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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.

6 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Speed of light says the latency will be bad. by rubycodez · · Score: 5, Funny

    that's why I use straight path neutrino beams through the planet. I quit using CERN's neutrino source though, because of the negative latency. It's annoying to get the results of a command while I'm still typing it.

  2. Re:Ping by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  3. Re:Ping by zennyboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Ping by hibiki_r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Ping by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:lots of land, no line by hdd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy