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I've had a Direcway system for several months and I really like it, although it's definitely not perfect. Like you, I live out in the country where I can't get cable or DSL. Our phone line quality is so bad that on a good day I was only getting about 24K connection speed. With the satellite, the download speed is terrific. However, there's some overhead to how it operates, if you think about what it's got to do. When you request an URL, that request has got to go all the way out to the satellite and back down to earth, somewhere. Then, the URL has to be located by their system and the transfer actually starts. The data has to go from wherever it is to Direcway's system, out to the satellite and back down to your house. All that takes a little bit of time, not bad though. Once it starts loading, it's there really fast. So, although it takes it a little bit to get started, the overall time to complete a page load is pretty darn quick. If you're downloading monster files, the speed is amazing. I downloaded an internet explorer update that would've taken several hours via dialup in about 15 minutes. I'm not sure what the upload speed is. It's not too bad, though. Most people don't use upload near as much as download, anyhow. I haven't found it to be objectionable. The system does have the same disadvantage as the satellite TV systems in that bad weather will interrupt the signal. That's really not too often, though. Overall, I'm really pleased with the system. Blake '52 8N512510
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