# need faster connection ...



## motdaugrnds (Jul 3, 2002)

Our area will not have DSL availble for many, many years...the phone company says. At present we have been using dial-up with the highest connection being a 21.6 kbps. We are wondering about a satallite connection. It would apparently give us about 200 ?kbps? connection; but not sure.

Can anyone advise and/or share experiences that might be good for us to know before we start looking for a satalite connection?


----------



## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

It depends on what you're going to do with it. If you download large files or watch a lot of streaming media, then it might be a good thing for you. If you are going to try to improve your web browsing experience, it probably won't help much. The problem with satellite is that the "latency time" (the time lag before the web page starts to come in) is long, so web browsing is sluggish.


----------



## joseph97297 (Nov 20, 2007)

Check on the limits that you will be under. When I was out in the boonies and got Hughes, it would throttle down and crawl, literally. I do a lot of video swap (family) and also get what little tv we watch online. You can add up some data and just make sure of the plan you are signed up for.


----------



## motdaugrnds (Jul 3, 2002)

We don't do a lot of browsing. We do visit eBay, Craigslist, this Homesteading forum and we play a multiplayer game (RuneScape). 

Example: If we load the "game", once it is loaded, would the lag be terrible?

Example: If pulling up several of these forums as "tabs" running at the same time, will that be terribly slow?

Example: If setting up our store for eBay or Craigslist, would that be slower than our dial-up is?

I am so computer "illiterate"; that understanding this is very difficult! (At present we are only paying $20 a month for dial-up; but if we can get more speed, paying a little more would be well worth it.)


----------



## defenestrate (Aug 23, 2005)

Not sure about runescape, but fast-paced games that need low latency are not recommended on satellite. For all other purposes you listed, it will be a big improvement. There is about .5sec or so of latency automatically due to the time it takes to bounce a request off a satellite in space and back, but it is much better.


----------



## motdaugrnds (Jul 3, 2002)

Defenestrate, what does "low latency" mean?


----------



## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

motdaugrnds said:


> Defenestrate, what does "low latency" mean?


Latency time refers to the time between the moment that you make a web page request and the moment that you begin to receive the web page. Ping time is normally accepted as the latency time.

Latency time and bandwidth are very different properties. It's possible to have extremely poor latency time with high bandwidth, and the opposite can also be true. Latency can make the difference between an Internet connection being acceptable or unacceptable for some applications. For example, voice conversations over the Internet require reasonably low latency time, regardless of how much bandwidth might be available.


----------



## texican (Oct 4, 2003)

Your not going to play any first person shooter games on satellite... you're always going to be several seconds behind everyone else.

I'm on hughesnet... 475mb plan. It is not 475/day and then your through... it's like a bucket with a hole in the bottom (your downloading) and a hole in top (refilling by hughes). You can use ~25MB/hour and your '475' never moves... dl 100MB in one file, and it'll take around 4 hours for your bucket to refill to full. I regularly get 7 or 800mb/day. Unlimited bandwidth between 12AM > 5AM ET. I get up to 3Gb during that time period.


----------

