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

Re:Ping

[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...

Re:Ping

[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.

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.