Satellite Questions for People with Satellite

[Ataris]

Satellite. That is the question. I live in the boonies . We've been told for a few years that we would be getting DSL. I'm disappointed to say that it's not here yet and I have major doubts that it'll ever be here.

Question about satellite start small. I know there were major issues with lag problems and stuff. I know of a couple friends who play Counter Strike that say they have good ping times, etc.

Any of you guys that have satellite tell me how it is? How BAD your lag is? If not how about other games how is it with other games? If it's not bad what service providor, starband, directv....?

Thanks for any help in advance,

Justin
Ataris

[Jason]

Not.

Worth.

It.

[Ataris]

Tis what I figured. I wish I was able to run TS and continuum at the same time. Now where's that DSL.

-Justin

[Jason]

I've run TS and Continuum simultaneously with minimal additional lag in-game. Just limit the bandwidth TS uses. As for the issue of DSL, we'll get it when the cows leave home.

[glacier]

depends on the prices

[Jason]

Well, allow me to elaborate on this a bit as I've done countless hours of research into the subject matter.

The bottom line is you have two flavors of satellite internet access, one-way and two-way.

If you want fast speeds both up and down, you'd want two-way. However, if you want to game online, two-way is not the answer. Think about it for a second. Data is being beamed from your dish, to a satellite in outer space, then it's beamed to a terrestial substation, then from the substation back to the satellite in outer space, then it's beamed back from the satellite to your satellite dish where it finally travels back to your computer. That's one hell of a round trip, which means your ping times are going to be rather shitty, easily in the 1000-2000ms range. Ping times like that are just fine and dandy for web surfing, and you'll get much faster upload/download speeds than you ever will with dialup, but we all know 1000ms is outrageous for gaming.

If you go with one-way, rather than having a dish beam the data to a satellite, and then from the satellite to a substation, the data is initially sent right to the substation via a land-line (your dialup connection), then the substation beams it to the satellite in outer space and the satellite beams it back to your dish. Via this method, you can still game as you can simply turn off the satellite functionality and you'd be operating strictly on dialup. Then when you want to surf the net or download some shit, you can turn the satellite functionality back on. Note that with one-way your upload speeds are no faster than with dialup, even with satellite functionality enabled.

As far as pricing goes, they're both more expensive than cable or dsl. I don't think either is worth the money.

Two-way satellite technology does exist in which you cut out the middle man, that is there is no terrestial substation, and data is simply beamed back and forth between your dish and the satellite. However, this technology isn't available to the public just yet. I'm sure the government's had it for years, but we'll have to wait for awhile, although perhaps not too long. Hughes has laid out plans for such technology but hasn't even bothered to announce any kind of release deadline. Read more about the Hughes technology here.

And after writing a fucking book, that's all she wrote!