Satelite Broadband for gaming

Agent7249

I'm just wondering is it viable? I've been lookni around and well this is what I've come u pwith as a cheap method for it = Europe Online .

Can anyone enlighten me about satelite broadband and how it is for gaming better/worse for gaming? Thanks

(And if there would be any better offers around)

Gonzo

i dont know much about satellite broadband but i hear its next to unuseable for gaming as theres a huge latency factor when using satellite, far greater than dialup i heard, as for surfing/downloading i heard it can be very good and stability is dependent on weather, if its raining/snowing very heavily there mite be signal interference?

John R

Satellite services are completely useless for gaming.
Any fixed location satellite service has very high latency as the time it takes for uplink+downlink alone is around 1 second, double that for 2-way satellite.

The EuropeOnline service is a very odd service, a very limited "live" internet service 500mb/month along with a file queuing service 1gb a month where you enter urls for files itto their server, they get them from the web and give a time for the files to be sent over the satellite- you must then have your PC on (preferably idle) with sat card tuned to their service at the correct time. They also provide constant streams of content; music clips, film trailers, light porn, etc and afaik access to better stuff with additional payment.
When I had the service (about 3 years ago) you could get an unnoficial prog that would let you take all the files requested by every user, 1000s of gigs per week of everything you could imagine. I have no idea if this is still available now though. I still have cd's full of stuff that I have not yet sorted through!

There are other satellite providers that offer more traditional BB services, the one I currently use offer 300k with 6gb per month for about €30, when I joined it was 350k daytime and 1Mb overnight with no cap for the same price. There are others, not sure of the prices though. Remember with one-way satellite you still need dial-up access for the outgoing connection so the cost of that needs to be added on.

kaisersose77

anyone know if u can "grab" stuff for free even if your not payin for EOL, i read something about it before on www.dvbnetwork.com as i have a skystar 2 card. any info would be appreciated

Capt'n Midnight

You could play games like chess - but not real time games

John R

There is a free service, nothing to do with EON, that anyone with a DVB card and satellite dish can access. http://satatonce.csp.it/english/index.php

I stopped using it 2 years ago so I have no idea about accessing EON broadcast without a sub. Do a google search for File Fetch Manager, that's the prog that used to work for capturing all the broadcast files. Although that program wasn't a hack to illegally access the stream, EON tolerated it's use as it was just allowing lots of people to access files being transferred anyway. I am pretty sure you still needed to be a subscriber to use it.

longword

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
You could play games like chess - but not real time games

MUD!

watty

Casablanca (satatonce) is the only really viable kind of service for Satellite.

Very expensive two way access if there is NO terrestrial access. But even for ordinary stuff it is very very poor.

Forget about games absolutely.

Squall

Well lets see,

All commercial telecommunication satellites are in geosynch orbits at approx 22k miles. All telecommunications signals travel at lightspeed, approx 186k mps. Simple math will show that an electronic signal making the round trip from a satellite ground station to orbit and back will travel 44,000 miles and take approx 236 ms.

This means that any satellite ISP service will have a minimum built-in latency of 236ms. Then you add normal system and routing times and you could expect an average ping of about 400ms although its not unusual at all to see 1 sec or better ping times using satellite.

Satellites are grand for browsing and downloading data due to the bandwidth you get. But they are woeful for gaming. If you can consistently get a 400ms ping while playing an online game you are doing pretty well. Your better off sticking with 56k if satellite is your only alternative.

Agent7249

Thanks lads

Capt'n Midnight

Originally posted by Squall
Simple math will show that an electronic signal making the round trip from a satellite ground station to orbit and back will travel 44,000 miles and take approx 236 ms.

Don't forget that because the delay is so long between the data and the ack packets , satellite is generally setup with large TCP recieve windows, ie. it waits longer before asking to resend a missed packet which also could affect the responsiveness. An analogy is that ships carry a lot more cargo than trucks, if you want to shift 100,000 tonnes of something - use a ship, if you want it there quickly use trucks.

Squall

Don't forget that because the delay is so long between the data and the ack packets , satellite is generally setup with large TCP recieve windows, ie. it waits longer before asking to resend a missed packet

Theres something I hadnt thought of. Yet another reason sattellites suck for gaming then

longword

Originally posted by Squall
Theres something I hadnt thought of. Yet another reason sattellites suck for gaming then

Most games use UDP rather than TCP. No windows. Lost or corrupt packets are often just swept under the carpet and forgotten about.