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?"

Comments

Satellite Internet for Gaming?

[The MAZZTer]

*cough*

Nope.

[antdude]

From what I read, satellite Internet services haven't improved in terms of latency. WISP should be decent if you can get that.

Re:Upstream

[Redfrost]

As far as I know, you need a dialup modem for your upstream so that won't help.

Perhaps for more Civilian/off-the-shelf solutions, but for big-ish commercial grade stuff you can receive and transmit through the dish. I work for a Canadian oilfield service company that has just gotten a whack of dishes on most of our Fracturing datavans that support both transmit and receive. Its pretty cool, actually, being way out in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no cell phone service and still having high speed internet. The cost is a little prohibitive, however. The estimates I've heard (no one will tell me specifics) is around $20,000-$40,000 (CDN) per truck at about $10,000 per month for the service. The per month fee is for a total of 1M/sec bandwidth (somewhere around there, combined, up & down) that is shared out with each of our trucks. So if we have each truck up on the network the speed can drop quite rapidly. I can't remember what the latency was like, though. The service we're using is provided through a Canadian company called Telesat.

I don't know if there are any low-end stuff that is cheaper but from what I can tell this is not a solution anywhere near the reach of a person with no money and still living with their parents ;). A better option would be wireless internet, if it is available, otherwise I'd look at setting up my own point to point wireless link with somone close who does have high speed internet.

Re:Satellite can't compete

[l33td00d42]

>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).

A ping is a round-trip and the internet is not in geosynchronous orbit, so it's roughly a 120,000 mi trip or minimum of 2/3 of a second.

It's worse than playing online with dialup

[Cecil]

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.

No. Never. Not gonna happen.

[EvilMal]

I'm on Direcway's asstastic service right now.

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. :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.

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.

It completely depends on the game.

[Draknorr]

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.

Re:latency - actual ping times

[exi1ed0ne]

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.