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Satellite Internet for Gaming?
Posted by
Cliff
on Sat Sep 16, 2006 10:55 PM
from the if-the-only-other-choice-is-dial-up dept.
from the if-the-only-other-choice-is-dial-up dept.
SphericalCrusher asks: "I have been using Comcast high-speed internet for the last three years. Before that, I used Bellsouth DSL and then random dial-up services — but I have to say that overall, I love Comcast the best. Now that my parents are moving, to a new house some 12 miles away, and having no money for my own place, I'll have to move with them . The thing is, the road that it is on is pretty far off the highway, and after calling all broadband providers in the area, I've found out that broadband is not available at my new location. Charter Cable Communications covers the entire area of Summerville, Georgia except mine and neither Bellsouth or Alltel offer DSL. Now, I'm forced to either go back to dial-up or try out a satellite broadband service, which is what I want to do. Has anyone here had any success in gaming online with satellite internet?"
"After purchasing the modem and cords off of eBay for DirecWay (now HughesNet), I'm ready to get satellite internet (we had everything else we needed at the new house). However, has anyone here used satellite and actually enjoyed it? I play a good bit of online games, such as World of WarCraft, Quake IV, and F.E.A.R. and I know gaming online with those will not be the same (the satellite is 25,000+ miles from Earth) because of latency issues. Will the high latency seriously affect the overall download and upload speeds?"
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high bandwidth, but high latency (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, no... (Score:2)
Speed? No. Latency? Yes. (Score:3, Funny)
Speed isn't going to kill gameplay as much as latency will. Who cares if you're able to burst 2Mbit/second when it takes you half a second to register commands you send through the game realtime. Frag city, my friend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet [wikipedia.org]
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Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Better solution is to find a neighbor who CAN get cable, you pay for it, and set up a wireless bridge with a couple of 21dB directional antennas. With good line of sight, you can get a mile with no problem and about $200 in hardware. Even further if you pay more for better antennas.
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It's not very likely that they'll even detect it, but better safe than sorry.
A couple of years ago, you could get a decent spread spectrum ethernet bridge very cheap (full set for less than $500). I guess prices should be better today.
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Technically, the remote user would be the customer and is willing to pay for the services.
It's the cable company that isn't willing to provide services.
Satellite Internet for Gaming? (Score:3, Informative)
Nope. (Score:3, Informative)
Cost (Score:3, Insightful)
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The current deal with HNS is $400 for installation and equipment. If you pay $200/mo rent for an apartment in the US, I really don't want to visit that area.
They offer a plan to ammortize the setup and equipment over 16 months, and the interest rate is 0%, so it's $25/mo equipment costs.
For games, I would go with dial-up, my understanding is that game packets are very small and don't take
From personal experience... (Score:2)
Another Perspective (Score:4, Funny)
In short, NO! (Score:3, Insightful)
Speed of Light = 299792.458 kilometers / second
Geostationary satellites are at an altitude of ~35786 kilometers.
This means that just for the radio wave to travel to and from the satellite, you are adding around 238 milliseconds. That is just one way, the return trip is another 238ms MINIMUM.
This doesn't account for signal conversions, modulation, demodulation(the preceeding are mostly negligable), latency from the ground station to the host, etc. You would be lucky to EVER see under 580ms ping using satellite.
Even the providers do not recommend gaming.
Link: http://www.wafa.ae/en/vsat/aboutsatinternetpg2.as
My terminology may be a little different than others are used to, that is because I am a Satellite Network Controller in the Army and use the military terms.
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DirecWay info - http://www.fchorizon.com/direcway.html [fchorizon.com]
STARBand info - http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/sDefinitio n/0,,sid26_gci560980,00.html [techtarget.com]
Why communications birds use Geostationary orbits - http://celestrak.com/columns/v04n07/ [celestrak.com]
It's worse than playing online with dialup (Score:3, Informative)
Latency on dialup is generally around 150-300ms. Latency on Satellite is limited by the speed of light and starts at an absolute, physical limit of 240ms, assuming that the radio signal is actually travelling at the speed of light (it isn't), no retransmissions need to take place (they will), the satellite isn't processing or juggling your data stream at all (it is), the satellite isn't oversubscribed (it is), and the game server you're connected to is directly connected to the other end of the satellite downlink (it isn't).
Expect latency of 400ms or more, sometimes much more. And for WoW, note the Latency the game tells you. Much of that is on the server end. When WoW's lagging and you have a latency of 500ms or more in-game, probably less than 100ms of that is due to your current broadband connection. So you can take the remaining 400ms and add that to your satellite latency as well. Now you're looking at almost 1 second before you can react to what's happening in the game.
Might I suggest trashing the dish and looking for terrestrial radio internet instead? Like WiMAX or EV-DO. Good luck.
No. (Score:2)
No.
Well, let me go into a bit more detail:
Hahahahahahahaha! No Flipping Way, Sucker! Hahahaha!
Also: Yet another Ask Slashdot question that can be answered by Google and common sense. Satellite = 600+ms latency. What do you do with people with that much latency in your Quake 4 game? Oh right, you kick their asses. WOW *might* be marginally tolerable... but I doubt it.
Dialup. (Score:2)
use dialup and other system (Score:2)
Why not cell phone broadband? (Score:3, Insightful)
This will beat your satellite broadband in terms of usability.
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Wifi? (Score:2, Interesting)
Another solution... (Score:3, Interesting)
Start a local ISP. Do a little market research on your area; find out what kind of demand there is for fast, low-latency Internet access. If the demand is sufficient to both pay for the service and employ you (and if you're interested), then get a T1, T3, or if possible, fiber run or two to your door. Share it among everybody you can find and run the service yourself.
Then play Quake 4, F.E.A.R., etc. during the down times on your fast line when nobody's calling you for support.
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You'll have last mile issues, which are always expensive. Maybe if there's a phone exchange near you, you can get a DSLAM in, if the phone company doesn't laugh you out of their office. Cable would involve a lot of equipment, know-how, and rights to use the poles (no idea there, but I'm certain they don't just let you staple your own lines on the p
Sure Dude! (Score:2)
For everything else it'll pretty much suck. Rumor has it one of those companies had to implement their own FTP client because the ping times were so high that the regular one thought the connection had been lost and gave up.
ISDN? (Score:2)
Keep in mind, I have no idea how well this is supported with any ISP anymore.
However, some years ago, I was in an area that was far outside of any access range. The only real alternative I had was ISDN. I believe at the time, it was 39.99 a month, and you did have a limit on the number of B channel hours you could have, but I never found myself over that limit (200). You get about 16K/sec, which isn't great at all bandwidth-wise, but it was very good on latency. I found it perfectly acceptable for gaming, a
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May be worth a shot just asking them, as their equipment quite possibly supports both call types - i'd hazard a guess that it's more an accounting issue than a technical one...
What about a cell phone data service? (Score:2)
No. Never. Not gonna happen. (Score:4, Informative)
It's $60/mo for me. That $60 lets me download about 160mb a day before I hit the "Fair Access Policy" which caps me at about 4-5kB/s for the next twelve hours. The speeds up to that point are okay, but it still sucks ass. $60/mo for that!?
Okay, well, you didn't mention a concern about downloads. You want games! Well, no. It's not going to work. If I go into a server for any given FPS game with this thing my ping is about 500-900. It's never, ever less than 400. If you're concerned enough about gaming to ask slashdot about this, I'm sure you understand exactly what devastating effects that would have on gameplay. There are other posts in this discussion about the speed of light being the limiting factor. It's really true. It takes about a quarter second to half a second for your signal to even reach a server and come back.
I was in your same situation. My parents were moving and I can't afford, yet, to live on my own. So I moved with them to the middle of nowhere. Now I made the wrong choice and I have what I would describe as the shittiest ISP I have ever used (I haven't used AOL. Not sure how that would compare.
If things like pornography and downloading music, videos, or other big content are not important to you, do not get this. You will NOT play games at any adequate level on this kind of connection.
Turn based games are okay.
Keep a dialup account handy to play anything else, though.
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no dsl/cable (Score:2)
ISDN or IDSL (Score:2)
On satellite right now (Score:2)
In short, if response time is absolutely critical, the game will be unplayable. If response time is important, you will get frustrated. If response time is not important, satellite kicks ass
It completely depends on the game. (Score:2, Informative)
Gaming is very possible on both Wildblue and HughesNet 7000. It really comes down to the game though, and how it handles lag. Obviously Satellite gaming is never a prefered solution, but many games are easily playable with 700-850ms pings (average DW7000 and Wildblue ping).
Most all MMOs are playable - even Planetside and Auto Assault.
Some RTS are playable (Warcraft 3 works for example).
PC-based FPS are ve
What you need to do (Score:2)
freind/girlfreind with DSL/cable
WiFi
ISDN (bonded if possible)
3G
T1 (fractional is possible)
Satellite
Honestly if your parents chose to move to a place without broadband and you're a geek, and they don't get that broadband is a requirement for your life I would leave as soon as humanly possible.
Do the math (Score:2)
Light speed is roughly 3.0 x 10^8 meters per second. So, in your best ca
Slashdot is the new google??? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For some people, in some parts of the world, that may seem like an easy solution to the problem but this isn't the case in general; personally, I live in Calgary where (because of the oil boom) it is not uncommon to pay $1100 per month for a bachelor suit or $1500 for a two bedroom. If you are (like me) a well employeed software developer you can afford to live on your own (or with a roomate) but the vast majority of people who work
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Prices for every day goods are also higher in Canada.
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I wouldn't have been so mean, especially not knowing anything about his life... but, I share your sentiments. Why not take this opportunity (no gaming distractions) to learn a trade or improve your current situation in life? My apologies if you are disabled or have extenuating circumstances, but if you are financially bound to your parents and are of working age, it might be time for a little self-reflection.
To stay on topic, satellite is going to have too much latency for real-time gaming, and there's not
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
By doing that, he's saving $7200 plus food, which is significant.
Even moreso when you consider that you're going to have to work an aditional ~30% just to pay the taxman.
Dorm life is fun, but when you're kept up every night by the douchebag in the next room, the assholes who think it's fine to l
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps for more Civilian/off-the-shelf solutions, but for big-ish commercial grade stuff you can receive and transmit through the dish. I work for a Canadian oilfield service company that has just gotten a whack of dishes on most of our Fracturing datavans that support both transmit and receive. Its pretty cool, actually, being way out in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no cell phone service and still having high speed i
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In games which send little data but you have to receive a lot more data, sending data up through dialup would get it into the game faster, while the larger bursts from the game might arrive faster through the satellite. It depends upon how much data has to be downloaded in each update and how often an update takes place.
There would still be more lag than with a faster uplink, but an issue is how much better than a simple dialup can
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Here is a fair use/access policy from wildblue [wild-blue.coop]. As you can see, it has some limits that could cause them to yank the service. I'm not sure if constant gaming with do it or not but I first found out about it several years ago when someone w
Re:Satellite can't compete (Score:5, Informative)
A ping is a round-trip and the internet is not in geosynchronous orbit, so it's roughly a 120,000 mi trip or minimum of 2/3 of a second.
Parent
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I had satillite for a brief while. It almost doesn't matter how far along the technology gets, the physical limitations of the technology make it completely unsuitable for gaming.
Re:latency - actual ping times (Score:4, Informative)
Actual pings via my WildBlue connection (pro package):
64 bytes from 82.165.178.138: icmp_seq=0 ttl=50 time=1040.5 ms
64 bytes from 82.165.178.138: icmp_seq=1 ttl=50 time=591.3 ms
64 bytes from 82.165.178.138: icmp_seq=2 ttl=50 time=698.5 ms
64 bytes from 82.165.178.138: icmp_seq=3 ttl=50 time=606.3 ms
64 bytes from 82.165.178.138: icmp_seq=4 ttl=50 time=709.0 ms
--- 82.165.178.138 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 591.3/729.1/1040.5 ms
Verdict: gaming sucks, way better than dialup, way way better than nothing.
Parent