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Wildblue signs up with Echostar
A month after it announced a partnership with AT&T, satellite broadband service provider, Wildblue has entered into a partnership with Echostar.
Clearly, the company sees these partnerships as a way to get some traction in a really tough satellite broadband market. [Daily Wireless has an excellent backgrounder on Wildblue’s technology.]
The service, dubbed “DISH High-Speed Internet, powered by WildBlue,” will be targeted toward EchoStar’s satellite TV customers located in rural markets. Given that AT&T is a distributor of Echostar’s TV service, this is just one more flavor of the same deal.
I installed WildBlue last week and have had Skype problems beyond the latency I would expect from a geostationary satellite. WildBlue forum users say Skype worked acceptably until May 15th (right after the announcement of the 1st AT&T deal). Posted more on this at http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/06/wildblueandsk.html
In no way is the ATT deal linked to Skype not working. WildBlue clearly states they do not support VOIP. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not.
WildBlue planned for this Echostar DirecTV deal from the beginning. The satellite is strategically placed directly between the Dish and Direct birds and the WildBlue Dish has a very advanced reflector that allows specific signals to either reflect or go through it. This way an additional DBS LNB could be added to the WildBlue Dish. Do not expect to see a one dish solution any time soon.