Melissa and I are currently using Wildblue satellite internet service. Overall, I find it to be a very good alternative to dialup. I get excellent bandwidth and about an 800ms average ping, with no special client-side hardware. Best of all, it’s no more expensive than DSL or Cable internet.
The bad side is that over the last month, I’ve been getting disconnected 1-3 times per night. It’s really kind of out of control. I have a theory about why it’s happening though. Obviously, skip this post if you’re not a geek.
Observations:
- Outages can occur with the connection light on the satellite modem (2nd LED from the top) either on or off. Usually the light is still on when an outage occurs, but both do occur.
- Waiting sometimes restores service with no intervention from myself.
- Resetting the modem *always* restores service, immediately. (thus, while it could be a problem with my modem, it is at least not a permanent hardware failure of any sort)
- My router is not at fault. I have stopped resetting my router during outages and now only reset the modem. Resetting the modem itself (but not the router) fully restores service each time I have tried it that way (perhaps the last 8-10 outages).
- Wildblue is reducing the bandwidth allowances in their FAP by 25% as of today. (the Fair Access Policy is the document that governs the amount of bandwidth you are allowed to consume per 30 day period, based on which tier of service you purchase)
- Technical support is not at all helpful with these outages, but simply walks me through a modem/router reset. (ie, instead of addressing the cause of the outage, the symptoms are merely addressed) They always manage to spend 20-30 minutes of my time doing this, but never manage to realize that I’ve already been through this with them many times before.
Based on these observations, my conclusion is fairly obvious. The reduction of the FAP tells me that wildblue’s current infrastructure is not capable of managing the load that their customer base places upon it. Just as electricity providers do in the event of a shortage, they seem to have implemented “rolling blackouts” of a sort, disconnecting clients for random amounts of time to artificially reduce load on the system.
While this is just an educated guess on my part, I feel that it’s a reasonable conclusion to draw from the facts available to me. What do you think?
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