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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.
I'm not saying the technology is worthless. I'm saying I live in a rural area (40 mins to closest large town, 20 mins or more to a motorway). I get a maximum of 2MB/s 'broadband', but my ping is reasonable (twice most others, but still reasonable). I'd prefer this to 10MB/s download speed and double the latency...
Not everyone is a gamer, but in my original comment, I simply stated that for Gaming (COD, L4D etc) latency is more important than download speed. And it is.
I was on Wild Blue Satellite for 1 full year. They do a "rolling" average for bandwidth that depends on your package. I had 17GB per month. If I used 400MB today, that would "roll off" in 30 days thus making it available again.
My latency was a solid 2000ms or higher at all times. I lost connection any time there was heavy storms between Virginia and New York. I was paying somewhere around $70/mo. I had trouble staying connected to Steam, so I stopped using it and favored retail single player games for that year.
I'm now on a more restricted local ISP and haven't really looked back. Instead of being on a rolling average I'm on a hard 600MB/day plan. I am paying more than under satellite, but I'm able to achieve 30ms pings (the ISP is actually WISP).
My fondest memories of satellite are: turning off prefetching webpages, clicking a link and then waiting many seconds for anything to happen and often wondering if I actually clicked it, and checking the bandwidth monitor logs to make sure I wasn't about to go over my limit.
Seriously, fuck satellite internet.
Wow, you are really out of touch with reality. Rural life does not equate to uneducated hicks. If you were to get out of your little shell and actually meet people in rural areas you might see that we live out here for a reason. Not because of education or lack of revenue but because we do not feel the need to surround ourselves with people all the time.
I really have more to say but I will leave it at that.
P.S There are quite a few more gamers than you think out in the country.
Ku usually has a serious problem with rain-fade more because dishes are sized just large enough for clear-weather communications.
Depends on who's engineering the link. Our Ku VSAT links could close the link with a 7-8db Eb/N0 on a 90cm dish, but we opted to go for a 1.2m dish for the extra rain fade margin. We also opted to spend a little more on the space segment to be able to transmit a hotter signal.
Throw a Ku-band LNBF on a nice big 3 meter (C-band) offset dish, and I bet your rain-fade problem will be history.
If your C-Band dish is Ku-capable, sure. That means no mesh dishes, and stricter manufacturing tolerances. Satellite owners get cranky when you splatter across 2 or 3 birds because of a dish that is out of tolerance for what it is being used for. Plus there's the potential problem of overload. I've had instances of having to pad down a signal because the system was engineered for 1.2m dishes all around and someone pops up with a 4.5m dish because that's what they had already. The receiver would overload and we couldn't turn the transmitter down far enough to not splatter all over the transponder.
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...
Good -- maybe all the rustic folk out in the hinterlands will complain enough to get a few sites to use less than 19 external sources of javascript tracking bugs, and to only have four or five layers of external scripts that load external scripts that load external scripts.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Caps can be an issue, but with satellite links it's rate-limiting that's the main issue.
For example the TooWay service in Europe can sustain 10 Mbps downlink, but if you use more than 500 MB in any one hour, or 2GB in a week then your data rate will be throttled for the remainder of the "fair access" window.
This was the main reason I had to stay with a flaky, wind-affected ADSL connection instead of moving to satellite. Although the data cap was generous, trying to use it was penalised.