So, massassi! Good news! I've gotten Satellite internet! Bad news, *see prior comment*

I understand I can't game with it, SO DON'T TELL ME THAT OK?! What I don't understand is HOW THE HELL did a friend of mine get a 450 ping in Counter Strike on 28k dial up when i get 1300 ping on satellite?

And to justify putting this in the discussion forum, post your internet type (i know we just had an internet speed one)

Because your request has to make a trip outside the Earth's atmosphere, that request is then sent down from the satellite to some base station, the data is retrieved, sent back up to the satellite, then sent back down to you.

Light can only go so fast...

FYI, under ideal conditions (being at the closest point on the Earth from a satellite and such), it would take 119.5 ms for one trip to a geosynchronous satellite from Earth's surface. Multiply this times 4 and you get 478 ms. Account for all of the delay created by data processing and such on the satellite, at the ISP's base site, the various hops from the ISP to the server, etc. and pings over 1000 don't sound so unreal. More realistic "good" pings with satellite are around 700 ms, but still, higher is not unusual at all. Satellite internet is a very erratic being...

I don't really know much about satelite internet service, but what kind of bandwidth are you supposed to be getting?

It's not the bandwidth, it's the latency. This is why 128k cable connections can still get a 60 ping in CS:S, while 1.5mbps satellite connections can't get anything under 500.

PS--told you so.

Yeah, I've had satellite broadband for about three years, and although it definitely has it's quirks, it's not bad. My download speed is usually 80 kb/s in ideal conditions. I would definitely use cable broadband instead of this (used that before I moved out here in the middle of nowhere), but if you have no other alternative, it's infinitely better than dial-up. My gripes are online games are out of the question, it usually shuts down during bad weather, not great download speeds, and P2P programs don't work with it.

BTW, what brand of satellite internet is it? I have Starband.

Direcway. It's 60$ a month but i get around 75 - 85 kb/s download. And we've had stormy weather lately so this has been going out

PS: It is the UBER-FORUM-SURFER, awesome for checking out the latest game trailers/reading up on them, and downloading (for me, 6 mb a minute I think o_o)

60$ a month??

Is it possible that you could get cable instead?

Echo, not a flames chance in Hoth (WE OFFERED TO BUY THE CABLE TO STRING TO OUR HOUSE AND PAY THE CABLE INSTALL CHARGES) or a snow's chance in hell (WE'RE JUST OUTTA RANGE FOR DSL TOO! WE'RE LIKE 200 FT AWAY FROM THE CUT-OFF, and even if we pay for ALL the expenses, we can't get it)

Another thing that doesn't help the ping at all is the upload bandwidth for standard consumer-level satellite is HORRIBLE and is easily saturated. Saturated upload causes the connection to have to wait and/or lose packets to get info out, which is one of the instances where bandwidth actually does affect ping.

Sounds like its time to move out of the middle of nowhere.

But yeah, when a signal has to go from your modem, to the other PC, then back up to a satillite, and from that satillite to YOUR satillite... it's not going to be very condusive to gaming.

I'm probably wrong here but:

Satellite gives you good download speeds, but your upload rate is no better than dialup. Most internet uses such as checking emails, downloads etc will have excellent speeds because once the initital request for data has been sent it's all download from there. Online games require the speeds in both directions to be good, this coupled with the extra latency of getting data to start being sent means satellite is basically worse than dialup for games.

Sort of Detty. Not really though. Even downloading you need to have some semblance of an upload, trust me.

My parents pay something like $30-$40 and I get 1.5mbitsps down and 384kbitsps up. And I can get 40-50ms pings in games (if I look for a good server).

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Sort of Detty. Not really though. Even downloading you need to have some semblance of an upload, trust me.[/QUOTE]

yes thank you, I had completely forgotten the really obvious stuff even after doing a networking course at university. my point was that the upload doesn't necessarily use the same medium as the download, I wouldn't be suprised if the upload method for satellite was just upstream dialup.

Nope, Direcway has been all two-way for a while now. They don't use dial up modems for the upload method anymore.

Problem with that satellite upload method is that it is horrendously slow to the point that it's slower than dial up. Even though they're rated for speeds of like 50 kb/s up, they're really about 10 kb/s up on average.

10kb/s is still over 3x faster than 56K.

b is the standard abbreviation for bit, not byte...

And it wouldn't even be 3 times faster if it were bytes...

uhh, I get about 120 kb/s download on a $30/mo DSL service... with msn premium, yada yada yada. the router came free, and the first month was free. So could you please explain to me why you have satalite?


verizon DSL with MSN premium package (we saw a good deal on it, so we went for a yearly plan) oh, and now they are running a deal where the first three months are 10 dollars cheaper, which is the same value as mine. You get a bunch of email account options. MSN mail (you can have more sub accounts to this), with 2 gigs of storage, and verizon email with the ability to have 8 sub-accounts. Oh, you get web space too. (not that that matters, there is plenty of free web space out there.) And DSL never fails, well, it hasn't failed on me at all, unlike Cable. Though cable is way faster...

Heh..I feel ya -- we're 1/2 mile too far away for DSL, and there is no cable service in my area.

[QUOTE=Double Helix]uhh, I get about 120 kb/s download on a $30/mo DSL service... with msn premium, yada yada yada. the router came free, and the first month was free. So could you please explain to me why you have satalite?[/QUOTE]

Read the thread.

ha ha... sorry... missed a few sentances. righto.

"He lives in the middle of no where."

"We are 200 feet from the DSL cutoff"

".. too far out for cable.."

And Zloc, I think the packetdropping was the reason our MSN transfers keep cutting out.

299,792,458 m/s

I'd say upload whatever you're sending, and let him just download it then

I too have the evil DirecWay, only because cable isn't available. I just play MP over LAN nowadays, which is still very fast.

I also get downlaod speeds of about 100 KB/s usually, which is good. Still, the service is very overproced for what it is. :/

Actually, there is no real "standard", although if you wish to go by recommendations of the IEC, you are supposed to call bits "bit" and bytes "b", to avoid confusion with B, which stands for bel. (Commonly used as Decibel, dB)

And I'm not sure how fast you think 56K uploads, but it's not that fast. 56K modems generally upload at about 3.5kb/s, which is about 1/2-1/3 the speed of their download.

3.5 kB/s > 1.25 kB/s

And while it's not a "written standard", it's a pretty much accepted standard that most all software and hardware companies tend to use. No one's going to confuse a bel with a byte in any situation anyway.

While we are on the topic of "accepted"... I believe it is generally accepted that 10kb/s = kiloBYTES, since that is how windows displays download speeds, so everyone sees it listed that way. When people talk about bits, they usually say 10kbps instead.

Besides that, I have no idea what you are getting at with 3.5kB/s > 1.25kB/s... unless your pointing out the fact that you meant 10kbps instead, which I already know. I was just replying to the fact that you said it wasn't 3x the speed, when it definately was...

No...b is bit, B is byte. That's how every company does it (otherwise they'd get sued for false advertising).

The only difference in kbps and kb/s is that you're replacing the word "per" with a slash. It doesn't change the meaning one bit.

And if you want to get technical on the 3 times thing, 10 kB/s is less than 3 times 3.5 kB/s...

And BTW, no, the IE download manager uses B for byte. It also uses a capital K, for kilo, which is wrong, but eh, it doesn't use b for byte.

There is no correctness though, you seem to miss this :/

And I am sorry, 3.5 * 3 != 10, it misses just barely. Heaven forbid I estimate :p

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]No...b is bit, B is byte. That's how every company does it (otherwise they'd get sued for false advertising).[/QUOTE]

They can't. There's no standard. You can't sue over something that doesn't exist.

I didn't say anything about anything being right or wrong (except them using K for kilo, which quite frankly is just plain wrong). I just said it's the most accepted usage, which it is.

Anyway, it is pretty clear based on the content of the thread that we were discussing bandwidth. Bandwidth is almost always expressed in bits.

No, but generally speaking, B stands for bytes and b for bits. Of course if you're using standards mb should be mili-bit. :p

Haha, mb is tiny.

Also, it's a standard insofar as it's spread throughout the industry and that's what everyone uses.