Skyway USA : Read this post before you sign up
trnc...@yahoo.com
I have been a skyway USA customer for about a year now. I live in a
rural location, putting me out of reach for cable and DSL. I am behind
a SLICK, so I only have 28.8 dialup service for the outbound
connection.
I am on the skyway USA bronze plan, 200 kbps for 29.99 a month.
I have an SW-10 Satellite modem, using a 10 MB network link to my lan
(wired and wireless)
Here are my observations:
1) skyway Tech Support is not that knowledgeable. They have a variety
of canned responses to technical questions. I am having difficulty
connecting to pop servers on the standard port. skyway's response:
reboot your computer and restart the satellite modem.
2) There is latency in loading web pages through the SW-10
In the pci card based version (used before they switched from ISAT to
PAS-1R), there was not as much latency.
3) The socks port offers limited access to non-http requests. iTunes
will time out, often rebuffering 6 or 7 times in a 30 minute span.
4) The SW-10 is based on linux, and I think it is running apache. I
have been able to remotely connect and disconnect using some shell
scripts on OS X and Linux machines.
5) The SW-10 has a built-in DHCP server and a fixed ip of 192.168.30.1
If the network is not configured to retrieve ip addresses dynamically,
even if you set the subnet to allow access to the 192.168.30.x ip
address range, the SW-10 will not respond to any network not on it's
range. The subnet is set to 255.255.255.0 and unless you plead with
skyway Tech Support to give you the magic password to the hidden
network config page, you are out of luck.
Overall, it does what it advertises...provides BASIC broadband web site
access. Don't think for a minute it will allow you to: ftp, run a ptp
file client, access standard pop ports (even to skyway's servers!), or
anything that relies on a name server to resolve a host name.
The SW-10 just doesn't cut the mustard for those types of requests.
Why am I ranting? Because I spent a lot of money on a system that is
advertised to do more than it can and I want to persuade others to not
be lured by it's low price, only to be frustrated.
caveat emptor -- buyer beware