So I’m heading home soon back to rural Arkansas. Cable and such is a no go out where I live, so I’m considering getting satellite broadband from WildBlue or HughesNet since they seem to serve over my area. Both, however, have disclaimers suggesting that their services are not the best for online multiplayer games.
Any of you dopers have such a connection? If so, how’s it for gaming? Would it be sufficient to play FPSs or MMORPGs?
No. Satellite is not good for gaming. Laws of physics dictate that you will have a minimum 300ms ping or more. Maybe more like 500ms. For downloading it’s not so bad once it gets going, but they’re really picky about the amount of data you transfer too.
Your best bet might be EVDO (Internet over cell towers.) Check out these sites to see if coverage is in your area:
AT&T: http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer/popUp_3g.html
Verizon: http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/CoverageLocatorController?requesttype=NEWREQUEST
Sprint: Sprint - Nationwide Coverage
Basically you have a USB or PCMCIA adapter that let’s you send/receive over their EVDO network. You can get antennas and amplifiers to boost your signal, and you can buy a special router to share the connection with more than one computer.
I have Sprint EVDO right now, until recently they were unlimited for $60 a month, now they’ve imposed a 5GB a month limit just like Verizon has. So I might switch to Verizon since they have better coverage in my area.
At best Sprint EVDO has about a 150ms ping, I’ve had many good hours of gaming with them. At worst it’s been a frustrating hour or two trying to get a decent connection and giving up. I am about 6 miles from the tower though.
Here are some forums with more info on EVDO: http://www.evdoforums.com/
Satellite is bad for online games. HughesNet also has rather strict access caps, and will throttle back your speed significantly. WildBlue seems to do this to, but if wikipedia is to be believed, it is nowhere near as drastic. HughesNet’s daily download limit can be hit extremely quick just downloading patches for MMORPGs.
Back when I was doing tech support for EA, one of the other guys took a call from someone like the OP, trying to play Madden multiplayer over a satellite ISP. The lag was horrendous, something like 2 seconds. A traceroute revealed that in addition to the physical lag from the signal traveling between satellites and whatnot, the ground station was somewhere in Asia.
My Wildblue connection in some what less than rural Arkansas suffers from rain fade as does satellite television. We decided on it because the cell tower option was very slow here, and I didn’t know you could share the connection at the time.
You might want to look at Alltel as well. Their headquarters are in Little Rock, so they might have more focus on Arkansas coverage. The coverage map looks pretty good in that state: Arkansas Coverage map
Yeah, I figured the satellite would be crappy for live play. That sucks.
I’d never heard of EVDO before, though! I actually have Alltel as my cellphone provider back home. I’ll be sure to check it out. Thanks a ton, guys!
Satellite user here and I am temporarily using DIALUP because my ping is in the range mentioned above. Sometimes it gets up to the 1500’s. As for satellite - my ping on WoW and a couple of other games was a low avg of 1300ms and a high of 8000’s.
Typically, it ran around 1800’s.
I will be trying out ISDN soon - hopefully next week. Keepin my fingers crossed that it will be faster than dialup.
PS It’s really sad when a gamer tells everyone they are thrilled and so happy to be using dialup!
I used to get very stable pings of 170ms or so on dialup. Too bad the transfer rates are so low!