WIth thanks to the folks at Ground Control and Direcway I'm once again using a dialup connection for the next week or two. Having had plenty of problems with the "Web Acceleration" of Direcway causing problems I decided to place a call to the satellite provider's 24x7 tech support.

First off it took several hours and in excess of twenty calls to have a single conversation. Every time I'd talk the satellite voice over IP connection on the other end would die and that was it. Once we got through that it turns out that the unnecessary "reset your DirecWay 4020" request was not only unnecessary, but also prevented my connection from working. So I was promised a call back in half an hour (the customer service manager and DirecWay's help desk were both not responding according to the customer service representative). Two hours later still no call. Being one to give the benefit of the doubt I thought maybe it was taking longer and waited until this morning.

A very rude customer service rep did everything but claim I'd been out moving the dish all night and instead of offering any sort of apology for the inconvenience and damages caused by Ground Control's errant attempts to solve a problem related to the cache on DirecWay's server, I'm now without connections. Once the problem is resolved I can share my customer service experience with Satellite World in Henderson, Nevada.

He could not seem to grasp that a user might expect a company which claims: Ground Control maintains an internal staff of highly trained satellite technicians. We know business satellite Internet. should be expected to not cause more problems. If, as the person this morning claimed, the problem is because of a "moved" dish then prior to starting the procedure, which again had nothing to do with the problem, that this procedure could fail if your dish has moved in the slightest.

The long and short of it is that a weekend expected to have a large component of web programming has instead been spent trying to correct the errors of a service provider who seems unlikely to do the right thing for their customer.