dial-up.

UPDATE:  WORK SHOP CANCELED DUE TO FIRES ON HWY 49.

The challenge of getting high-speed Internet in Nevada County

Russ Steele

Laura Brown writes in the Business Section of the Union Internet service inconsistent, August 15, 2006

There is high-speed Internet for everyone in western Nevada County, it just depends how much you want to pay for it.

Many residents are fed up with slow dial-up, and yet for those who live outside city limits, some as little as four miles away, there are no companies who provide traditional broadband service.

Read the whole article, it is a good summary of the challenges facing rural residents who are seeking a high speed connection to the Internet.

Making security choice can be confusing

Russ Steele

Bob another Wildblue Customer writes in an e-mail:

I had another "event" this weekend concerning our networking.  For no apparent reason our Linksys wireless G router quit cooperating.  After spending a couple hours rebooting the router, the Wildblue modem, reinstalling the router and the PCMCIA wireless adapter I finally broke-down and called Linksys tech. 

Turns out the security setting I chose when I completed the install of the router on Saturday was not compatible with some versions of XP or at least the tech said it was not compatible unless you had service pack 2, which I know we have!.  Anyway there are five different types of security you can choose from when setting up the wireless network.  Linksys doesn't suggest any preference in the setup routine.  I just picked the first and least complicated looking one, WPA.  Turns out that one was the wrong choice.  The tech wanted me to use WEP.  WEP worked, and after spending at least three hours of MY Saturday fixing something that seemed to have broken all on it's own, my wife was up and running on Wildblue again. 

Three Weeks with Wild Blue

From John Powers

It's been three nearly-mellow weeks with AT&T Wild Blue. It started with a call to AT&T who took my credit card number and put me in contact with an approved, independent installer for my "free installation" service. It takes a week to get the installer to come all the way to rural Nevada County and when he showed up it was "Oh, oh. This is a 'non-standard installation'. We can't install the dish on your house, the trees are in the way. You'll have to put the dish on a pole." Not just an ordinary pole, mind you. This is not Echostar DISH where they bolt the dish to a tree and run the coax over the ground. Wild Blue has much, much stricter specifications. I asked the installer to show me exactly where to put the pole and told him to come back the next week. It took a 2-3/8-inch galvanized, thick-walled corner fence post, a 3-foot-deep hole, 300 pounds of concrete, and 50 feet of 1-inch buried conduit to prepare the site for the Wild Blue installation. The next week, the installer installed all the hardware and brought the cables into my home office. I insisted that he bring them up inside the wall and install a connector plate on the wall. He connected the cables to the special Wild Blue modem and the modem to my iMac. The next steps involved a toll-free telephone call and some interaction with the Wild Blue web site. I expected the installer to then connected the Wild Blue modem to my router and make sure it worked with my internal network, but that's not part of the package. He'll connect it to one computer of your choosing (I have several) and verify that it's working, but networking is not included. Okay, so it's working with one computer. So far, so good.

I have Windows PC's (running XP) and an iMac with Mac OS-X 10.4.9 connected to a LinkSys WRT54G wireless router. There's a plug in the back of the router for an "Internet connection" and that's what I plugged the Wild Blue modem into. It took several toll-free telephone calls to LinkSys to get the Wild Blue modem and my network working together. It seems that the WRT54G wireless router has some problems that LinkSys is learning about and I helped them learn. Several calls over the next week or two finally got everything working smoothly. LinkSys tech support was excellent. In the meantime, Wild Blue was working smoothly. The only problem was the router.

I use a local ISP, NCWS, for email and web sites. They are my dial-up host and still are. My Apple Mail worked with Wild Blue without any changes. The change-over was completely transparent. Very nice.

Performance is good, but don't expect zippy browser interaction.Once a download or refresh is started, it's quick. I got the lowest tier, 512kbps, for $49.95 a month and am happy with it. It's 10 times faster than v.92 dial-up and feels like it. I haven't used the "accelerator" software that Wild Blue offers because I don't understand what it really does. If anyone can shed light on whether or not the accelerator software really works, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

So far, so good with AT&T Wild Blue.

--john

Wildblue e-mail solution

Russ Steele

Bob writes how he solved a problem with e-mail on the Wildblue satellite.

My satellite installer, Hugh Tower, directed me to a fellow by the name of Paul Castro for advise and help with trying to make the satellite companies compatible with out existing e-mail addresses.  Paul had two pertinent suggestions.  One was that he did not believe that port 25, the default port, was compatible with authorization.  The other thing he mentioned was that Outlook Express had a long time bug that would not allow some setting changes to be effective until after you shut down the program and started it back up again.

Paul suggested that I try switching to port 587 and shutting down Outlook before testing the change. This worked the first time I tried it. We are up and running at home downloading at 500 and uploading at 200.  Using our existing addresses sending and receiving.

Bob, thanks for sharing.