Wildblue Issues

[Andrewwski]

Hi, everyone. I'm posting this in regards to a problem that a family member is having with Wildblue internet.

They got WB last August for their house, at which no cable or DSL is available. They are on the 1.5 mbps down plan, I think it's $89.99 or so.

The problem is that it seems to be very slow, but inconsistently slow. Sometimes it works fine, you can run a bandwidth test and get a full 1.5 mbps, other times it seems to slow right to a crawl. But it happens very quickly - you could have a good connection for 30 seconds and then an awful one for a minute. Very short bursts.

When they first got the service, it was nothing short of terrible. The connection was very intermittent - you couldn't surf the internet practically. Even downloading emails was tough. They had the installer back out, who did a bunch of things. He changed the head on the dish, and verified that it had good signal. He installed some kind of optimizer software, and tweaked a bunch of network settings. That may have helped some, but it didn't seem to do much. He then called WB and they placed the account on the top of some sort of priority list, giving them greater access or something, and the speed shot way up. Got much better than it was.

Well, that didn't seem to solve it. If it did, it didn't last too long. The connection is still intermittent - not as bad as it was before, but not great. Downloading emails can sometimes take awhile, and surfing is still intermittent. The connection is completely useless for other web-based devices, such as the IP thermostat they're trying to use.

They're going to call WB back out again and see what they can do. The dish seems peaked properly. There's about 75 feet of cable between the dish and the modem - it's solid copper core RG6 that the installer provided. One dual ground block and two barrel connectors also provided by the installer - they are both in good condition. So that doesn't seem like an issue. We've tried bypassing the router and going directly to the modem and that doesn't help, so it's not a LAN problem.

The modem has not been replaced, but the tech didn't find anything he thought was wrong with it. Could it be something that WB is doing to allocate connections?

I don't know which satellite the dish is pointing at, but it's in the same general direction as the Dish 500 pointing at 110/119.

Should it work better than this? I understand satellite internet isn't perfect - there's latency and stuff, but surely it should be better than this. Unfortunately they are too far away for cable/DSL to ever be practical, and there's no Clearwire or wireless broadband available either. There's always Verizon or AT&T stuff, but that's even more expensive. If we can't get this solved, is HughesNet any better?

[daddyzlod]

I had Wildblue fof 2 1/2 years, and finally got rid of it., and went with Alltel wireless, which was real good the
first 10 months, and now seems like a little better than dial up, since Verizon took them over. The WB did
cut out quite a bit when it rained, which the Alltel does not. I think they oversold most of the beams, which in
turn, made it slower. I also noticed that the last few months that I had WB, that even the downloads where
much slower, and that was one of it's strong points. I think now that most of these company's are full of shit
with greed, and all they know is higher prices, for less product, and more exec. pay & bonuses.

[bradleys]

Andrewwski,

I have HughesNet right now in Blaine, with about 200 feet of cable.

Until recently I had Xplornet in Port McNeill, with about 100 feet of cable.

Both of those satellite services work/worked much better than what you have described.

Neither connection was as good as my Clearwire in Seattle or my cable-internet in Port McNeill, but they are/were eminently usable.

FWIW

[PhillySky]

They should do a full check for viruses, or if they are running any peer to peer programs, they should shut them off. Those can sometimes slow down a computer, which in turn makes the Internet seem slow also.

[Andrewwski]

Yeah, everything's clean as far as that goes. No viruses, no P2P stuff. They have two residences and have DSL at their other residence and the same laptops work great there.

I posted this same thing on WB's official forum and a WB rep looked into it, said everything looked fine on their end, but she couldn't set up a troubleshooting call as they actually have WB through Dish, so we need to go through Dish for that.

I still don't know what the problem is, but it's definitely a problem. Page loads sometimes take forever. I know there's a good second of latency, but even once a page begins loading it loads real slow - the connection often drops to a really slow speed or drops out totally.

[phpinfo]

Wildblue is the worst service ever and they have horrible customer service. - I use Starband, which is great on Cluster 80.

Plus they are switching to 121W right now. Supposed to be more reliable with better architecture.

[Stalker]

I had internet satellite several years ago and it was not very good then either but a shade better than dial up of course. My service was satellite down and dial up back up tho.

I do know with satellite internet weather plays a big factor of course and I also know when they point and align the dish they have a much smaller window to work with as opposed to TV satellite which means if it is off by a miniscule degree you will not get great connection or speed.

Also be aware they have an FPS that is way lower than cable and dsl allows meaning exceed your download bandwidth allotment for the day and your speed will be cut off to dialup for 5 hours if I remember right

[sharky5485]

Also be aware they have an FPS that is way lower than cable and dsl allows meaning exceed your download bandwidth allotment for the day and your speed will be cut off to dialup for 5 hours if I remember right

24HRS. AT LEAST WITH HUIGHESNET.

[Wildblue1]

The reason that I'm asking is that WB has had some of the worst installs in history. I recently started with DSI doing installs, but also checking out poor performing modems on site. I have found that 8 out of 10 of these poor performers were *terrible* installs and usually end up reinstalling the entire system.

Take pictures of the whole thing; up close at the dish (front and sides), look at the model number on the cable (a lot of installers take the cheap way out and buy copper clad cable, which is non-compliant and does not effectively carry the signal). Also look at the ground block (if it's even there), are the barrels white or blue?

One small issue usually doesn't amount to a huge reduction in throughput, but a combination of installation failures can cause your TRIA to burn out or kill the modem.

[Andrewwski]

The installation looks good to me. Dish is pole mounted and seems to be very sturdy, all connections look good, cables are run neatly and ground blocks seem to be connected correctly, etc. It's solid copper RG6, so no issues there.

They are nowhere near the bandwidth cap - 17 gb/month on their plan.

The modem has not been changed out yet, maybe I'll see if they'll do that next. I suppose that could be quirky as well.