Internet Connection

Zuko

Hi! I'v been recently thinking about changing from my current internet which is DSL High speed I believe, to Dish Satellie High speed. The download and upload speed stats are higher and a lot better for dish, but I have connected from hughesnet before and there is a good 1 second lag when you play achaea for each command, which is something I wouldn't be able to easily deal with as a player. Does anyone have dish that plays that can tell me if it is any good? Or should I stick with DSL?

Tecton

Having been "fortunate" enough to have tried to play through HughesNet, I would recommend sticking with a traditional broadband connection (DSL or Cable) - any satellite service will have much higher latency, and your quality of service is at the mercy of the weather.

Arador

Agreed. One of our sites use Satelite due to it being in the middle of nowhere. Speed is surprisingly fast but the latency is a nightmare. The signal path is just that much longer. Dsl is still king for Achaea.

Zuko

Alright Achaea is my main game so i don't think I would be happy if I switched. Thanks! Thats what I needed to know

Arador

Even for other games it would be a pain. See that guy you just shot? You missed because by the time the server received you click he had already run across the entire map, killed your team mates, killed you and is now teabagging you corpse. You'll see in in a moment, the signal just bounced off the satelite and is making its way down to you.

Katzchen

Wait, your internet is fine, and you've tried this one and it sucks? What's to ask then? Stay!

Zuko

http://www.attsavings.com/gualala-att-california-internet-deal.html

Something like this would be okay though? Because it is DSL?

Daslin

if you're in Cali, U-Verse should be available to you. I worked for AT&T as tier 1 tech support, and the service is actually quite amazing.

Ephram

Tecton said:

Having been "fortunate" enough to have tried to play through HughesNet, I would recommend sticking with a traditional broadband connection (DSL or Cable) - any satellite service will have much higher latency, and your quality of service is at the mercy of the weather.

Australian satellite internet is scary. Especially when the bandwidth is up for the month...

Nizaris

HughesNet has improved lately on speed; but yes, still sucks for latency.

Put it this way: the big problem in delivering high speed internet to homes these days is known as the Last Mile Problem. There are several aspects to this problem, including distance to be traveled, as well as the problem that occurs when you put several users into a single data pipe, causing a bottleneck.

Satellite basically takes every thing that you could do wrong in solving the last mile problem, and does it wrong. There is a far greater distance to travel: all of the way up to space, and then all of the way back down; satellites, being expensive to deploy, must serve a very large geographical area of users, causing greater bottlenecks.

Stick with a dedicated line.

Arador

I would not say wrong in ALL cases. It is a great solution for reaching areas with little to no infrastructure. And the massive cost of the satelite is better than me carrying the cost of 200km of cabling to a site out in the middle of nowhere. It really does make sense in some cases, but it is a last resort tech, worse than everything else but better than nothing or funding the infrastructure yourself.

Nizaris

Arador said:

I would not say wrong in ALL cases. It is a great solution for reaching areas with little to no infrastructure. And the massive cost of the satelite is better than me carrying the cost of 200km of cabling to a site out in the middle of nowhere. It really does make sense in some cases, but it is a last resort tech, worse than everything else but better than nothing or funding the infrastructure yourself.

Agreed. I work in retail electronics, and I recommend satellite only after all other options have been exhausted. My personal hierarchy of consumer-available services: fibre, cable, DSL, WAN (think that thing on top of a small country town's central grain elevator), 3G/4G/LTE (this low only because of the frequency of data caps), satellite, dial up.

Caveats:

• Symmetric speed DSL (where advertised upload and download speeds are the same, hence "symmetric") can be a better choice than cable for a select group of users who require fast upload speeds. This group is comprised of those who run personal web servers, game online, use file sharing protocols such as BitTorrent, etc.
• If your data usage is high, and both cellular and satellite are available and nothing else, go with satellite if it happens to have a higher data cap and semi-respectable speed. I think that cellular service should in theory have better latency, however. That said, online gaming on either with a data cap still scares the jeebies out of me.
  
• Regarding cellular data, I seem to have two groups of customers: (1) mobile professionals who view it as secondary means of internet access to meet their mobile broadband needs, and (2) for those living out in the country who have access to nothing else, save satellite. This second group views it as their primary means of accessing the internet.
  
• If you game, don't get sucked into the arms race that is faster download speeds. Make sure that you also look into the advertised upload speeds.

EDIT: Grammar and style.

Trevize

uverse is great. I'm using that at the moment, least latency I've ever had at home.

Amunet

U-verse, if you can get it, is fabulous. When we went to visit the significant other's dad, I wanted to take it with me. I nearly cried when I had to come home.