Bummer. Three days now and my Starband rural satellite broadband service has been offline.
I pride myself in being a fairly competent geek, multilingual in my discipline (Mac and PeeCee). When I heard word of Starband's legal problems and subsequent filing for bankruptcy, I got a bit nervous. Then Starband said they got it all worked out, both with Echostar (DISH Network partner providers) and in the bankruptcy courts.
So anyhow, I get an email saying there's an updated Starband client software available for download. My rule of thumb is to wait five days before downloading and installing, in hopes that other less prudent customers might have ruined their systems by upgrading immediately and in the meanwhile, given the company time to produce an improved patch. Five days was not enough.
Started getting buggy when I first updated. Now, nothing but borrowed 28k slowband dialup through the only local call ISP available in my area.
At the very least, my GeekEgo was spared today when the installer came by to check things out. After spending four hours doing everything I had been doing for the last three days (including spending a fair amount of time talking to Starband tech support), he concluded as I had -- the modem has gone bad.
But he's got the certification which makes his diagnosis believable and authoritative. Fortunately for me, my modem has one month left under warranty. Better yet, the new modem (which should arrive by Thursday at the latest) ought to have an additional 90 days from the day I receive it. Even more fortunately for me, the installer was gracious and only charged me $75 dollars to sit here almost 5 hours total and do everything I had done over the last several days (uninstalling this, reinstalling that, unstalling again and revertion to a previous version, etc. etc.).
So, back to slowband for me -- at least for a few days. Talk about yer headaches... :-D
