Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
*cough*
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
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.
As far as I know, you need a dialup modem for your upstream so that won't help.
;). 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.
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
>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.
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...
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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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