Satellite Internet Service Too Slow, Customers Say

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March 24, 1998 (12:00 AM EST)

Satellite Internet Service Too Slow, Customers Say

By MargieSemilof,

A high-speed Internet access satellite service is falling victim to its own success.

Hughes Network Systems is at odds with some of its customers, who claim the company is not providing the access speeds it promises. The vendor denies the charges.

Customers say the service, DirecPC, which requires customers to buy a satellite dish to get one of several grades of high-speed access, is oversold.

DirectPC began as a service for businesses, but last winter was relaunched as a consumer Internet access service, or as a means to receive TV reception, said Fritz Stolzenbach, senior marketing specialist at Hughes.

When a customer signs up for DirecPC, he or she must buy the satellite dish, which is sold in mainstream retail chain stores, and a DirectPC card.

The entire package costs about $299. Satellite dish installation costs about $150 extra. The service also requires Microsoft's Windows 95 and a Pentium II-class computer.

Customers sign up for an account using a CD-ROM that comes with the product. There are several service packages for consumers to choose from, ranging from $19.95 for the Moonsurfer, which lets customers on the Internet from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. and advertises speeds of 200 Kbits per second. On the other end is the Moonsurfer 2, which, for $39.99, gives users speeds of up to 400 Kbps.

Customers who want Web access during the day get five free hours of unlimited use at 200 Kbps, and after that time runs out they are charged $3.95 per hour. Hughes also sells the service to corporations and business accounts.

Many customers have said that when the service works, it works well. However, others complain the carrier does not deliver the performance speeds it promises. Several customers said they are considering filing a class-action suit.

"I don't think I've ever seen anything above the speed of ISDN," said John Lundell, senior network analyst at Manta Technologies, a Barrington, Ill., company that trains IBM AS/400 users.

Regarding performance, customers said they never see speeds near the 400 Kbps advertised. They also charge that the company's tech support staff is poorly trained and lacks a general technical expertise.

These customers also say Hughes has enacted a fair access policy that slows a user's access speed if the company thinks the customer is abusing the system. They say Hughes does not have a clear definition of what constitutes abuse.

Stolzenbach answered the complaints by saying many DirecPC customers purchased the service assuming it would give 400 Kbps whenever they asked for it, regardless of their application.

He said many of those who are complaining are abusing the system by downloading CDs and running ISPs off DirecPC, for example.

"Our policy is to provide for the vast majority of customers exactly what they expect to get, which is, if the Internet can cough up the information fast enough, we will get it to customers up to the speed they purchased," Stolzenbach said.

"Anyone familiar with TCP/IP knows there is no technology that can deliver instantaneous, full-throttle speed as soon as you click on a URL," he added.

Stolzenbach said DirecPC has about 60,000 to 70,000 customers worldwide and insists that system capacity is not an issue. If the system were truly bogged down, Hughes could activate a new transponder.

He said the system is designed for casual Web users, but that contradicts its original intent, even according to Hughes.

DirecPC started as a business-to-business service. In fact, DirecPC's first customer was IBM, which used it to ship software upgrades. Stolzenbach said word spread that the service could deliver very fast Internet service and Hughes started making DirecPC available to individual users.

Although these early customers proved to be power users, because there were relatively small numbers of them, the service could support their use. As their numbers grew, the problems started. Now Hughes is migrating DirecPC to the casual user, Stolzenbach said.