Does anybody have any experience/wisdom with satelite internet? I live in an area where DSL and cable aren't available, and probably won't be for at least 5 years...
However, I've heard of some problems with online gaming and such??

"Consiousness of the past alone
can make us understand the present" - Herbert Luethy

http://www.broadbandreports.com/faq/6166
Great site with lots of info and tweaks.
Just got Satellite two way service here and
it rocks. Have not done any gaming yet.

Your raw data transfer should be pretty good. Once you overcome the initial latency it can be pretty quick. For gaming, your better off on a dialup. You have to consider the distance the frame has to travel. Around 45,000 miles round trip. Electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Forget about atmospheric conditions and assume the actual speed of light round trip. 250 ms in a perfect world. I believe it is more like 400 ms round trip just from dish to satellite to the ISP's RX/TX hardware. Then factor in the switching and routing hardware latency and so forth. You can look for 500+ pings to good servers.

45,000? i would figure the sats were no more than 100 miles?

my computer is so fast, it completes an endless loop in less than 4 seconds!

I agree. Home-->Isp-->GameServer-->Isp-->Satellite-->Home. I can't image the roundtrip is 45000 miles. The circumference of the earth is 24,902 miles. A salelite orbits at probably 500 to 750 miles up. At most you are probably looking at a 3000 to 4000 mile round trip, assuming your game server is on the same continent as you. Given the propagation of light, that would be roughly 16 to 21.5ms, plus the propagation of the network.

<font color=blue>My job is to polish</font color=blue> <font color=green>turds</font color=green><font color=blue>, I</font color=blue> <font color=red>love</font color=red> <font color=blue>my job.</font color=blue>

In case anyone was still wondering about this. If you have to point your dish at a certain point in the sky, you are pointing it at one satellite then the satellites that are used for satellite internet are probably the same satellites used for television, which means they are in geostationary orbit around the earth. That puts the altitude at about 37,000 km from the center of the earth. So round trip, the signal has to travel about 70,000 km. That's where your lag comes in.

-Brett

My altitude estimate did not go off a geostationary satellite. I stand corrected

<font color=blue>My job is to polish</font color=blue> <font color=green>turds</font color=green><font color=blue>, I</font color=blue> <font color=red>love</font color=red> <font color=blue>my job.</font color=blue>

No problem. My original reply was a rambling piece of crap, I probably could have stated it better (it was late). I wasn't sure about it, though, since there is new stuff out there like XM radio & Sirius that run off of a series of satellites that are in much lower orbit, allowing you to receive their signals on the move. I just assumed. I could be off, but it made sense to me.
-Brett