WildBlue is SLOW!!!

Monday Feb 6th 2006

My ISP is WildBlue. Satellite internet. The day will not come soon enough where I can ditch this shit. Okay I’m happy with the fact it’s faster than dial-up, but there are some major drawbacks.

I upload and download a lot of stuff. WildBlue has “thresholds” on how much you can transfer per month - it is not unlimited (something I didn’t find out until after I signed up). Tap the threshold and WildBlue will throttle your connection speeds.

Speed is roughly half the speed of traditional cable internet. Maybe a tad faster than that but not by much. The proof is in the ping replies. On my old cable ISP I used to routinely get under 300ms ping times when pinging my own site. On WildBlue, it’s at least 600 and sometimes over 1000. That’s bad, not good.

Online gaming on WildBlue? Forget about it.

VoIP (like Vonage) on WildBlue? Forget about it.

With FTP I absolutely (it’s not an option) have to use passive connections. Active never works.

Side note: For those using satellite internet that are pulling their hair out trying to get FTP to work, use UltraFXP. It’s free and easily allows use of passive (PASV) FTP connections.

If using DreamWeaver MX, edit the “site”, then go to Remote Info and tick the option for Passive FTP. Transfers will still take a long time but it will work.

Stable connection? Nope. Drops at least two times a day for at least five minutes.

It will not be soon enough when I can ditch this crappy connection. Again I’ll say it’s better than dial-up.. but doesn’t hold a candle to cable or DSL.

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