netwire
Premium
join:2001-04-27
Mooresboro, NC | Dial-up is better, faster...
I had Wild Blue, the Pro Pack. Dial-up seemed to be a lot faster (perhaps slower boost speed, but a whole lot less latency). I'd never use them again; would rather use 1XRTT or Dial-up.
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World of Warcraft - My anti-drug.
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iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO
 ·Comcast
 ·Qwest.net
 ·magicjack.com
 ·BeeCreek Communica..
·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| @netwire agreed! I'd rather use 32 kbps dialup than 512 kbps WildBlue. Latency of 1-2 seconds just kills the connection!
As to WildBlue's speed disadvantage vs. HughesNet, granted WildBlue tops out at 1.5/256 for $80 a month, but Hughes' 3000/300 package is an excercise in marketing more than anything else. I mean, who's gonna actually pay hundreds of bucks per month for a minimal speed increase? Even at 512k latency kills you in web browsing, and on the 3 Mbit plan you would just break your FAP in 20 minutes and be forced into sub-dialup speeds for the rest of the day. Not worth $2xx per month, says I.
Hmm, what's happening with these one-way sat roviders anyway? I'd actually perfer their tech, as it has gotta have less latency than two-way sat, with no FAP limits and lower startup osts. Wonder why nobody talks about them more. Seeing as how uploads on sat 2ay aren't much better than dialup. Hmm, maybe it's the requirement for a phone line... |
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Island Jeff
join:2005-07-18
 ·WildBlue
·TDS
1 edit | quote:
Hmm, what's happening with these one-way sat roviders anyway? I'd actually perfer their tech, as it has gotta have less latency than two-way sat, with no FAP limits and lower startup osts. Wonder why nobody talks about them more. Seeing as how uploads on sat 2ay aren't much better than dialup. Hmm, maybe it's the requirement for a phone line...
I like the ability to self-install 1-way, but uploads on sat 2-way *are* much better than dialup. On wildblue I always get 220+ kbps up. On dialup, I was lucky to get 30 kbps up. It's not as great a difference as the download speed improvement, but sending a file 7x faster is nothing to scoff at. As you say with the latency, dialup will come out faster if you're uploading a very small file, but for sending photos to friends or uploading to an online gallery, printer, etc. or sending files to others to work with, etc. the difference is well worth the $. (especially, as you say, if you figure in the cost of an additional phone line with 1-way.)
Also there is the reliability of local dialup -- can you count on it to be 100% reliable and always-on, or does it typically glitch after a while? (Here wildblue exceeded the reliability of the local GLE/transworld analog dialup by a good margin.)
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Very happy TDS DSL user | Wildblue in Lake Michigan |
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iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO
·Comcast
·Qwest.net
·magicjack.com
·BeeCreek Communica..
·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| Hm, to my knowledge I've had two problems with dialup (circuits busy on the exchange where the modems on the other end were located). Otherwise, aside from wet lines killing the connection, the service was quite reliable. Sat 'net...not so much; wather issues, anyone?
As to upload speed, that's a very YMMV thing. I've speedtested in sat locations and upload ranged from 38 to about 100 kbps on a 512/128 connection. The average for my town's sat connections? in the 80s. Guess it depends on the ground station at the other end, but latency seems to be about 1300 ms on sat and with uploads that slow you have to FAP yourself (okay, not quite, but close!) to see any upload benefit over a decent dialup connection. |
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Island Jeff
join:2005-07-18
·WildBlue
·TDS
2 edits | Very low upload speed and frequent weather outage might indicate poor dish pointing. Wonder if your local installer isn't dong a good job for you? Back in the Starband days in 2001 the upload speed was really poor (in the 40-60 range; those were frustratingly slow times), but with Wildblue I've gotten 220+ kbps upload 24/7/365 since the year 2005 when it was installed. I think a good installation with accurate pointing is key to both good performance and reliable operation through weather (here it has to be raining so hard I can't see the W on the dish 100' from the window for it to drop out; we have around 3-4 weather outages a year due to rain or wet snow sitting on the tan cap on the tria.) But that's much better than the analog dialup was which drops off every couple hours. The dialup ISP had said it was phoneline quality, but I find it interesting now that DSL is here that the same phonelines deliver 100% reliable dsl service at 60x the performance; I guess it was poor ISP equipment afterall in the analog dialup days.)
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Very happy TDS DSL user | Wildblue in Lake Michigan |
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iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO
·Comcast
·Qwest.net
·magicjack.com
·BeeCreek Communica..
·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| Could be, but keep in mind that I'm going from the whole city's records on speedtest.net, and AFAIK they measure non-latency-based stats. I've seen upload vary greatly on the connection in fine weather at the dish location..dunno, but it seems like sat is very, very YMMV'y. Better than dialup, yes. Better than anything else (but maybe 2\2.5G cellular)? Probably not. |
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Island Jeff
join:2005-07-18
·WildBlue
·TDS
| Speedtest.net doesn't measure upload speed accurately* for my wildblue connection (*when I say accurately, I mean it doesn't measure the maximum speed you can sustain when transferring a larger file.)
vs testmy.net:
![]()
:::.. Upload Stats ..:::
Upload Connection is:: 234 Kbps about 0.2 Mbps (tested with 2992 kB)
Upload Speed is:: 29 kB/s
Tested From:: »testmy.net/ (Main)
Test Time:: 2008/07/20 - 4:09pm
Bottom Line:: 4X faster than 56K 1MB Upload in 35.31 sec
Tested from a 2992 kB file and took 104.603 seconds to complete
Upload Diagnosis:: Awesome! 20% + : 47.17 % faster than the average for host (wildblue.net)
U-Validation Link:: »testmy.net/stats/id-EZTP2R7S9
User Agent:: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1 [!]
The testmy.net mirrors what I get if I upload a larger file via ftp as reported by the ftp software or if I upload files via the web to print at kodakgallery or a commercial printer, etc.
Via ftp, if I transfer little files due to the traffic shaping and latency, they go at about dialup speeds *but* I set FileZilla to do 8 concurrent transfers at once which works great to better utilize my wildblue upload bandwidth.
(the speedtest.net site does measure spot-on for my DSL connection comparing almost exactly to what I get real-world, so I think it's either the latency or test file size in their upload test that measures something different than the maximum sustained speed I get over satellite.)
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Very happy TDS DSL user | Wildblue in Lake Michigan |
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iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO
·Comcast
·Qwest.net
·magicjack.com
·BeeCreek Communica..
·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| Hmm, I believe the Speedtest.net test uses a packet stream for the test, whereas testmy.net uses a file. Something like that.
Anyhow, I read awhile back in some PDF that sat modems tend to tamper with TCP protocols (spoofing of something or other) and thus, while real-world results are better, stricter tests get abosolutely botched.
So basically satellite's only advantage over dialup is in dealing with large file transfers. Realtime applications just don't work right, which is fair enough when you look at latency and such.
Guess I'll test that WB connection again using some file-based speed testers. The packet-based ones tell me what I already know: this thing ain't gonna do VoIP. Thanks for pointing that discrepancy out. |
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supergirl
join:2007-03-20
Pensacola, FL
·Cox VOIP
·Skype
·Cox HSI
·AT&T Southeast
·magicjack.com
| reply to Island Jeff
I get:
I usually see up to 4.6 up in the evening (after 9 pm).
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Saving the world keeps me busy. However, I find Earth very primitive from my home planet of Krypton.
-Supergirl |
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