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budro5
join:2011-12-13

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budro5 to Miss Match

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Re: [Networking] Online Gaming on HughesNet

Same problem here, and not only with Second Life. From 6pm until 11pm CST, latency can cause up to 3 min lag in local chat. Download speeds can drop to CMDA 1x or below dialup speed, even many txt chat clients cease to work. This mostly happens Sunday through Thursday evenings and has become the norm for the past 3 or 4 months. During this nightly lagfest, if I can log on to Second Life, about all I can do is chat via direct instant messages. Moving becomes impossible, and if I try to sit, my avatar will appear in some off world area of the sim, like 0, 0, -45. In case anyone is wondering, Second Life is not a bandwidth hogging game. Unless you constantly visit simulators not stored in viewer cache and stream high bandwidth audio, it is possible to be logged on all day and not use more than 5% of your daily allowance.
I hope Hughes launches the new satellite soon, because I really have no other option besides dialup. Politicians have been talking about expanding broadband to rural customers for years, but this never happens. Cable, DSL, and cellular companies don't care how long rural America stays in the dark ages of internet.

Modem Model: HN9000

Miss Match
join:2011-02-24

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Three minutes isn't bad! Seven or more is the norm for me, if I can even log in.

It's true that Second Life is not bandwidth intensive if you know what to do. From what I understand, the reason it performs so poorly during congested hours is because there's constant communication between Linden Labs' severs and end users, even when it seems idle enough; which makes sense, since the world is kind of "streaming" anyway. Normal satellite latency isn't a problem for this, but it gets all zany and broken during congested hours.

Unfortunately, my "congested hours" are creeping in earlier and lasting later. Sigh. I have the same experience with other things during the 4 to 11 PM trainwreck, and logging into webmail or instant messengers can be as much of a challenge as logging into Second Life. Even basic web browsing is severely affected, and it's not uncommon for websites to load only in a "skeletal" text only appearance, or just time out, during the overcongested hours. It's very frustrating and disappointing.