3
Background
Direcway is a high speed satellite internet service that is used by those of us lucky few
who can not get high speed internet service from any other provider. Direcway is a
wholly owned product of Hughes Network Services which in turn, is wholly owned by a
partnership between SkyTerra Communications and the DirecTV Group.
Probably the hardest thing to teach new customers is that Direcway is not like your local
phone and cable companies. Direcway is a marketing product line from Hughes Network
Services. Hughes Network Services is an international satellite communications
company. They do not see themselves as being an Internet Service Provider. This is an
important distinction from Insight, Comcast, or South Central Bell. Hughes has no desire
to directly deal with small individual consumers or businesses. They want to concern
themselves with the transport of communications via satellite. For this reason they have
outsourced their help desks, manufacturing, distribution, and installation of all products
and services related to the Direcway system. They have gone to great lengths to distance
themselves from the actual users of the Direcway system. One would think that this
structure is a recipe for disaster. It would be if the Direcway product did not maintain
such a monopolistic hold over the consumer VSAT industry.
For the consumer and small business to receive the level of service they would expect
from a “normal” ISP they must learn to deal with schisms. First they have to learn when
to deal with Direcway and when they have to deal with a local support organization.
Then, within Direcway they have to learn which group to deal with internally, and
externally, to Hughes Network Systems to involve for each problem they may encounter.
Some small business have elected to simply pay their local technical provider, such as
CPE Labs, to handle all of their support issues in dealing with the multiple personalities
that Direcway can have.
Direcway is a service we love to hate. Internally to Hughes it is treated like an interesting
step child to the much larger VSAT business they control. Hughes provides commercial
VSAT services for Chevron stations, hotel chains, and other major corporations. If you
see a VSAT dish on a business it is a good chance that it is a Hughes VSAT client. The
number of Direcway clients is roughly 225,000 as of January 1, 2005 while the number
of commercial VSAT clients is 650,000. In the first quarter of 2005 2.6 million
subscribers were added to the cable and DSL ranks.
There is a growing digital divide being erected between the number of city and town
dwellers with effectively very cheap broadband access and the rural dwellers with few
but expensive broadband access. Most rural citizens are forced to buy infrastructure
facilities while their urban brethren are able to spread the costs of such infrastructure over
a wide population.
The FCC reports as of 2005 that there is at least one wired broadband product offering in
95% of all U.S. zip codes. Also, this covers 99% of the country’s population in those zip
codes.
(24 pages)
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