Satellite broadband for home.

[mrwobbly]

Has anyone any experience of satellite broadband for home. If I cancel my 1.8Mb down at best, broadband and the home phone which I only have for broadband it’s the same price but 20Mb down, 6Mb up.

I’m 4 km from the exchange in a very small village and my phone line has had constant problems for the past 18 months. It’s got to the stage of having no broadband for three days every two to three weeks. My mobile phone goes through broadband when at home so I lose that when it’s down also.

[timbo343]

Yes, many years ago and if its raining or snowing you can say bye bye to your connection. Even wind can have a problem esp if you have got trees in your line of sight

[CyberNerd]

terrible ping times if you have to go to space and back.

[glennda]

As @CyberNerd says the latency on those connections are huge - anything up to 350ms which comparable with cable is god damn awful.

[mrwobbly]

Ping times are not a problem as I’m not a gamer or going to use voip. Ping on my current line at the moment 75ms. I’m not sure if it will affect my mobile phone but being able to have it working all the time is a small price to pay.

At the moment wind and rain leaves me with no broadband for days on end but Freesat works faultlessly. I’ll phone some suppliers and ask about ping times. The technology seems to have moved on a lot since I last looked and prices are coming down. A couple of years ago it was down only and you needed the telephone for up. I will never see cable or ADSL2 where I am so no point comparing sat ping to cable or am I on the wrong track. I'm in a little village with about 30 properties.

[glennda]

Ping times are not a problem as I’m not a gamer or going to use voip. Ping on my current line at the moment 75ms. I’m not sure if it will affect my mobile phone but being able to have it working all the time is a small price to pay.

At the moment wind and rain leaves me with no broadband for days on end but Freesat works faultlessly. I’ll phone some suppliers and ask about ping times. The technology seems to have moved on a lot since I last looked and prices are coming down. A couple of years ago it was down only and you needed the telephone for up. I will never see cable or ADSL2 where I am so no point comparing sat ping to cable or am I on the wrong track. I'm in a little village with about 30 properties.

Its not just ping times - its repsonses to web requests etc that will also be affected. It can when I have looked into it previously appear to be just as slow to an end user as a low speed ADSL circuit because of the higher latency.

This document explains it quite well - Latency in Networking - Speed and High Latency

[twin--turbo]

low earth orbit is considerably better but considerably costlier.

I tried a geo-stat but wasted 10hrs on it.




better results from 3G!!

Rob

[mrwobbly]

Oh Dear.

Ping of 915ms with 0.13Mb download speed today and thats on ADSL.
Satellite is looking more of an option each day.

[SYNACK]

As @CyberNerd says the latency on those connections are huge - anything up to 350ms which comparable with cable is god damn awful.

Hey, don't mock my ping time, that's what I used to get to the old edugeek server.

[m25man]

I used satellite some years back to link a VPN from UK to Monaco it cost a fortune and was a real headache.
Times have moved on and its nowhere near as painful Fast broadband for rural locations | ToowayDirect
The price seems reasonable too.
You could look at WISP options in your area, or if you have friends or family within line of site you could consider 5ghz P2P.
Install cable or Infinity at the remote location then beam it back to you by P2P wireless.
I have had 180Mbps over a 9 mile link using Ubiquiti Nanostations.

[CyberNerd]

I just spotted a timely article on this very subject:
Satellite Internet faster than advertised, but latency still awful | Ars Technica

[MatthewL]

Watch for hidden costs, we looked at putting it in the village before ADSL was available and there was some shocking costs.

[timbo343]

This might be one for @john to recommend B4RN maybe?

[john]

B4rn is a great solution however its not a nationwide thing its just the rural area around where I live (and some other members) but that kind of scheme needs some major planning and entire villages getting together not just a few houses.

[mrwobbly]

Watch for hidden costs, we looked at putting it in the village before ADSL was available and there was some shocking costs.

Pricing packages seem to have become somewhat compatable for downloads with standard ADSL or cable in the past few months.