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Satellite Internet for Gaming?
SphericalCrusher asks: "I have been using Comcast high-speed internet for the last three years. Before that, I used Bellsouth DSL and then random dial-up services — but I have to say that overall, I love Comcast the best. Now that my parents are moving, to a new house some 12 miles away, and having no money for my own place, I'll have to move with them . The thing is, the road that it is on is pretty far off the highway, and after calling all broadband providers in the area, I've found out that broadband is not available at my new location. Charter Cable Communications covers the entire area of Summerville, Georgia except mine and neither Bellsouth or Alltel offer DSL. Now, I'm forced to either go back to dial-up or try out a satellite broadband service, which is what I want to do. Has anyone here had any success in gaming online with satellite internet?"
"After purchasing the modem and cords off of eBay for DirecWay (now HughesNet), I'm ready to get satellite internet (we had everything else we needed at the new house). However, has anyone here used satellite and actually enjoyed it? I play a good bit of online games, such as World of WarCraft, Quake IV, and F.E.A.R. and I know gaming online with those will not be the same (the satellite is 25,000+ miles from Earth) because of latency issues. Will the high latency seriously affect the overall download and upload speeds?"
so probably not suitable for gaming.
Considering how much the next gen consoles cost, I'm not getting private satellite for multiplayer. Besides, the ping rate probably sucks during a solar storm.
Speed isn't going to kill gameplay as much as latency will. Who cares if you're able to burst 2Mbit/second when it takes you half a second to register commands you send through the game realtime. Frag city, my friend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet
As far as I know, you need a dialup modem for your upstream so that won't help.
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
Half a second of lag is EXTREMELY low for what I'm familiar with in satellite internettery. Memory more lends to numbers like 7500 ms for most commerical satellite links. You'd be just as well off with IP over Carrier Pigeon for gaming.
*cough*
Ground Control is now offering the new HN7000 and HN7700 professional grade HughesNet satellite Internet systems that blow the lid off of high-speed performance vs. price when compared to consumer grade service. The "Business 400" service will give you more than T1 speeds down (Up to 2048 Kbps) and upload speeds up to 1024 Kbps. Satellite Internet service is more affordable than ever.
^^^ From website.
it looks like it would be usefull to know what pan your getting, or atleast your budget.
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Lets see. dialup or satellite? Personally I'd invest in a nice sharp razor blade and cut both my wrists before dealing with either of those again.
Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
It's faster than dial-up, and generally available places where DSL can't reach.
well, i dont haver sat net myself, but i have expirenced it, and for the price i dont think its worth it, but that aside, uploads and downloads should be comparable to DSL to some extent as the packages being sent back and forth contain alot of information, so once the flow starts, it generaly goes pretty fast, however latence will be an issue with gameing, as with gameing its not just how much information you can send to the servers, but how fast you can get and receve it, and this is where lag time comes from, and latency comes from, i dont have much expirence with MMRPG's on sat net, however i have heard mixed reviews, some claim its unplayable, some say its ok, either way you look at it its not gonne come anywhere Near Comcast, and will have trouble keeping up with DSL.
Noone writes jokes in base 13!
There must be some computer games that can handle pretty much latency.
For example, in a game like Chess, Bridge, or Go, you wouldn't really mind even a few seconds of latency.
So I'd think Age of Empires or some other RTS should play reasonably well, at least compared to a shoooter. Are there other types of multiplayer games that can accept a lot of latency?
Half a second is 500ms, which would get you completely kicked off of most FPS game servers, and probably wouldn't work well with games like WoW and Everquest. I was being very generous in my example, the URL I provided indicated that latency is up to one second.
It's completely unsuitable for any type of realtime interactive game.
Goddamn! Get a job, or a loan, and get the fuck out of your momma's basement
... Jackass!
For some people, in some parts of the world, that may seem like an easy solution to the problem but this isn't the case in general; personally, I live in Calgary where (because of the oil boom) it is not uncommon to pay $1100 per month for a bachelor suit or $1500 for a two bedroom. If you are (like me) a well employeed software developer you can afford to live on your own (or with a roomate) but the vast majority of people who work Retail, manufacturing or other low paying jobs can not afford to live on their own. There are people who get by simply by having 4 or 5 roomates in a house in a house in a poor area of town, but this is hardly a decent solution for many people.
Don't assume that people have as easy of a time making ends meat as you do
Communications satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, roughly 30,000 miles above the earth. Even if you have satellite both ways (vs. the more common satellite for download, modem for upload) the speed of light limits your absolute theoretical minimum ping time to about 1/3 of a second (333ms). This is actually slower than a modem, where the modem itself only adds about 150-200ms to your latency.
Satellite is fine for downloads, and it's better than nothing... but for gaming, it's not better than nothing by very much.
I've used satelite for gaming for years and it's great. I get checkmate every time!
From what I read, satellite Internet services haven't improved in terms of latency. WISP should be decent if you can get that.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You could probably pay a couple months' rent on an apartment with the setup and equipment costs for satellite internet. It's not cheap. And it's no good for most types of online gaming.
If your packets are going through the satellite in both directions, you are looking at about 3/4 second latency on a round trip, which is not suitable for gaming, especially first-person shooters. You also won't want to use it for voice over IP. Starband will even tell you so on their website.
You can play online games, but you won't be satisfied with the performance. Typically, you can manage a latency of 200 on Counterstrike, which was the last online game I used with satellite. Check out a wireless internet provider. It can offer a better ping, and can easily be stretched 12 miles from broadband. Good luck, and if nothing else, look at this as an opportunity to branch out into some new online activities. BTW, the new equipment wont change your PING, just the up and download speed and the size of your "bit bucket".
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
Let me see if I under stand the issue: 1. Living in parents' basement 2. Focus most of your time playing computer games 3. Biggest problem is getting faster Internet connection I don't know. Have you asked your girlfriend yet? Oh wait, I'm really sorry...
I have your same problem, I live in Rural North Florida, far away from any /real/ broadband. I've tried Satellite Internet, and I have to say that while it is effective for browsing the Internet, it makes games pretty much unplayable.
With Satellite, anything you do it going to have about a 2 second response time. You press fire, you fire two seconds later. You cast a heal, the heal happens two seconds later. Not fun times.
On dial up, MMORPGs normally do okay, but downloading patches can be a pain- also very large raids can cause you to go link dead regularly.
Though, to be fair, FEAR and Quake IV will be unplayable no matter what, so you'd better get used to having LAN parties, because that's the only FPS fix you're going to get.
The best I can tell you is try to get ISDN.
Long version:
p x
Speed of Light = 299792.458 kilometers / second
Geostationary satellites are at an altitude of ~35786 kilometers.
This means that just for the radio wave to travel to and from the satellite, you are adding around 238 milliseconds. That is just one way, the return trip is another 238ms MINIMUM.
This doesn't account for signal conversions, modulation, demodulation(the preceeding are mostly negligable), latency from the ground station to the host, etc. You would be lucky to EVER see under 580ms ping using satellite.
Even the providers do not recommend gaming.
Link: http://www.wafa.ae/en/vsat/aboutsatinternetpg2.as
My terminology may be a little different than others are used to, that is because I am a Satellite Network Controller in the Army and use the military terms.
It depends on the game. World of Warcraft or a RTS/Strategy game might be tolerable. Any first-person-shooter will not be. When it takes 500ms for you to see what just happened and then for your commands to register... oops, you're dead.
Latency on dialup is generally around 150-300ms. Latency on Satellite is limited by the speed of light and starts at an absolute, physical limit of 240ms, assuming that the radio signal is actually travelling at the speed of light (it isn't), no retransmissions need to take place (they will), the satellite isn't processing or juggling your data stream at all (it is), the satellite isn't oversubscribed (it is), and the game server you're connected to is directly connected to the other end of the satellite downlink (it isn't).
Expect latency of 400ms or more, sometimes much more. And for WoW, note the Latency the game tells you. Much of that is on the server end. When WoW's lagging and you have a latency of 500ms or more in-game, probably less than 100ms of that is due to your current broadband connection. So you can take the remaining 400ms and add that to your satellite latency as well. Now you're looking at almost 1 second before you can react to what's happening in the game.
Might I suggest trashing the dish and looking for terrestrial radio internet instead? Like WiMAX or EV-DO. Good luck.
Random and weird software I've written.
Has anyone here had any success in gaming online with satellite internet?
No.
Well, let me go into a bit more detail:
Hahahahahahahaha! No Flipping Way, Sucker! Hahahaha!
Also: Yet another Ask Slashdot question that can be answered by Google and common sense. Satellite = 600+ms latency. What do you do with people with that much latency in your Quake 4 game? Oh right, you kick their asses. WOW *might* be marginally tolerable... but I doubt it.
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I have a professional account with HughesNet (DirectWay) and it sucks. Speed is based on accessing their proxy server not real speeds. If you need vpn, dont even think about it dial up is way faster.
Limit of how much you can download is stupid. Try to download over 300-500mb in an hour and you'll be slapped with FAP (Fair Access Policy) 10-14k for the next 12 hours. There is no notification your approaching the limit, and the limit is not fixed it fluctuates based on how many people are on your sattelite and what they are doing.
All this for the low low price of $140.00 per month? Find somebody with DSL in your area and setup a wireless link to them.
I actually knew someone who had both. She used satellite for work, basically anything that needed fast Internet, but dialup for gaming. And we were playing an MMO -- if you're into any kind of FPS, forget it, satellite won't work.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
well, go with dialup and either a LOS system or SAT. both are going to suck and thats the price you pay for living off the grid.
You'll be lucky if your average ping is less than 1000ms. You won't be able to join most servers with ping that bad, and even when you can join you'll get pwned unless you happen to have Spiderman's precognition.
Verdict: As much as it sucks, stay with your cable provider. Maybe you'll be able to get Wi-max in a few years.
Edge is 144kbps and there are faster technologies. I used VPN over plain GPRS as well.
This will beat your satellite broadband in terms of usability.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
Nobody has mentioned this so far: why not go with plain old 802.11g? All you need is a friend with broadband with a clear line of sight to your place and a couple Pringles can antennas. Sure, it'll be crap when it's raining, but it's cheap.
Be relentless!
The Clarke band is 22,500 miles above the earth. For each outgoing packet, the data has to make the round trip of ~45,000 miles. Light travels at approximately 186,000 miles per second.
45,000/186,000 = 241.9(rouded)MS of latency for each outgoing packet. Under optimum conditions a ping will take 848.8 MS to return. Now that's just to their uplink center. Add in another 60 - 200 MS of latency for other servers. You're looking at upwards of one second, over 1,000 MS of latency for any game that you play. Obviously it is of no use for a "gamer". Unless you're playing internet chess, steer clear because you're going to get better response times from dialup.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
If you're so far out in the sticks that you must resort to satellite instead of Comcast or DSL, then here's my suggestion:
:-)
Start a local ISP. Do a little market research on your area; find out what kind of demand there is for fast, low-latency Internet access. If the demand is sufficient to both pay for the service and employ you (and if you're interested), then get a T1, T3, or if possible, fiber run or two to your door. Share it among everybody you can find and run the service yourself.
Then play Quake 4, F.E.A.R., etc. during the down times on your fast line when nobody's calling you for support.
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
For everything else it'll pretty much suck. Rumor has it one of those companies had to implement their own FTP client because the ping times were so high that the regular one thought the connection had been lost and gave up.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Keep in mind, I have no idea how well this is supported with any ISP anymore.
However, some years ago, I was in an area that was far outside of any access range. The only real alternative I had was ISDN. I believe at the time, it was 39.99 a month, and you did have a limit on the number of B channel hours you could have, but I never found myself over that limit (200). You get about 16K/sec, which isn't great at all bandwidth-wise, but it was very good on latency. I found it perfectly acceptable for gaming, at any rate.
Like I said, though... it's been some years, and I'm not sure any ISPs exist that can or will offer to service ISDN customers. Telco's not my area of expertise. But, it might be something to look into.
If you have good signal strength you might be able to use a cellular data service. Just make sure you're allowed to use it as your primary data service and you can access the cell companies high speed network where you are going, you don't want to get stuck on gprs. You might want to check out howardforums.com, otherwise I'd go with ISDN.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
I'm on Direcway's asstastic service right now.
:P). I got this because I had to keep my system up to date (doing development work, etc - yes, out of my parents' house) and I'm addicted to pornography and demand easy and quick access to it.
It's $60/mo for me. That $60 lets me download about 160mb a day before I hit the "Fair Access Policy" which caps me at about 4-5kB/s for the next twelve hours. The speeds up to that point are okay, but it still sucks ass. $60/mo for that!?
Okay, well, you didn't mention a concern about downloads. You want games! Well, no. It's not going to work. If I go into a server for any given FPS game with this thing my ping is about 500-900. It's never, ever less than 400. If you're concerned enough about gaming to ask slashdot about this, I'm sure you understand exactly what devastating effects that would have on gameplay. There are other posts in this discussion about the speed of light being the limiting factor. It's really true. It takes about a quarter second to half a second for your signal to even reach a server and come back.
I was in your same situation. My parents were moving and I can't afford, yet, to live on my own. So I moved with them to the middle of nowhere. Now I made the wrong choice and I have what I would describe as the shittiest ISP I have ever used (I haven't used AOL. Not sure how that would compare.
If things like pornography and downloading music, videos, or other big content are not important to you, do not get this. You will NOT play games at any adequate level on this kind of connection.
Turn based games are okay.
Keep a dialup account handy to play anything else, though.
solution: use the sat for downloading updates and dial up to game. dial is not that bad at latency and a lot of games have optimized to send as small a packets as possible but often. So dial works for that. The wirelss GPRS solutions dont' work well because often no DSL = horrible cell coverage. So while you can get 144 kbit/s under the tower on a clear day you get closer to 4kbit/s at the remote locations where dsl/cable isn't available.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I wouldn't have been so mean, especially not knowing anything about his life... but, I share your sentiments. Why not take this opportunity (no gaming distractions) to learn a trade or improve your current situation in life? My apologies if you are disabled or have extenuating circumstances, but if you are financially bound to your parents and are of working age, it might be time for a little self-reflection.
To stay on topic, satellite is going to have too much latency for real-time gaming, and there's not much that you'll be able to do about it. As someone else said, perhaps look into ISDN. Clearwire doesn't do Georgia right now, but perhaps the new Sprint "4G" service will cover you? As I understand it, the latency should be better than current 3G systems. Rome and Dalton have municipal WiFi systems of some kind, but you are pretty far from those cities.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Another option for you can be ISDN or IDSL. IDSL is basically DSL over ISDN lines, and it will give you a slight edge over dialup (in the boonies, 19.2kbps conect rates are not unusual), and should have decent latencey. Frankly, you will not be gaming on a satellite Internet connection.
I am on satellite right now. Latency is a minimum of 600 milliseconds so games like Counter Strike are completely unplayable. I do play Eve Online and it is not so bad, quite playable for the most part. I have friends here who play City of Heroes and World of Warcraft and they have no problems with either of those games.
In short, if response time is absolutely critical, the game will be unplayable. If response time is important, you will get frustrated. If response time is not important, satellite kicks ass.
Do not confuse latency and bandwidth. I can download (theoretically) at 4 megabits per second (bandwidth) but it takes a good second or so (latency) for the download to start. Clear?
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Most people responding here don't seem to have real experience with current-gen satellites and gaming.
Gaming is very possible on both Wildblue and HughesNet 7000. It really comes down to the game though, and how it handles lag. Obviously Satellite gaming is never a prefered solution, but many games are easily playable with 700-850ms pings (average DW7000 and Wildblue ping).
Most all MMOs are playable - even Planetside and Auto Assault.
Some RTS are playable (Warcraft 3 works for example).
PC-based FPS are very hit and miss, and CS/HL/HL2 is one of the "miss".
XBox 360 games are usually surprisingly playable. Only NFS: MW and DOA4 have been unplayable. Perfect Dark, Project Gotham 3, Call of Duty 2, Burnout, Test Drive Unlimited - all work very well. Halo 1/2 also work great, but in larger games players start to see you warp around (but you don't see this).
Also keep in mind dial-up is actually worse in many new games because it can't handle the amount of data being pushed - ping is not the only factor.
I would just suggest you do your homework, check Broadband Report's forums, and www.wildblue.cc for Wildblue (they even have a gaming forum to report "what works". Also do your homework when looking into HughesNet vs. Wildblue - both have advantages and disadvantages.
is check the availability/price in order-
freind/girlfreind with DSL/cable
WiFi
ISDN (bonded if possible)
3G
T1 (fractional is possible)
Satellite
Honestly if your parents chose to move to a place without broadband and you're a geek, and they don't get that broadband is a requirement for your life I would leave as soon as humanly possible.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
I supported Satellite for a few years and heard nothing but complaints about it from gamers. For surfing, its fine most of the time, but gaming - no way. Its picky, especially when it snows, wind, etc. Kind of like some of those anti-satellite commercials you see every once in awhile.
You would have to walk uphill both ways through a snow storm just to get your ass whooped...
What is wrong with that abacus I bought you?
Satellite huh? I will give you a satellite you'll never forget.
(Seriously - get a life, girl, dog, car, morgtage, sense of humour)
Poster is correct... it will suck, and suck badly.
Better solution is to find a neighbor who CAN get cable, you pay for it, and set up a wireless bridge with a couple of 21dB directional antennas. With good line of sight, you can get a mile with no problem and about $200 in hardware. Even further if you pay more for better antennas.
I have seen many posts so far from people who have never had sat inet. And they are getting it all wrong. I have wildblue service, and I support several direcway installs. Gaming on sat inet is all about the specific game.
FPS's / Twitch Games == Not gonna happen
RPG / RTS / MMORPG == Should have no problems
For the people who say VPN's are unusable on sat inet, I beg to differ, as I use mine all the time to run remote X from my office, and its an ipsec vpn not an SSL vpn which in theory would work better.
The easiest way to understand sat inet is to understand the latency, any chatty protocols will suck. Put in your caching DNS server and Squid proxy w/ pre-fetch and adzapper and you will be pleasantly surprised at the increased performance. You want to minimize the packet trips to/from the sats.
Satellite Internet talks to a (you guessed it) Satellite in geostationary orbit. Geostationary orbit is roughly 3.6 x 10^7 meters from the surface of the earth. Before your packets can join the rest of the internet, they have to go up to the satellite and back down. When they come back from the server, they have to go up to the satellite and back down again. Now you're talking 1.44 x 10^8 meters that a packet has to travel (round trip).
Light speed is roughly 3.0 x 10^8 meters per second. So, in your best case scenario it takes 1/2 of a second for a packet to go from your computer to the Internet and for the server to send a response packet back. That's your best case scenario. The typical case is more because of other slowness issues on the 'net and because your dish probably has to wait for an authorized send window rather than sending immediately.
Have you considered an ISDN BRI? Yes, its fallen out of favor but its widely available, it offers 128kbps instead of a 56k modem's 40kbps and it offers about a 30ms latency instead of a modem's 150 ms. Virtually all dialup providers support ISDN calls since they have to buy ISDN PRIs to operate as the head-end of a 56k modem call.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
If you can play it on dialup with a download running, it should be good to go.
growing up, getting a job, buying your own place. Then if you've done everything right you can buy whatever service you want because you have the job to pay for it.
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...and yada yada..."half the cost of living in New York City"..and so on. And people wonder why so much industry, blue and white collar, is being outsourced. It's because of the ludicrous and expensive cost of living in many areas that slop over and drive up the prices of everything.
If only there were some quicker, more efficient way of answering this question. Some sort of engine that would be good at searching for things. A searching engine if you will. Then you could simply type in satellite internet gaming and get the answer. Oh for such a wonderful device...
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Good advice if you have a neighbor friendly enough. Be wary of the legal issues, tho. Some cable companies might consider this "re-distributing" the service and it might be against their TOS.
It's not very likely that they'll even detect it, but better safe than sorry.
A couple of years ago, you could get a decent spread spectrum ethernet bridge very cheap (full set for less than $500). I guess prices should be better today.
No sig
I would do it anyway until they provide the last mile.
Technically, the remote user would be the customer and is willing to pay for the services.
It's the cable company that isn't willing to provide services.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Satellite is completely unacceptable for any real net junkie, especially gamers. The ping is even higher than with dial-up. Man, I played FPS games over dial-up for a few years-- it's not so terrible as all that if you've got a good phone line. And of course, if you're out in the boonies you probably don't have a great phone line. My tip is this: get yourself a nice desktop replacement laptop like a Macbook Pro or some such, and mooch off some free hotspot in town. You'll spend about the same, and have a kickass lappy in the bargain. Might help you to prioritize some things differently. Find some roommates and get an apartment. Unless your parents are letting you stay for free, it's the way to go, even if you wind up spending three times as much on rent. I had a guy come in to my work yesterday straight out of A Confederacy of Dunces, a huge fat man nearly in his 40s and living with his elderly mother, trying to return the guitar amp he'd bought because he couldn't get a good sound out of it with his inexperienced hands. Man, move out of your parents' house! Don't be that guy. Noone really cares (except any potential girlfriend) if you're living with your parents when you're 25, but something happens when you turn 30 and you won't have much in the way of friends or life. Suicide might become your only option. Get out there, get a job, make some money. If you can't get a job consider the idea that perhaps there's some aspect of your personality or attitude that is poorly suited to the hard realities of the working world, and endeavor to change those aspects. It's not that hard once you get started. I spent the last 7 years of my life not working (fortunately I did not have to live with my parents) and surfing the internet 10-16 hours a day, and I gotta tell you-- it's not that hard to work and make money and live on your own. It might not be the comforts you're adjusted to, but it's totally reasonable, and socially rewarding. Speaking of which I gotta go to work to pay for my rent. Yes, it is a worthy tradeoff, and it does make your life more enjoyable to make it. Quit making excuses for yourself and go do it. The video games will still be there after work.
I've got satellite, since I live out in the sticks. No ISDN, no Cable. Heck, it took the phone company three weeks to figure out how to activate my phone service. Latency is an issue, but the pipe is T1-ish or better once it gets going.
Actual pings via my WildBlue connection (pro package):
64 bytes from 82.165.178.138: icmp_seq=0 ttl=50 time=1040.5 ms
64 bytes from 82.165.178.138: icmp_seq=1 ttl=50 time=591.3 ms
64 bytes from 82.165.178.138: icmp_seq=2 ttl=50 time=698.5 ms
64 bytes from 82.165.178.138: icmp_seq=3 ttl=50 time=606.3 ms
64 bytes from 82.165.178.138: icmp_seq=4 ttl=50 time=709.0 ms
--- 82.165.178.138 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 591.3/729.1/1040.5 ms
Verdict: gaming sucks, way better than dialup, way way better than nothing.
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
I have been using Direcway's service for the last 6 years (back when it required a dialup return connection, and now with the DW6000 unit that is basically like a DSL modem). Throughout that time I have played EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, and World of Warcraft and all three were playable. It wasn't the best possible experience at all times, but it was playable and the alternative was just not acceptable (try entering Ironforge in WOW on a dialup connection and watch that latency skyrocket).
For background, I play WOW currently and I have a level 60 Warrior who is a member of a raiding guild that does MC/BWL/AQ40. I am typically an offtank (because it must makes more sense to have one of the faster connection guys be the maintank), and I have no problems fulfilling that role. I also have had no complaints from any of my guildmates. It's just a matter of adjusting how you play. You have to learn to predict things a little faster because you DO have about a 1-2 second delay between when you hit a hotkey and the event happens. I also PVP quite a lot, and while the delay leaves me at a disadvantage, I do just fine against most opponents.
It handles large crowds (raids, crowded cities) very well, also. I have very few, if any, issues with higher than normal latency in cities or on raids. Typically, my ping ranges from 800ms to 2000ms and throughout that range it is still playable.
The biggest pain in the ass is the fact that the satellite is so sensitive to cloudcover and rain. Living in Florida, during the summer months I lose signal almost every day because of the afternoon thunderstorms. It's annoying, but until I move it's my only option.
Having said all that, don't expect to play any FPS's reliably. In fact, I wouldn't even bother trying. Sub 100ms pings are so important to play those games enjoyably that you're better off just playing against bots, or having a LAN party every weekend.
And finally, make sure you check the policies of any satellite provider you look at. Direcway (now Hughesnet) has a policy called the "Fair Access Policy" (someone mentioned this before). This policy is a bullshit rule Hughesnet enforces to "make sure all customers have equal bandwidth access at all times" and basically limits you to a certain amount of bandwidth per day (around 170 megabytes). If you download that much in a short period of time (say, 1 hour), they curtail you down to dialup speed for about 8-10 hours. You can get around this by using a download speed limiter program (Getright has this feature) and setting it to about 15kb/sec. That will allow you to download something nearly indefinitely without risking the FAP (because the FAP is based on how much you d/l over time, and it slowly "refills" by itself).
Aaul
P.S. Be prepared for a very expensive setup/installation and the worst billing/customer service support ever if you go with HughesNet.
Perhaps people are more productive when they game occasionally instead of overworking themselves? Oh wait, you probably use a Mac, so you have no games.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Satellite should be your LAST choice for gaming, especially FPS games, because of the high latencies.
IDSL has very low latency, a speed of 144 kbit/s, and long enough range that almost any residence with copper phone wires can get the service. Unlike ISDN, IDSL is usually sold at a flat monthly rate and is an always-on connection. You can get IDSL service from ISPs such as speakeasy.net -- prepare for sticker shock, however, as it's rather more expensive than Cable or DSL.
3G cellular service, if it's available in your area, can offer surprisingly good speeds (several hundred kbit/s, even exceeding 1 Mbit/s on HSDPA with good coverage), but with worse latency than Cable/DSL (still preferable to satellite, however). Your choices are EVDO (Verizon and Sprint) and HSDPA (Cingular) service; if you don't have coverage for one you might have it for the other. You'll need a PC Card slot; if you have a desktop PC you can probably get an adapter card from your favorite PC parts supplier. Kyocera's KR1 router has a built in card slot, but will only work with EVDO (not HSDPA). You can expect this service to be less expensive than IDSL, but still more (probably at least twice as much) than Cable/DSL.
Consider that the absolute minimum latency that satellite COULD provide is quite high. Let's do some math:
Geosynchronous satellites reside at roughly 35,786 kilometers altitude. Multiply by two for the round trip, or 71,572 KM. The speed of light is 299,792 kilometers per second. Therefore, it would take light itself (in a vacuum) 239 milliseconds JUST to travel the distance. And of course, satellites don't use light for communication, and the signal isn't going through a vacuum, so the actual numbers are much worse. I've heard anecdotal reports that latency for satellite internet is at least 500 to 1000 milliseconds.
Bottom line? Get both satellite, and dialup. A good dialup connection can provide latencies as low as 150ms (or sometimes lower) to game servers, which is really quite good. Try to stick to games such as Half-Life (1 or 2) based games, or more recent Quake 3 engine games, that use latency correction; this will eliminate the effect of latency for the most part. Also be sure to tweak your connection settings; you'd be surprised how much optimized settings can do for sub-par connections.
Of course, you'll be limited to servers that are extremely close to you internet-wise, but this is the price you pay for living in a non-broadband served area. One important piece of advice I can give is that, above all else, GET A HARDWARE MODEM. WinModems (which make up virtually all 56K modems sold today, or built into motherboards) significantly increase latency, sometimes by 50 to 100 milliseconds. Your best bet is to buy either an decent external 56k modem (Not that cheap, probably best to get one that has a serial connection), or an internal modem that uses the ISA interface.
I know for a fact that reasonably modern motherboards can be found with ISA slots. You can find ISA slots in motherboards for processors as recent as the Athlon XP. You may want to build a cheap router out of a box with an ISA slot, in order to minimize latency without having to use a slow computer for gaming. The Abit KT7a (which used the Via KT133a chipset) has an ISA slot, it's what I've got in the desktop I'm currently typing on. I've had broadband for years, but still have an ISA 56k modem plugged into the computer.
Other people have suggested other broadband alternatives; ISDN, for example. You may want to look into those types of things, though they may be expensive. Just know that properly configured, with a good ISP, dialup internet CAN be perfectly acceptable for gaming.
I should note that not all PCI internal modems are WinModems. You can buy them still, such as this one from US Robotics:
? sku=USR5610B
http://www.usr.com/products/home/home-product.asp
which sells for about $80 US. It features a "gaming" mode which supposedly reduces latency (probably uses shorter buffers or something). If you could find one, I guess there'd be no reason not to stick it in your gaming PC itself (unless you're using a laptop). (Proper) external hardware modems from US Robotics sell for about $100 and up, although that low-end $100 modem is missing some features that might help for gaming that the $70 internal and more expensive external modems have.
You can play WoW. You'll never see latency under about 900ms, though. How much of a difference that makes will depend on your class and what you're doing. For example, as a rogue you will find it basically impossible to stay within range of a moving target long enough to pull off a successful backstab. As a priest, if it takes you over a second to notice that your tank needs healing, you may become unpopular. On the other hand, a warlock can function effectively because it doesn't make a lot of difference if a 24-second damage over time spell hits right now or a second from now, and your demon will keep right on attacking. First person shooters? No.
People in New York don't pay assloads (~40% income + 7% sales tax) of tax.
Prices for every day goods are also higher in Canada.
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Or the guy could just be going to school locally and instead of dropping $600 a month on a shitty closet of a dorm room plus the cost of food, he's staying with his parents, maybe helping them fix their new place up.
By doing that, he's saving $7200 plus food, which is significant.
Even moreso when you consider that you're going to have to work an aditional ~30% just to pay the taxman.
Dorm life is fun, but when you're kept up every night by the douchebag in the next room, the assholes who think it's fine to light up a smoke in the stairwell and set off the smoke detectors for the entire goddamn building every fucking 3 weeks, have a drunk stumble into your room one night because his key fits your lock - to say nothing of numerous hit and runs on cars in the parking lot, rapes, stabbings, or a honest to god gunfight over a drug deal (not shootings but gunfights, involving several people shooting at each other, and most of those bullets going straight through 10 sheets of sheetrock), it begins to get old really fucking quick.
Oh, yeah, and the crackheads that break a $130 car window to steal loose change and the methheads that try to mug you until you show them something made of metal that fits in your hand (which, btw, may be a felony to carry on campus). All of this happened while I was at the dorms in portland state university.
Fuck that, what a waste of money.
Learning a trade or bettering yourself, absolutely, do that, just realize that paying for dorms has some drawbacks.
Sprint and verizon will terminate your contract if you begin to use their data service "excessively". No warnings, no appeal, but it gets you out of their contract.
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Also see if any of the new high-speed cellular data services are offered in your area. Obviously CDPD is no help, at 19kbps with random high latency, but some of the newer ones might be fast enough to be as useful as satellite.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
700ms at best. Loss is a problem. Sign up some neigbhors and create your own hotspot.
Direcway may have been a good option at one time, but fixed wireless is 100X better. I have heard newer satellite services, even if using the same satellites / bandwidth, are also better. eg wild blue or ground control. I hope Direcway decides to improve their service someday, since I am still a customer. So it's not worthless, but it's not very good either.
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Actually, they do pay near that.
click on the interactive tax map link here.
I agree that we should give the guy the benefit of the doubt, but I disagree with you on the importance of living on campus. I think the experiences that you get by living on your own for the first time are very important, and probably were worth as much as a lot of the structured learning. All of the things you mention were major hassles, but helped build skills like conflict resolution. I don't mean the mortal danger part, but getting noisy neighbors to quiet down and the such. Not to mention all of the "getting it out of your system" that needs to happen. I found the commuter students to be on a completely different level socially - eventually they would sort it out, of course, but it was hard for them to be out-of-step with their peer group (one of my best friends was a commuter at the same school as me). Like you, I went to school in a downtown, and got mugged a few times... but crack was still the drug-of-choice back then :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"Mechanical reliability will suffer due to moving parts on the dish itself."
Side note. There are electronically steerable antennas.
Yes, and it will be so awful you won't be able to play period. The _only_ thing sat internet is good for is big downloads from a single source. Kiss file sharing good bye, and forget about gaming.
If you want to game in the country, find a wireless isp that doesn't have a shitty T1 (or less) connection (real isp's that use wireless do exist, do some research), that uses Motorla Canopy radios. As I write this, I am enjoying 4.5 mbit down, and 2.0 mbit up speeds from my Canopy 5.7 ghz service. With low latency to boot. Wireless internet, when done right, can be as fast and as reliable as a cale modem. Satellite inet is a waste of your money. And I say 'when done right' because there are a load of pathetic fake wireless isp's out there that use 802.11 junk and a single business class cable modem, and call it internet service, avoid them like the plague.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Verdict: gaming sucks, way better than dialup, way way better than nothing.
:)
Actually, as a dialup gamer, I feel a need to respond to this.
If you need the throughput (for downloading, browsing, etc), yes satellite is the way to go.
But here's my results for pinging Google on dialup:
Reply from 216.239.51.104: bytes=32 time=190ms TTL=243
Reply from 216.239.51.104: bytes=32 time=170ms TTL=243
Reply from 216.239.51.104: bytes=32 time=170ms TTL=243
Reply from 216.239.51.104: bytes=32 time=170ms TTL=243
Ping statistics for 216.239.51.104:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 170ms, Maximum = 190ms, Average = 175ms
So you're looking at 175ms on dialup. Way better than satellite, and while you can't really do FPS games, it is more than sufficient for most RTS games and World of Warcraft (not enough throughput to do >20 man instances though).
So I would reccomend using the satellite for most uses, and just dial in when you need to play.
Either way, I feel sorry for you. Going from broadband to this is gonna hurt bigtime. Luckily I have no way to go but up.
I happily signed up for WildBlue's satellite service about a year ago, since (1) they're not DirecWay or StarBand and (2) I was sick and tired of 26.4 (yes, 26.4, not 28.8 even, but 26.4) dialup service. My wife & I had moved from our happy happy DSL-connected (Verizon, technically, but on BBN/Genuity/Level3's old 4.0.0.0/8 network) townhome out into the boonies of VA since we could turn a 115% profit on selling our house and move closer to my work.
... um, don't even bother. It's an exercise in frustration. I ended up cancelling my Xbox Live subscription since I just didn't use it.
:)
Soooo then the fun started. Don't get wrong, most of these problems are because of having satellite service in general, and not specifically because of WildBlue as a provider. I can normally get 550ms - 600ms ping times to WildBlue's NOC on the other end of the satellite connection, and 600ms - 700ms to most well-connected places on the 'net. But you get rain fade, intermittent signalling problems that pop up and then mysteriously go away, and occasional problems with the satellite modem itself where you need to power-cycle the beastie to get a usable signal back (don't forget to use a UPS or a filtering power strip at the very least, clean power saves you many headaches, especially in older houses).
The specific problem with WildBlue is that they've oversold their service (check out the WildBlue Uncensored forums for more gory technical details if you care), and you can get a fair amount of congestion during peak usage hours, depending which satellite beam (geographic area) and NOC you happen to be in. Plus all sorts of other fun stuff like flaky DHCP service, cable cuts at the NOC, slow DNS service, and all the assorted joys of using a residential ISP.
At least WildBlue's FAP (fair-access policy or bandwidth limitation) is not as draconian as their competition, but it's still annoying for me. I end up downloading ISOs, game demos, etc. off of other non-limited connections when I have the chance so I don't bust my 17GB monthly download quota.
I've also had friends who signed up for the Value or Select pack on the same beam complain about slow downloads (way below rated speeds) and super-high latency. After checking the signal, having a tech adjust the dish, check for obstructions, etc. they upgraded to the Pro pack and hey presto! problems went away. I've always had the Pro pack, so I can't say for sure, but it looks like WildBlue is using a QoS implementation to distinguish between users on different plans, along with the FAP.
World of Warcraft is kind of okay on WildBlue. You get about 800ms - 1200ms latency, and doing raids or other groups where you need lots of chatting + coordination is kinda painful, but it *is* playable in most situations.
Halo / Halo 2 on Xbox Live is just
Oblivion is pretty cool!
The problem is that the latency involved with satellite completely eliminates entire categories of online games (FPS, RTS), leaving you with either MMORPGs or turn-based games. I've ended up playing a lot more current single-player games, old ROMs under emulation and digging out older classics (Starcraft, Baldur's Gate) to play through the single-player missions & stories again.
VPNs and interactive remote access (SSH, VNC, NX/FreeNX, Citrix, Tarantella, remote desktop) suck pretty hard on satellite too. You can get them to work most of the time, and some have latency-reduction features that can help, but it's still painful. Character-interactive logins and apps over a VPN on satellite feel like you're squeezing the bits through a 300 baud connection. Dialup or ISDN is far better for this sort of access, if you need it.
In short, if you have any kind of option for better landline service (ISDN, DSL, cable, fiber-to-the-home, T1) go for that instead. Satellite should only be your last resort.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
satellites don't use light for communication
I'm going to go with "yes they do" on this one.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Like others here, I have had DirecWay in the recent past. It was basically a 'must have more than dialup' situation.
WoW, CoH and the like are playable since there is no aiming needed.
FPSes are not. You *might* get lucky once and a while and it is almost decent, but it will just frustrate you if you try.
The Fair Access Policy is a pathetic restriction because they will not invest to bring satellite users to the modern era, plus since there is no competition they can do whatever they feel like. I believe the cap is 160mb *buuuut* the killer is what happens after that 160mb. It was described to me as a bucket; what is in the bucket is tha available download amount, so the bucket is 'filled' at 160mb. You can empty it at your wonderful blazing speed (yeah right).
It refills, however, at a slower rate, only 50kbps (yes, kbps). That means if you want lengthy downloads, then maybe you should get a modem for those...it will be faster. Even if you shell out more money for a better service, they are all now refilled at 50kpbs.
Another killer (from the DirecWay days, not sure with Huges). If you hit the cap, you get thrown into the 50kpbs pile (eating as fast as they are willing to give it to you). If you exceed it for some secret amount of time, you get turned off. Yeah. For around a day. Oh, by the way, you have no way of being informed of your usage. Since machine is not so hard, but a real joy if you have multiple computers. Could they have invested in showing a 'usage' or 'free mb' on their machine's web interface? Yeah, but that would be useful. Their customer website (which among other things keeps track of the invoices to remind you how stupid you are for paying so much) does have a usage page, but it was always 4 hours behind. Kinda like driving a car forward only using a rear view mirror.
Did I mention the crappy service?
The DW6000 was a piece of crap. It could not go more than a day without locking up. I was temtped to put it on one of those outdoor timers just to power cycle it every night. Get a cloud in the sky? Time to read a book. Really, I am in upstate NY and the connectivity was utter crap. While it may not interfer too greatly with browsing, having an iso time out because a duck is in the air (coupled with FAP) was real annoying. A killer for WoW and CoH. It made, for me, ay kind of gaming unbearable long term.
For $60/mo (only 60, that is, after the huge setup fee and optional monthly extortion fees (you want it to work? gonna cost ya...))? Find a dialup ISP which supports coupling modems to double thruput. Get the phone lines. It will likely be around the same price, faster, and more reliable.
Oh also: keep poking at your local phone co. We finally got DSL here as they expanded service and dropped DirecWay without looking back. I am actually thinking of burning the DirecWay dish in a roaring bonfire.
Before I had cable (5+ years ago) I had two modems in what is called a Shotgun configuration. I've never had satellite so I can't make a fair comparison. I'm sure you will get better speed with satellite but the latency may be less with a modem Shotgun. Just a thought.
BTW, is anyone still doing this?
And I'm going to go with "microwaves are not considered a type of light". You can't call the entire electromagnetic spectrum "light".
You need to actually multiply by 4!
Home to Satellite
Satellite to ISP
ISP to Satellite
Satellite to Home
And as you said, that's on top of the regular latency between the ISP and the game servers.
Ah yes, you raise a good point. Although I already multiplied by two for the round trip for one direction, so the total "ping" latency to the first hop would theoretically be 478ms. And then there's the fact that microwaves in atmosphere and through clouds probably don't travel quite as fast as light in a vacuum.
And that's just the minimum latency to talk to the first hop!
Why the hell not, when it *is* ?
Why the hell not? Because microwaves are classified as radio waves. They occupy roughly 3GHz up until 300GHz. At the 300GHz point, THAT is where light starts, with FIR (Far Infrared light). Visible light is up at roughly 380 through 750 terahertz, or over a thousand times higher than where microwaves end.
Consumer microwave equipment such as cooking microwaves and WiFi, is actually a decent bit into UHF territory (but the boundries of what is considered a microwave are a bit fluid), so 2.4GHz is apparently close enough to still be considered a microwave.
Any how, to reiterate, microwaves are RADIO waves, not light waves. That's why the hell not.
Microwaves are considered radio waves, and are about a thousand times lower frequency than visible light. As an example, Ku-band satellites (used for satellite TV and internet) operate in the 12 to 18 GHz ranges. The lowest frequency form of light, far-infrared light, starts at 300 GHz. By no stretch of the imagination do these satellites operate using any form of light. The frequencies are way too low to be considered such. That's why the hell not.