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As I remember BMI, had service restored late in the second trading day via a
minor dish shift to G3. While DTN switched most of their customers to G3 at the
same time, DTN was unable to use G3 for realtime customers. I have to admit that
I wondered about my choice of DTN vs BMI as DTN diddled around for several more
days finding a solution for their realtime customers. Then DTN moved into real
action: they overnighted instructions by UPS Saturday delivery and I had two
phone calls from DTN support over the holiday weekend, one on Saturday and one
on Monday. Obviously, solution #1 has been a PIA for many DTN customers and DTN
has kept working toward a better solution. From what I've heard, the proposed
T5, which is extremely close to the old G4, is much more powerful and should
provide superior signals to fringe areas and pretty well eliminate any chance of
rain fade - might possibly allow use of smaller dishes. BMI has apparently not
been without problems since the shift to G3, as they lost service for a
significant part of one trading day last week and I haven't read of any real
explanation. As it sits right now, by my count, BMI traders are down 3 trading
days and DTN traders, who made the switch successfully, are down 5 (I count loss
of any part of a trading day as a full day because of data gaps).
Bottom line, I think it will be some time before the dust settles and we can
assess the pro's and con's. First, we must temper any short term evaluation by
the fact that loss of satellite is a rare occurance. I think that all of the RT
quote vendors which used G4 have been hurt financially, perhaps DTN more than
some of the others, so we may see some fallout. Also, the financial press
reports that the loss of G4 should result in higher income stream to PanAmSat so
can expect to see changes in satellite fee structures which will affect vendors
differently depending upon the satellite used as replacement.
Did I think about calling BMI last week? You bet, but I was restrained by the
egregious up-front fees (including $160 to ship a dish from TX to NM), the
doubled monthly base rates, and reports of shoddy customer service. So I'm
keeping my fingers crossed and trying to reserve judgement until this whole
thing shakes out.
Earl
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter2150@xxxxxxx <Peter2150@xxxxxxx>
To: realtraders@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <realtraders@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Saturday, May 30, 1998 1:02 PM
Subject: Re: DTN data Feed
>Geez guys
>
> I saw a post this morning where someone said DTN was doing pretty
>good under the circumstances. Good grief. BMI had there satellite people up
>and running by 1 est the next day. I thank my lucky stars I didn't have the
>option to switch when the subject first came up. This problem some DTN users
>are having would be killing me. This is a case where a penny saved would be a
>dollar disaster. Good luck folks.
>
> Pete
>
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