OMG, I am so excited.

I have been limited to an air card or tethered to my wife's Sprint phone forever as we have zero options for broadband, DSL or microwave internet at my house out in the boonies.

In the past HughesNet had satellite internet but it was 2MBS download 300K upload for $109/mo.

ViaSat just launched a new 140GBS satellite last year. It's been in testing for a couple of months and goes live to the public on 1/16.

They are stating 12MBS down, 3MBS up for $49.99/mo. Now, that is limited to 7.5GB/mo. If you want 15GM/mo it's $79.99/mo.

I have already sent in my application for service. It's going to be nice to join the 21st Century finally.

Just posting it up as I know there are a couple of people here that are rural and tied to dialup.

ViaSat press release

http://www.viasat.com/news/announcin...service-for-50

Residential and commercial supplier

http://exede.com/

 

Congratulations! A titanic world of online p0rn awaits you.

 

Pr0n. It's not just for hotels any more.

 

I'd get one in a heartbeat because that is faster than our service BUT I can't deal with a DL limit. Too many movies to watch...

Still, I'll pass it along to a friend who has dialup. He's been waiting on something like this...

 

Maybe a stupid question. How much of your monthly 15gb a month would xbox live battlefield 3 gaming take up? Never payed attention to my usage numbers. Without tv at the house I live on netflix and xbox for entertainment. Just curious if one could live a life of extacy online limited to just 15gb a month. Aside from just downloading the world 24/7.

 

Except for patches, games are typically low-bandwidth but highly latency sensitive, Torque.

Speaking from a perspective of, say, Netflix, their bandwidth is very minimal - but the latency is incredibly sensitive, and I wouldn't know if I could stand trying to game on any kind of satellite.

 

I am mildly computer illiterate. After a quick "google" of ^ got the just of it.
Latency-time it takes for signal to go out and things come back in. IE: I move joystick to kill the 13yr old. Xbox sends signal to kill the noob, hits server (time it takes is latency), kills noob, comes back, I get the kill. Time this takes is latency. Hence why server based gaming is better than host based, or so I'm told.

Low or high bandwidth dependant-just amount of info going back and forth

The original question is more about how much info is being used of your 15gb of info in gaming. I get that it is low bandwidth dependant. But if you game say 5-10hrs a week and live on streaming netflix instead of Tv. That has to over time take up a BIG chunk of 15gb worth of monthly info allowed. No? I ask because the wife wants to live in the boonies in the future. Deal is cool as long as I get my garage.

 

Well, if you can handle the latency (The lowest latency I've heard of is 500ms on satellite - basically, one half second between when you press the button and your character responds.), then as for bandwidth consumed it depends on the game.

Most games are not truly very bandwidth intensive - 56k modems can handle most of their bandwidth requirements, just not their latency requirements. If you use voice comms, they chew through bandwidth relatively quickly, however. If I was shooting for a rule of thumb, I'd say 4kb-6kb/sec (*60, *60), or about 20mb/hour without voice comms. However, that is without voice comms. Increase that by a factor of 10 on average for voice comms.

This is, of course, pulled out of my butt primarily with some testing I just tried with an online game. Plus, as I mentioned earlier and will stress again, it depends on the game, but I am having trouble thinking of one heavily bandwidth-intensive game off the top of my head I've ever played.

 

Having never actually tried it, I would suspect that the latency issue would kill you in gaming on a sat link. There have been a couple of occasions in the past where I've had to use a guaranteed-bandwidth sat link (3Mb/s bi-directional) and while the connection was perfectly acceptable for streaming or file transfers, trying to use VNC across it was downright excruciating.

 

Yeah, unless you find a way to break the speed of light, your ping will be AT LEAST 250ms, and closer to 500-700ms. Which is absolutely miserable.

 

My wifes family uses the sprint dongle for internet. Watching her little bro play MW3 online is painful. The "lag" is horrible. It makes me want to club baby seals infront of puppies. He just runs around dying and swearing.

 

The sprint dongle is going to have better latency than satellite in all likelihood based on pure technical specification, although there are numerous conditions in which that could not be the case. But my money is if you don't like the sprint dongle, you'll hate the satellite connection for gaming as I believe that the latency will be worse.

 

I've never really measured the performance of my 3G connection, but there's an underlying problem with satellite communications (all satellite communications) which does not affect any form of terrestrial signals.

Namely, distance.

Geostationary satellites orbit the earth at an altitude of 22,236 miles above the equator. The speed of radio waves through space is roughly the same as the speed of light, which is 186,282 miles/sec.

So just to get from you to a server is 22,236 up to the bird and then 22,236 down to the earth station (the big dish on the ground owned by the satellite provider which you see as the "other end" of the satellite link), a time of 240 msec. That alone is worse than a "good" ping time, and then, of course, you have to add on the "normal" terrestrial ping time to get from the earth station out to whatever server you were trying to talk to and back. Oh, and then of course you have to add another 44,472 miles to get through the satellite and back, and you can see how you can very quickly start getting into ping times of 600-700 msec or more.

In other words, imagine you're doing nothing more than typing text into a telnet session. You hit a key, and 0.7 seconds later the character appears on your screen.




Anyway, Stein, congrats. Sounds like a better deal than what you've had previously for sure.

 

My current internet is the same, or perhaps worse than, Stein's. Interested in this. Obviously, a nogo for gaming, but seems OK for streaming (wife REALLY wants NETFLIX, I tell her she already watches too much TV and she should be out waxing the Miata instead -- you can guess the results). Plus, the increased speed would be a big plus for basic internet use, E-mail, etc.

Anybody have an idea how to judge usage for basic E-mail/surfing/streaming? Is 15GB plenty? 7.5GB?

 

Streaming eats bandwidth like a fat kid eats cake.

Basic email barely nibbles at bandwidth. Surfing can vary - websites can be several mb in size, or a few dozen kb. Some types of surfing can eat through bandwidth very quickly.

I would recommend you install software to monitor your internet usage over a period of when you would normally use internet, and decide from there. It is entirely dependent on your surfing habits and how much you are on the internet.

 

As one who actually had to pay at least cursory attention when we had a Sprint air card with a 5GB limit, we never hit it. Most was ever 3GB. That said, I didn't bother with any large downloads as it was painful. Youtube required buffering on the lowest setting. So, as a result usage was down because downloading was forced to be limited.

I can see with general surfing, etc with a faster connection that I would end up easily doubling or tripling that so the 7.5GB might not be enough. If that was the case I'd jump to the 15GB and it would be fine, albeit limited to a movie or two a month plus general playing.

I thing 15GB for 79.99 is going to be the sweet spot for speed and volume. My first two questions will be

1) equipment cost
2) can I upgrade to a higher package at any time without penalty. I assume this is the case.


Also, gaming is right out as stated above. Realistic latency will be 500ms.

 

As a backwoods HughesNet Bro for 3 years in the past, this is awesome news. I hope they get back to you in a hurry. I sent this to the dude who's in my old place, hopefully he can make use of it.

I was part of HugesNet before they implemented the new Fair Access Policy (FAP in their documentation, lol) and then things REALLY sucked :( AdblockPlus is/was a godsend on transfer capped connections. Hell, I used to drive my computer into town and plug in to pull OS and software updates. When you are far enough back in the woods that satellite internet is your main source of communication (phones were super iffy, no cell) it really cuts off your ability to be a member of society, one of the big reasons I got out when I did. I tried playing wow over satellite, it was OK because its not exactly a FPS and you can time your actions to match the lag, but anything where lag is important its just not useful.

For a single computer connection, this is built into windows. Just look at the properties for the NIC. Anything going through the NIC is going through the HughesNet modem. Alternatively, get a router with a counter. They are out there but they can be a pain to find.

 

When I was deployed, I had a usb dongle for internet, the monthly bandwidth limit was like 7.5 GB. I spent every free moment playing WoW, and used a bandwidth monitor. I never came close to using the 7.5 GB in a month, except for when WoW would roll out a 2.5GB Patch, but even then I didn't eclipse the 7.5 GB. Latency was about 200ms, which made playing slightly more difficult, but nowhere near impossible. If you have anything that resembles a life, you'll come nowhere near that much bandwith in a month.

 

I was thinking this as well when I first came across this thread, but (in XP, at least) looking at the Status window for a NIC gives you a count of the number of packets sent and received, but not the actual number of bytes. Since packet size is not a constant, that information isn't particularly helpful in this context.

 

Truth, its been a while since I looked to be honest. The network meter gadget for Vista/7 seems to work OK, but I've not tested its accuracy.