anyone using a satalite connection(up and down)

[dog-god]

this is the first high speed being offered in my area ,cable and asdl at least a year off,
i was wondering if anyone is using it and thier opinoin of it
what is being offered is
400 kb down,128 up
3 gig montly down
no limit on up ,but its not really designed for that
after 3 gigs ,3 cents(euro) a mb
price espensive but cheaper than my phone bills
150 euro a month
min 2 years contract
there are no cheap phone connections
this is in ireland


all feedback appreciated
ps i realise that gaming online is useles with this

[shadoe_phantom]

couldn't tell you dog-god, as all ISPs are different. I had a sat connection in Canada & when doing work for some groups in asia. The one in canada was much better (cause friend owned the business), & was able to test it upto 3Mb/s down & 140KB up(though for every day use, it was set to 140KB down & 80KB up).
They do tend to work well if your provider has a good connection as well. The settings you are talking about, seems like kilobits (kb) & not KiloBytes (KB), so you would be expecting a speed of around 50KB download & 16KB upload. This is still very good, especially if you're not in the city (don't forget you're not in the North America where you can easily get a DSL/Cable line of 2Mb down & 1Mb up for fairly cheap).
I don't know how well your ISP is in Ireland, but a 2 year contract is a long time. You should do some checking up with their service at either the better business bureau there or from other subscribers using them. Also they require a huge cache file on your HDD of about 400MB (at least that was back then *3 years ago).
Hope you have the best of luck with them.

[sarahjh]

be very careful before parting with money
do not make upfront payments for equipment or service

most of these guys go bust in a few months
cos the service the offer just don't work
leaving you with a load of useless equipment!

At least they have done in the UK
try to get a rental for service and equipment
so you can stop paying if they don't produce the goods