Satellite connections....

Have a friend who is in a very rural part of Canada with no hope of access other than either dial up or satellite. Here's the clincher, he is really into online gaming, most notably FPS style games such as Delta Force 2, Joint Ops, World of Warcraft, etc. The question is, what experience have others here had with satellite connections and this type of online usage? Is the latency too much to play a decent game? Please try to be specific in type of connection and speeds as well as latency issues please. Thanks!

Jack

 

I am using a vSat two way connection 512Kbps in 128Kbps out. Although much quicker than dial up and actually seems to run above its bandwidth downloading etc the latency is a big problem for online gaming and even live video streaming very choppy. Not a problem for me as i don't really online game but if this is too be its main use I probably can't recomend it. You can get much higher in/out setups than this but latency will still be a problem as any signal has a round trip of something like 60,000km from base station to satellite and back.

 

Jack i been looking into Sat also so if you find something good please let me know

 

Latency will kill you. The high latency causes large ping times. Basically, anything that relies on low ping times is going to suffer. Checking email and downloading files is not ping sensitive, where BF2 and Quake is. Packet loss is also going to be a problem.

I have looked into Hughes Net and several other satellite style ISP's. The only difference that I know of is there used to be a company that did broadband in rural area with microwave transmitters. That was pretty good, packet loss was an issue, but latency wasn't.

 

Your looking at latency of a second with any satellite connection I have seen '1000ms',to put that in perspective a dial up connection can run at 200ms,if he doesnt like gaming on dial up satellite will be a joke

Forget any FPS games,MMORP as long as there is no fighting and its nice and boring,walking around saying hello to people, RTS would be ok I suppose but not my cup of tea so not sure

That leaves chess "unless your on the clock" Its a sad situation but I'd probably swap with him,all our open spaces have had houses ect built on and the ones that havnt now have police dirtbikes and helicopters patrolling them,theres no where to take a dirtbike for a quick blurt