Review by NH_Guy 
UPDATED: 39 days ago
member for 41 days, 1 visits, last login: 39 days ago
 Greenville,Hillsborough,NH
 Contract price not specified.
 "Minimal investment, self installation, okay price, a step up from dial-up"
 "Chronically overloaded during peak hours, RUP, 2 yr commitment (at the time)"
 "Better than dial-up _when_ it works. Think carefully before committing"
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Alright, I'll admit I'm new here and this is my first review, but here it goes:
Being just out of reach for non-satellite broadband options, and being new to satellite, I decided to give Skyway a try. I was skeptical of the negative reviews for other sat ISPs, and I thought I'd be benevolent by supporting a small to midsized business out of Kentucky. I've been with Skyway since May of 2008, and I'll try to make this as objective as possible.
The equipment is a minimal investment at $150, and at the time they were offering a $100 rebate if I recall correctly, making for a rather enticing deal. The equipment was at my doorstep within a week, and self-installation went about as smoothly as it could have. I mounted the dish on a galvanized pole with a footing, having had no prior installation experience. The first time I aimed the dish, (on AMC-4) it wasn't too tricky using a good compass with a mirror and the included "beeper." For those who are unfamiliar with the process, the beeper is a small device with a monaural headphone that is temporarily installed inline with the coax from the dish. The headphone emits a higher pitched squeal when the dish has the signal squarely in its focus. Novices should note that Skyway is a "one way" sat provider, meaning that outgoing traffic goes over a dial-up connection while incoming traffic is via satellite. This being said, there is only one coaxial cable to run. In summary, self installation is easy to moderate in effort.
As for the quality of the connection, here's my experience: Anyone with a satellite connection will tell you that the most substantial drawback is that, when a lot of customers are using the connection (especially during peak evening hours), it slows down to varying degrees. Bearing that in mind, the download rate varies wildly, so as with any ISP, don't go by the numbers they give you when you sign up. We started out with the "bronze" plan, which supposedly boasts 256K download rates and costs $30 a month. As with most sat providers (if not all of them, nowadays), the "reasonable use policy" (RUP) gradually throttles back download rates as your downloads approach certain thresholds. For the gory details, see »www.skywayusa.com/rup.php. On the bronze plan, it doesn't take much to bring your connection to a crawl. According to the RUP, the slowest rate of "32K" is reached after 2500 MB of downloads in a one month period. The reality is that, because the connection is already pretty slow during the hours you'll probably use it, it's pretty well unusable once you hit the "32K" mark. I can't quantify this with data because I haven't run benchmark tests, but practically speaking, you might as well be on dial-up by the time you hit the lowest RUP level. After a month or so of this, we upgraded to the "silver" plan, ($50/mo) which was a marked improvement. (again, see the RUP for details)
A more serious problem than the throttling, however, is that Skyway's proxy/gateway is chronically overloaded during evening hours, and sometimes during other times of the day. The symptoms consist of the following: Let's say you log on, hypothetically, at 8 PM EST on a Wednesday. The connection will be marginal, slightly better than dial-up. Then, after a few minutes, pages will time out or not load at all, and you may see a proxy error message: "Remote side reported: An outstanding acknowledge pdu was not received in time (probably high udp data loss) The enhancement client proxy could not communicate with the server proxy." You hit refresh and wait for one minute... two minutes... stare at the ceiling and space out... five minutes. Oh, right. I was actually trying to get something done. That's when you lose it and start muttering naughty words. Finally, after about ten or fifteen minutes of it, you contemplate throwing the computer and realize that you have better things to do and log off, vowing to hate-mail Skyway. You secretly resent how much the Skyway staff are enjoying their DSL and cable connections down in Louisville. Ah yes, where was I? The tendency for the dreaded proxy jam to happen seems directly proportional to the urgency of what you're attempting to access. At least dial-up connects reliably, albeit at a snail's pace. One day I started playing with settings on the satellite modem, and noticed that if you delete the entry for the proxy server and save settings, the connection is completely reliable, although much slower due to lack of caching/acceleration. This proves to me that their proxy or its connection is inadequate. When we first signed up, Skyway was using AMC-4, and they assured us that the connection would improve once they moved to AMC-15, which happened in November of 2008. Re-aiming my dish in frigid New Hampshire temperatures wasn't my idea of fun, but I went along with it considering that they offered a 3-month upgrade to the next tier for my trouble. For some reason, aiming for AMC-15 was quite a bit trickier. Thankfully one of their support people connected to the modem and read the detailed signal strength numbers to me while I tweaked the dish. (Why can't they just make those numbers available to the customer?!) A few months later, the chronic proxy overloading returned. Lately, it's literally been just about every night. It's unusable most of the time. That being said, my family and I are beyond fed up. We tried to be patient and give them a fair chance to get things sorted out. Growing from a small business is never easy, but really the bottom line is that their service has to work. $50 a month is a lot to pay for something that only works half of the time. (The half when you're at work or sleeping) As for the claim on their home page, "Enjoy blazing fast email; download photos and music at DSL broadband speed!" Forget it. Blazing fast email? My Gmail account takes, on average during the evening, about two minutes to load, and that's when the proxy feels inclined to work. "DSL broadband speed?" I think they may have... er... misremembered. I had DSL before we moved here, and this is nowhere near DSL. It's not that I ever expected it to be comparable to DSL, as I did quite a bit of reading on here before I signed up; I just think their claims are misleading.
I've emailed Skyway to air my feelings on the matter of the proxy, but emailing them is practically futile, as they don't seem to check it and I've never gotten a reply. On the bright side, I haven't had too much trouble calling them, but there hasn't been a lot of discernible action on their end to remedy to poor connection. That being said, unless some drastic improvement occurs very soon, we're already gone. I'd be lying if I denied that we can't wait for our 2 year contract to be up in May or June.
Thankfully, they've lowered the contractual requirement to a 1 year agreement. If you're feeling the pinch financially, Skyway is a reasonable improvement over dial-up if you can deal with the hassles. You'll be stuck with it for a year, though, so weigh the costs and benefits carefully before you commit. If you cancel early, they'll charge you for the remaining duration of your agreement.
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