Satelite Broadband

[Devirka]

I just wanted to know if the tales i hear about satelite not eing viable for gaming is true or just urban leyend.

[EvilIguana966]

Probably quite true. Your signal can be interrupted by all manner of meteorological phenomena, and it is typically very asynchronous in nature. As in you get a lot of downstream bandwidth but very limited upstream bandwidth.

[Catila Amano]

On top of that, the latency for the satellite signal to go from the ground station, to the sattelite in geosynchronous orbit 22,236 miles above the earth and back down is around a second. Remember that light travels at 186,282 miles per second, so the 44,472 mile round trip would take about a quarter second alone, and then add signal processing time on both ends and in the sattelite itself as well as internet latency to the ground station, and it all adds up to a time that's horrible for gaming.

Upstream is usually handled via a standard 56K modem over a phone line, so upstream bandwidth is really limited. That's not a big factor in gaming, but it does add to the server->client->server latency.

There are bi-directional sattelite connections, but they're rather expensive and they suffer from the same ground->sattelite->ground latency described above, but times two.

So, if it's available, stick to cable or DSL. Comcast recently increased (or will be increasing) the bandwidth for its customers (SlashDot article here (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/17/1219252&tid=99&tid=98&tid=95&tid=1)), and DSL seems to be getting cheaper (as long as you are within distance of the nearest central office), so ground-based broadband options are (hopefully) getting better (at least in the US -- still not up to Korean standards, yet, though).

If all you do is surf the internet and read email (and don't send large attachments), sattelite broadband is fine, but for anything beyond that, it's severely lacking due to the latency problems.