ViaSat Delivers 12 Mbps+ Via Satellite

An anonymous reader writes "Last Thursday, ViaSat announced pricing for its new home broadband service, which is set to deliver 12 Mbps+ download speeds (3 Mbps+ up) beginning next week for $50 per month. Engadget just dropped by the company's demo home just a few feet from the Engadget trailer at the Las Vegas Convention Center parking lot to try it out, and posted their review." The comments there, understandably, wail for information about how much data that $50 buys.

Comments

Ping

[zennyboy]

Download speed is nice, but for gaming, latency is God...

Re:Ping

[LynnwoodRooster]

Latency is an issue for Farmville? For 90% of the Internet using public, latency of a second is acceptable - speed when connected is king (can it stream music/Netfix/Youtube). Farmville doesn't really have a latency issue...

Re:Ping

[Grishnakh]

The question, however, is how much people care. Gamers don't seem to realize that most people don't give two shits about MP games, and there probably aren't many gamers living in rural areas anyway, as 20-somethings generally live in metro areas.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Ever try to load Gmail over a high latency connection? Anything with a lot of redirects will cause an issue - and that is a lot more stuff than you think...

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[Anonymous Coward]

Gamers don't seem to realize that most people don't give two shits about MP games

According to Wiki: "Modern Warfare 3 went on to gross $1 billion throughout the world in 16 days of availability, beating Avatar’s record of 17 days, according to Activision."

None of those millions of buyers are playing online?

There are currently 3,015,146 players on steam - http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

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[hibiki_r]

1 second is still a disaster for complex sites: You load the page. The page includes some javascript file. Said javascript file includes some more. Then it makes a couple dozen web service calls... and that's if we hope the browser is smart enough to request every link in the page at once.

I've seen many a custom business apps that was tested with pings of 0-10 be a bit slow with 80s, and a total disaster when used from another continent. A 1 second ping makes a connection from the US to India seem like a LAN.

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[Grishnakh]

Sorry, it's just annoying when this topic (satellite broadband) comes up, because it seems like a whole raft of gamers jump on and start bashing it because their gaming is oh-so-important and the technology is useless because it has too much latency for their application, so my response was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction.

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[Grishnakh]

But when it comes time for the family to decide whether they're going to pay $50/month for 12Mbps satellite broadband which allows the parents to watch Netflix and do all the normal things they do on the internet, or the same amount (or more) for some local ~1Mbps service with low ping times so junior can play his games, but is useless for Netflix, I wonder which one they're going to choose. And if junior has a sister, she's going to be rooting for the Netflix too.

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[spire3661]

Then you deal with the delay. It amazes me how people trivialize this stuff sometimes because it isnt 1000% consumerized. Pretend you are communicating with a base on the moon and have fun with it.

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[flimflammer]

Sure, if you want the most terrible encoding of the video. Their lowest quality video makes 240p on YouTube look high def by comparison.

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[HopefulIntern]

Fuck comcast, or more appropriately, fuck capitalism.
My point is, you cannot blame them for not wanting to run cables to your house, if they are not going to make money off it. I am in the same situation (my city is one of the top for internet speed in the country, but I live in an inexplicable not-spot). Countless phone calls to the cable company (the only people who do fibre, apart from a few small niche companies) end in the same result: it is not economically viable for them to cable my street, despite neighboring streets being cabled. In addition, BT are rolling out fibre as well, to my exchange, but the catch is, they are only bringing the fibre to cabinets that are already served with fibre from Virgin. Why? Well, for competition. If you are not on fibre, you are already paying BT for line rental on the copper, so they have no incentive to cable. In places with Virgin cable, they are not guaranteed a profit, so they put in a competing service.
tl;dr privatising telecoms means monopolies and profiteering, rather than providing a public service. so fuck capitalism. in this case.

Re:lots of land, no line

[noh8rz2]

Throughput is great if I'm downloading large files, but what's the latency? Awful, I imagine. This kills any bi-directional applications - Skype, e.g., and spoils the snappiness of a good internet experience.

Re:lots of land, no line

[hdd]

Latency in any sat based communication is governed by physics, not technology. Skype/VOIP over a sat connection is actually not terrible once both party understand that they need to wait for the other end to finish before they start talking. On the other hand, being able to get 720p streaming over sat connection is not something that you could get for 50 bucks a month before, so this is a huge improvement.