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iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO
kudos:2 Reviews:
 ·Comcast
| My Experiences I've (forutnately) never had to use sat internet as my primary connection, but I certainly know what it feels like; many folks in my area have WB because they can't get fixed wireless and either don't know about 3G or are paying $50 instead of the $60-$70 that 3G requires.
As others have said, latency used to be better, but overloading has slowed connectivity down to a crawl. A few years ago one of the local telephone cooperatives hailed WB as the answer to rural broadband, citing DSL as too expensive. As of this time last year, they had had enough of WildBlue, and were deploying DSL to all of their customers.
As for the "gamers" argument, I'm really tired of it. Gamers don't need high speed as much as they need low latency and connection reliability 100% of the time. Downloading games (versus playing them) is another deal, but if you're just playing 'em latency is paramount, though 768 kbps down and 384 kbps up is nice, or more if you're hosting your own game server (a few Mbps symmetric should do the job). Of course, sat systems can't do low latency, particularly anything above LEO, so the "gamers are disenfranchised by satellite" argument is true, just for a different reason than 100 Mbps download speeds.
Speaking of download speeds, I find it interesting that the Sat folks didn't even bring up upstream bandwidth as a sticking point. Neither HughesNet nor WildBlue (for 99.9% of people the only sat companies they know of) offer upstream speeds above 300 kbps, which is absolutely pitiful in this day and age. 1-1.5 Mbps down isn't so bad, paired with low latency and high reliability, but 200-256 kbps of upload speed is downright crappy. | |
Reviews:
·Charter
 ·Virgin Mobile Br..
·Millenicom
 ·HughesNet Satell..
 ·ooma
| After I moved from Hughesnet to mobile broadband I see an average of about 1.6mbps DOWN, and an average of about 500-600kbps.
Sometimes during peak time (tower load), i've seen UPLOAD speeds faster than download ones.
the service has only had 1 service outage that affected me in almost 8 months. | |
iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO
kudos:2 Reviews:
·Comcast
| I'm posting this from MBB (because I'm currently heading down I-10) so I know what you're talking about with mobile broadband. I'd personally pay extra for MBB over sat internet if given the choice, however for some folks the value proposition isn't quite there.
That said, I've personally switched one WISP customer over to Sprint MBB and they're very happy with the new connection. If the transition had been from satellite they would've been even more overjoyed  | |
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