We just bought a new home, and we can’t get any ground-based broadband out here. No DSL, no cable TV. We could get ISDN, but it’s a business service so it’s very expensive in addition to being slow.
We signed up for HughesNet satellite service. It seems to be moderate throughput, although after experiencing their “throttle-back” feature, I was ready to throttle them (a 500Mb download took 38 hours).
Anyway, we are running World of Warcraft. It reports latencies of 1,500 to 2,000 most of the time. I’ve never seen any color but red on the latency bar. I get lagged out and disconnected about once every 1-2 hours. A ping to a popular server like yahoo.com reports 650 to 950ms turnaround average (I just ran 20 packets and one of them was 2,250 ms!).
Is this a HughesNet thing or a satellite thing? Does everyone else with satellite Internet service get latency this bad? Any suggestions on ways to improve it?
The problem is the sheer distance–satellite internet has a higher bandwidth, but it takes longer for data to get there because it’s going out into orbit and back again. As a result, it’s bad for online gaming–the distances involved cause the lag, and as Tucker said, unless you can change the laws of physics you’re screwed (Is there a Suzumiya Haruhi in the house?).
Geostationary orbit is at an altitude of 35,786 kilometers; at light speed, the minimum possible round-trip time is about 240 milliseconds, which is already a very high latency for gaming. Add in the usual routing delays (and probably the fact that satellite Internet providers feel no need to optimize their service for low ping times, considering gamers will already be out of luck), and you’ve got a recipe for some nasty latency.
Frankly, you may have better luck with dial-up. Failing that, maybe start a grassroots campaign to convince your local telephone service providers to bring broadband to your area?
Understood. I did the math, too (we’re above the 45th north parallel, so it’s a bit worse than that), but the latency I’m getting is still about 300% more than I’d expect.
How depressing.
I started that the day I moved in. There aren’t many of us out here, so it might be a long fight.
