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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.
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...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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.
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...
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/
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.
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.
This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy