Specifications

The satellite internet business as a whole is rather small. Direcway is the largest at

250,000 subscribers. This number pales to the number of subscribers for DSL and cable

modems. A 2005 survey put the number of Americans with broadband access in their

homes to the internet at 57 million. It took 6 years for Direcway to get 1/4 of a million

subscribers while a cable company such as Comcast adds more than 400,000 broadband

subscribers in a single 3 month quarter.

There are other satellite providers such as Starband, Galileo, Tachyon, and soon –

someday – WildBlue. Starband seems to be doing OK now that they have emerged from

chapter 11 bankruptcy and they are pricing their systems above Direcway but it is

obvious they are still a very unsteady company. Galileo and Tachyon are not for

consumers but for businesses only; finally, WildBlue will launch someday, hopefully, to

compete with Direcway on price and speed.

Without any real competition the pricing structure for Direcway has not changed from the

time of its inception around 1998. This is extremely rare in the technology sector as input

costs continue to decrease it would be expected that hardware or services would become

cheaper. It is very probable that any cost savings seen by Direcway, past their initial start

up, has been absorbed into Hughes itself as increased profits. It will take a concerted

effort by WildBlue to force any price changes by Direcway as they have such a

commanding lead of the marketplace.

Believe it or not, Direcway is priced at the low end of the VSAT services industry. Two

way satellite communications is the most expensive method of communications for the

bandwidth received. It is only viable because it is available anywhere there is a clear view

to the southern sky.

Direcway is priced and supported by Hughes just as if it were any one of their other

VSAT services. They view the residential users as small business users that have the

financial and technical ability to support their usage of a Hughes provided service. They

have made some allowance by having a first level support desk located in India that is

staffed with people conversant in Microsoft Windows and the configuration of a

DW6000 to a single PC. Otherwise the user is expected to behave like a business client.

When they purchase the service they buy the equipment out right, they have access to

non-Direcway networking technicians that can assist them in building networks and

providing on site support. Any on site maintenance, service, and configuration work will

be performed by such technicians at added cost to the user.

Hughes does not maintain any field personnel. The installers for all of their VSAT

products are subcontracted by national distributors. This means that the installer that

arrives at your door is an independent contractor probably from a small dish satellite

company or even better from a data communication company that does satellite

communications as well. A computerized system assigns your install/repair to one of two

distributors that then further computer assigns the service order to one of many

subcontractors that handle work in a given area. Hughes, the Federal Communications