> Somebody else mentioned that SBB was reworking Gilbert.. and I can
> second that.  In the past few weeks(months), things have gotten much
> faster.

I might add after the rework I still had problems.  I took time to sit on
phone for 1.5 hours.  And quoted them download times from a program that
monitors such things.

They sent out a tech.  He replaced my modem with a new "better" model and
repositioned my dish.  This is when I saw REAL improvement.
 
> However, in the past few months, I get a lot more drop-outs, too.  My
> connection drops for anywhere from a few minutes to over 6 hours.  It
> happens at least weekly and sometimes daily.  It can be more than a
> little irritating when I'm working.

I have had this problem too, only to make it worse it flips out my
motherboard/ethernet card and will lock the box up.  The way I have found
to combat this.  Is I just do a virutal terminal and ping speedchoice.com
and let it run indefinitely.

Since doing this my dropouts have gone down to say one every 2 weeks.  If
the connection doesnt come back with in 10 minutes of outage.  Unplug
modem and leave unplugged for a few minutes and then plug back in 85% of
the time it will reestablish the connection.  (I was however told that you
should not do this more than once or twice a day or you risk smooshing
modem)

I can only assume by keeping an active ping it doesnt 'loose' the
connection.  If you arent sending data it must 'relookup' to reconnect and
I think this is where the issue lies. (purely speculative on my part)

 > Upload speeds is bursty and horrible. Ifthe file is less than
a > couple hundred kilo, then it's pretty fast.  But if gets over 500K,
> then the upload likes to freeze for long periods of time.

Upload speed is HORRID.  Period end of story.

Derek