F.A.Q.
1. Just how fast is your high-speed internet?
We have four recommended speed offerings to simplify your decision:- Economy service – 128 Kbps down / 64 Kbps (It's four to twenty times faster than typical ICE dialup. It offers reasonable web surfing and email user experience.)
- Basic service – 256 Kbps down / 128 Kbps up 20%CIR (Six times faster than Economy - good for general purpose residential web surfing experience.)
- Enhanced service – 512 Kbps down / 256 Kbps up 20%CIR (Twelve times faster than Economy - good for most tele-commuters.)
- Business service – 512 kbps down / 256 kbps up 50% CIR (One and a half to two times the performance of Enhanced - for the power user.)
We also offer a range of customized service speeds for you to customize your own solution depending on your requirements.
2. What is CIR?
Confirmed Information Rate: the minimum bandwidth available to you at all times.This is a misleading metric that is virtually meaningless. The underlying technologies are more important. Some people use the loose rule of thumb that every over-subscribed user of a capacity lowers the average available capacity by 1%. By that metric, our 48:1 oversubscription should yield an average availability of 52% of the capacity you're paying for. Speed tests will show that you actually achieve much better performance than this.
Our iDirect platform provides a minimum CIR of 8 kbps for uplink and downlink. The platform's fair use software ensures that each customer will never get less than the greater of 8 kbps and 1/48th of the channel's capacity with 48:1 oversubscription(or 1/30th with 30:1 or 1/12th with 12:1) as a worse case. Even this isn't the whole story though. Our platform employs 4:1 compression on all http (i.e. web surfing) traffic. This means that our slowest 64 kbps service performs like 256 kbps. That's why we claim our basic service is 4-20 times faster than dialup. There are other factors; with dial-up the phone company is over-subscribing (some tacos carry as many as 200 sessions!) users on their backhaul trunks and they're splitting a phone line between two households in many cases. That's why users often can't get more than 26 kbps on dialup.
Our philosophy is simple. Pick a 48:1 capacity that is affordable to you. If you are not happy with the performance, you can make an upgrade in service at any time at no additional charge - except the higher monthly service fee, of course.
3. Can we use Skype and other such VoIP technologies?
We offer our customers our Enhanced VoIP telephone service which only uses 20 kbps of inbound and outbound capacity with negligible impact on internet access. Pricing is directly competitive with Vonage so you really couldn't possibly do any better from a pricing perspective. If you use VoIP and you want a satisfactory customer experience, we highly recommend using our VoIP service.
4. Can internet café’s use your service?
No. Due to the bandwidth consumption of internet café’s, this would cause negative impact on other users of our service. We draw the line at hotels and small businesses.5. How do you support your Costa Rican customers from Canada?
We have local installation and support professionals throughout Costa Rica to service your needs.6. What is over-subscription?
All cable, DSL, satellite, and dial-up internet services use a technique called “over-subscription.” More than one user will share a given block of capacity in an over-subscribed environment. This strategy relies on the presumption that not all users will be demanding capacity at the same time. Cable and DSL companies in North America over-subscribe with as many as 1,000 users on a given circuit. Our service uses a low over-subscription rate of only 12 to 48 customers per block of capacity depending upon the speed and quality of service you choose to purchase.It is worth noting that as part of standard web surfing, when you pull a web page, it is really comprised of a series of dozens to hundreds of "TCP data packets" and each packet needs to be "acknowledged" before the sending site sends the next one. In computer terms, the time between the sending of a packet and receipt of acknowledgement of receipt of that packet is an eternity where the network is effectively idle. This is the premise behind why oversubscription is viable. The key is finding an oversubscription rate threshold where a set of users' performance doesn't degrade to an unsatisfactory level. We have found that 50:1 is the threshold in which satellite internet begins to suffer noticeably. That is why we recommend 48:1 for residential use but recommend 30:1 or 12:1 for business use.
7. What distinguishes your service from other satellite internet offerings?
We use the iDirect platform - the choice for the US Military in Iraq and the vast majority of Fortune 500 remote site installations. It is simply the best platform available. Our hub strategic partner is a CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) - in other words, a small phone company. This is why we have such a phenomenal VoIP offering. iDirect compresses web pages up to 4:1 so that your perception of speed is 4 times faster than the capacity you have actually subscribed for. No other satellite platform achieves this level of performance. Our service has an additional capability that our competitors do not offer. We can allocate multiple "subscribers" of capacity to your system so that if you pull extreme volumes of data or run many users on a single antenna (e.g. community internet), we can sell you linearly scalable increments of subscriber capacity.
Speaking of community internets, we are the only company with the practical experience to provision and install these complex installations to lower your per-household cost of infrastructure.
8. How do I pay for my satellite system?
Wire transfer, PayPal, debit or credit card, and certified funds.9. What customer support capabilities does your website offer?
Coming This Summer: Personalized user-account login, online account information, call detail record reports, and customer support interface.10. How will I be billed?
You must use either a valid PayPal-authorized debit account or your credit card to do an on-line "subscription" from our web site. Your fixed payments will be automatically debited from your card at the first of each month. If you have any long-distance VoIP charges, your statement will be emailed, along with an embedded PayPal link with which you can use your credit card or PayPal account. We expect payment of phone bills within 14 days of receipt of our email invoice.
11. What is your late-payment policy?
Accounts 15 days late will be disconnected and a $300 reconnect charge will be required. Our goal is to keep costs to a minimum. We don't have the time or resources to chase down customers for payment. That is why we have automated subscriptions. In the event your monthly subscription is declined, you will receive an email notice with an embedded link that gives you the opportunity to pay via another method within 30 days. If your account is delinquent 30 days, we will cut off service. A reconnect charge of $300 plus all arrears will be charged. Yes this is expensive so don't miss your payments. We don't want the hassle either and just because you don't pay doesn't mean our hub lets us off the hook. For community internet subscribers, your MAC address will be deleted so that you can't access the network and one subscriber of capacity will be removed.12. Can I have my service disconnected and then reconnected at a later date?
Yes and no. For the contracted initial period, the answer is no. After your contract period expires, you revert to month-to-month service and the answer becomes yes. We must receive written notification from you prior to your next billing cycle. A $200 reconnect fee is required when you wish to reactivate your system.13. How does your VoIP long distance rates compare with ICE?
For North American calling a $6 (c3,000) ICE phone card allows 18 minutes calling or 20 cents per minute. Our basic North American call rate is FREE in USA and Canada. Other plans will be introduced shortly with DID (direct in dial) to selected countries. We will post the information when it becomes available - soon.14. What are your VoIP call plans?
We have one offering at this time - $25/month for a USA or Canadian phone number with unlimited calling in these two countries. Our long-distance toll rates will be posted on our web site here shortly
15. Can my LAN work with your service so that more than one computer can access the internet?
Yes, conventional routers can be configured with the satellite modem in a fashion similar to setting up a network with DSL or Cable modems.16. Are there places in Costa Rica where your service will not work?
No. All that is required is:- Clear line-of-sight to the northwest horizon at a 50 degree angle. (KU band) at a 50 degree angle or to the eastern horizon (C-Band) at a 43 degree angle.
- Electricity.
17. What happens if I buy your internet service solution and it does not work?
We will refund your money (less a 10% restocking fee) on the assumption that the equipment is in the same condition as delivered. The short answer is IT WILL WORK.18. What is the difference between C band and KU band?
C-band is capacity that operates at frequencies between 3 and 5 gigahertz. This range of frequency is used to convey television throughout the world. It is particularly good at cutting through heavy rain so it is particularly well suited for our country. It is also a little cheaper than KU for satellite capacity as you can see from our rates. The equipment is slightly more expensive and 1.8 m. dishes are not recommended.
KU-band operates at the 9 to 13 gigahertz frequency spectrum. This capacity is largely used for telecommunications applications like the internet. Performance with smaller dishes and lower-powered radios is usually noted but in Costa Rica, we have found that smaller dishes go down in heavy rain so that this advantage is not apparent here.
In our opinion, other than cost considerations there are no particular advantages to choosing KU over C band.
19. You offer 1.8 and 2.4 meter dishes. What's the difference?
The smaller dish is not an option for C-band. With KU band, the 1.8 meter dish is known to go down in rain and under difficult-to-recognize abnormal atmospheric conditions. The 2.4 meter dish will pull a 3 db stronger signal. This is approximately 8 times stronger than the smaller dish. Think of it as the difference between barely good enough and really good - then choose a 2.4 meter dish. You won't be sorry.
20. If I have problems, how do I get technical support?
Your first line of support is to phone us. We will contact you within 24 hours. Understand that we are a small company whose most competent technical people are on the road installing systems. Please leave a message and we will get back to you.
If the problem is related to the installation, there will be no charges to you - unless you have damaged the equipment. If the problem can't be solved over the phone, a site visit will need to be scheduled. A standard installation service charge of $50/hour for labor + $25/hour for drive time to a maximum of $400 will be levied. Drive times are levied from our home base in Ojochal. If the equipment fails under warranty, no labor charges will be levied - other than your costs to return equipment to the manufacturer for repair or replacement.