Satellite Internet

[twistsol]

Does anyone here use satellite for internet and if so, who do you use what's your opinion of how well it works, customer service, etc.?

I've been with frontier since we moved to Cannon Falls and for the past couple of years it has been unbearable. In the wee hours of the morning Speedtest.net will give me 2.3 to 2.5 Mbps, but once the sun comes up and other people in town are using it I get .18 - .30 Mbps. And this is $70 / month.

[JoeyGee]

I don't have any experience with residential satellite Internet service, but we used one service at work for one of our remote sites. It may have been the provider (Wild Blue?) but the service and speed were terrible. We had clear site for the dish and connections were good from what I could tell, but we could do nothing to help the speed.

[LCHIEN]

One of the issues will be that satellite coms are usually by geosynchronous satellites that orbit at 22,200 miles above the earth (compared to about low earth orbit of 100 mi or so for weather, spy, ISS, etc) The geosync orbits provide a constant view of a satellite so it won't be complicated by having to do handoffs as different satellites fly by. the geosync satellite is stationary over one spot on earth. With a round trip distance of over 45,000 miles it takes around a quarter of a second for a typed character to go to the server and another quarter second be echoed back to appear in a text box. This delay can be very disconcerting.

I use a satellite sservice to connect from my computer to a remote oilfield computer running Windows remote desktop in Kazakhstan on ocassion. According to the IP trace, it goes across the uS to Europe probably by undersea fiber cable then across Europe to Russia and then by satellite to Kaz. The site has a satellite dish and is connected to a router serving the computer. All the transatlantic/trans europ distance has IP delays of around 100 ms, then the satellite contributes .3 second more. Round trip for a typed character is no faster than .8 seconds and frequently slower. I have to set Ping windows to 3000 milliseconds to keep from losing signals. Performance increased greatly when the one Kazakh satellite (owned and operated by the Kazakh national communications company) failed and they had to lease BW on a russian satellite.

I have to learn to type in a word or phrase carefully, wait a couple of seconds for it to appear, hope I didn't make any mistakes requiring backspaces, then hit enter or click the mouse.

So satellite comms performance for interactive (browsing) is can be very frustrating, although likely you will have short IP delays other than the satellite link. Typing into a browser and hitting send is also likely to be faster than typing to a remote windows because the windows characters are echoed back one at a time whereas the browser takes the whole text box and send it when you type a return into the browser.

Streaming performance is not so bad for transfering large files since streaming involves fairly large packets in one direction and only a small amount of handshaking that goes both ways and needs to wait for response..

My guess is that for a satellite provider, using a browser and streaming applications, you'll notice a little added delay in response time. The internet already has a delay that's frequently a fraction of a second or more for locating pages, so it might not even be noticable.

[cabinetman]

We had DirecTV for about 10+ years for TV service. They also have satellite internet service. We liked the TV service but switched to U-Verse because of cost and options. Their TV service was very good, and it's likely so is their internet service.

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[jackellis]

I used satellite internet recently while fishing in Alaska, but the house we stayed at was owned by the local telephone company. It was fine for e-mail. I didn't try video.

[gerti]

Is consumer satellite internet bidirectional these days? When I looked into it a few years back outbound data had to go via dialup, and only the downloads went through the satellites.

[Sweet Willy]

Where I live we don't get TV reception, cell phone reception (we can't even get pizza delivery from anyone) and our telephone guy told us we have the oldest telephone cables in the system so dial-up was useless. We got Hughes Net a few years ago and we've had no problems at all. I don't download videos and such but I do watch YouTube stuff and most times there's no delay. I have no idea what it costs and the boss is asleep so you'd have to find that out on your own. Good luck.

[JR]

The up-link data rate is usually a LOT slower than the down-link - by an order of magnitude or greater.

As Loring implied in his anaysys the effect on performance won't be so much with raw speed, rather it would be on overall performance once actual two-way communication takes place.

I don't know the actual data rates in use these days for satellite dat communictions, but they would be alot lower than for xDSL. I would have thought Frontier was xDSL - isn't it a telephone-based service. Usually that would mean fairly consistent dat rates no matter the time of day. Cable-tv based systems are more prone the performance charactheristics you have experienced.

180 - 300 Kbps is awfully slow for $70/mo.

JR

[twistsol]

I don't know the actual data rates in use these days for satellite dat communictions, but they would be alot lower than for xDSL. I would have thought Frontier was xDSL - isn't it a telephone-based service. Usually that would mean fairly consistent dat rates no matter the time of day. Cable-tv based systems are more prone the performance charactheristics you have experienced.

180 - 300 Kbps is awfully slow for $70/mo.

JR

I think the problem is more with the bandwidth in and out Frontier's central switch in our town than with the speed to my house. During the day, the pipe is simply overloaded with everyone using it at the same. time. Incidentally, I'm paying for minimum 3Mbps service even though at peak, we've achieved barely 60% of that in the past year. And yes, $70/month is a lot for that level of service.

[JR]

I think the problem is more with the bandwidth in and out Frontier's central switch in our town than with the speed to my house.

Yeah, I'd suspect you're on the right track. It could be the amount of available upstram bandwitdth or it could be the throughput of the DSLAM and/or router at the POP.

It's entirely possible that complaining could get results, particularly since you're paying for a specific performance level. If you can find the cognizant executive at Frontier and manager of the local office an email or letter, with cc to the Frontier CEO and the state PUC (plus the attorney general!), would be the recommended path. Frontier is not such a large organization that this kind of thing should get lost in the beurocratic maze.

Bandwidth inside their network should be available at a nominal cost to them. Bandwidth consumption has gone up quite a bit in the last few years, but the overbuild of a decade ago is not completely consumed and adding a whole lot more costs very little.

In the business park where I work it costs about what you're paying, which, IMHO, is way too much. Unfortunately, the company privoding service there has some sort of sweetheart deal so there's no competition. Fortunately, they give us what we pay for and are supportive and responsive.

JR

[Skaning]

Wildblue

We use Wildblue and it's only because where we live it's the only other option to dial up. It works, faster than dialup much slower than say cable or DSL. Significantly more sensitive to rain blockage than the Dish Network TV we have although lately we can pretty much count on losing both signals when thunderstorms roll through. Have had occasions when weather where WildBlues receivers are located cutting off service. Speed is not consistent either. The system is somewhat oversubscribed and speed drops when there is high traffic volume.

I'm not a gamer so the latency issues are not a problem for me but I would like to be able to use VOIT which is not possible with the system. Streaming video is generally an issue. Going to the mid level service helped that some but it's still not really acceptable with commercial feeds. You-Tube most times works OK.

Customer service has generally been good with Wildblue. They seem to have it located here in the states rather than Bombay so my 75 year old ears do not have to deal with heavily accented english. To be honest, I think I've had to use it three times in 5 years and in two of those cases it was issues with their system not at my location, so I would score it reliable if a bit klunky.