satellite broadband

[Stradivarius]

Sorry, I don't know if this is the right place for this question.

Can someone who currently has a satellite broadband connection tell me what they think of it?
I have heard things like it doesn't work when it's cloudy out, or it isn't much faster than 56k.
Can anybody with first-hand experience verify this? I would also like to know if it is suitable for online games such as RtCW.
I'm unable to get DSL or cable in my area, and satelite is the only broadband option for me.
Thanks

 

[Tallgeese]

Satellite = HIGH latency = HIGH pings = CRAPPY for gaming, MAYBE OK for d'loading

 

[Stradivarius]

would a satellite be better than a 56K for games?

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< would a satellite be better than a 56K for games? >>



No. How much physics do you know? With a little common sense you may understand that data traveling 22000 MILES will take a little longer than from your house to your phone company.

And BTW, DirecPC always sucked when I worked for them.

 

[Santa]

Maybe they are much better now that you don't work for them n0c

Joking of course

I am with n0c.. if you are playing games Dish is the Pits.. You have to realize latency is definatly not a friend to live action games.. neither of course is bandwidth but you can get by with less bandwidth since there will be less retransmissions due to loss of packet. You will just be slow. Now High latency will cause all sort of packet loss and retransmissions so you might as well have a slow pokey modem.

Depending on your type of Sat connection you also may be reduced to 33.6K upload rate anyways back to the internet.

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< Maybe they are much better now that you don't work for them n0c

Joking of course >>



I hope they are better now! They were screwing their customers royally...

 

[Rhi]

22000 miles?

 

[TheCorm]

What happens to digital satellite TV when there is bad weather, it goes crackly and messes up the film you are trying to watch!...hence, it cannot be great for surfing the net....plus trying to use interactive services on sky digital is low so you can imagine trying to surf into a flash built site.




<< 22000 miles? >>



Yes, 22,000 miles, n0c's old satellite provider is based on the moon

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< 22000 miles? >>



I thought it was 22k, but I could be mistaken. I havent worked there for a while and havent needed to do the math in a while. So whatever the distance from the earth a geostationary (geosyncronous?) satellite is at is the distance the signal has to travel, times 2.

 

[ViperXX]

I have the Starband satellite modem. I can tell you that you cannot game with this system. As someone already pointed out, the distance the signal travels is more than 20,000 miles round trip. Ping times for games are in the 2000's. Now if you just want to surf the internet and download huge files than Starband does the job well. I can get download speeds in the 100kb to 1Mb speed. I've been able to download during a minor snow storm but when a big storm hits and visiblity is low due to heavy snow or rain fall then the system will not work. This winter I have only been down once due to the weather and I had to get on the roof and clear the snow from the dish. You can setup ICS with starband and it seems to do well with mulitple users online and downloading at the same time. The uploads are one of the downsides of Starband. I'm only able to get uploads of about 56k. If your a gamer than my advise is to stick with your 56k modem. But if you download MP3's and game demo's or other huge files than get Starband. You can also have the best of both if you can afford it. 56k modem for gaming and Starband for downloads.