PCA Forums

My father lives in the country and has to choose between dial up or satillite. My experience with satillite broadband is as follows:
1) It's expensive
2) Latency of approx 1 sec from signal delay between ground station and satillite

Has there been improvements either of these areas? Is there an alternative choice that I don't know about? Thanks!

I don't know about the price but I doubt it is much cheaper right now. Latency will be the same due to the distance between earth and satellite.

Thanks Doc,
was kinda hoping for a 'Magic Bullet' on this, but maybe someday....

This may become popular at some point...

http://motorola.canopywireless.com/

I just found out a few hours ago my ISP is installing wireless also!

If this works as claimed 1.5mbs and only $40 per month. I have to buy a $100 wireless modem!
From the little I have read myself so far, and a call to tech support for one, and the lot I learned today about what they have looked into and decided on, this is the way to go if you can get it.

I don't do gameing, and I always forget those lag time questions, grrrrr.

lol.. never call them and say.. Oh this game laggs and its because of ur service..

Cause i did this once and they took me around that whole bs turn my modem off and all this junk.. i said dude did u not undertsand me.. i said its the shitty connection u give me... he said "sir please refrain from useing any profanity. this call is being recorded.. i was like um.. ok so? give me a better connection... After that ITS ALL BEN GAY! i never call them for anything

Turn my modem off.. Pfft ok w/e

Just don't use a Sat. for playing games it is a waste of your time and money. Sure you will have a decent connection IF it is nice outside but when it goes to crap your connection goes to crap. Plus your ping is not gona be what would be good in the gaming world. Think about it. Where is your connection going? First you are bouncing it all the way into the Earth's Orbit-->back down to earth--->received by a ground based Satellite-->proccessed--->routed to where ever it is going. If you only use it for Downloading stuff/surfing then you should be fine. Otherwise forget it unless all you play on playing are MMORPGS where ping isn't really a factor.

Satelites are DEFINATELY not for gaming. Ping times of 500+. Usually there's some caching software installed that keeps the long ping times from being a nuiscance when browsing, but that's not going to help with gaming.

Yea I did the direc pc Sat deal.

Was happy at first surfing and downloading, then I ended up totally pi$$ised and dumped the service.
It got lousy and had lots of problems.

The final straw was when I could not get to my own websites. Since I was calling out on dail up and comming back on SAT I geuss I had 2 ip addresses and the servers for the websites would not let me in! I would have to totally go offline and call back land line only, which mean the hours it took to upload files at 33k I could not use my high speed service for downloading!

I don't know how they do with two way SAT now, but I think you still have two modems, one out and one in, so Is that still a problem getting to your webservers to update your sites? Maybe not if it is just one IP address?

If at all possible, sounds like this wireless is the way to go if you can. I'm still gonna search it out and try to get equipment prices, but since my current ISP has started setting it up already it kinda takes the rush out of it. Need to see what they actually do before I buy anything or make any plans.