Hello Vaulties.  My fiancé and I are considering moving, and are looking at houses.  The house I am most interested in has no high speed cable internet, but is hooked up for satellite internet, specifically Dish network.  Do any of you use this, and how much does it effect your gameplay, specifically lag issues?

Dhalgren wrote on Jul 17^th, 2012 at 1:14pm:


A Wifi hotspot is certainly an option for us.  Thanks for the tip.
What pisses me off most is that the local cable company provides digital cable TV to the area, but no internet at all!  Bastards!

Could check for Verizon Fios or AT&T Uverse, both fiber optic, but limited in where they can be found.

I did some research when I was looking to switch (Thanks to Massachusetts leaders comcast has no competition where I live, so it was continue to get bentover by them or go satellite) a from what I could tell is that dish, when stuff is working well, will be indistinguishable from cable.

But, during heavy rain, snow or wind you start to have issues.  That was a deal breaker for me.  When work is closed due to snow, I want my internet working.  When its nice out, I'm outside.

Good Luck

Torgal wrote on Jul 17^th, 2012 at 1:42pm:


I have that and its really pretty good.

Beyond the latency problems, the big issue is the cost vs return.

They won't tell you this, but when I had satellite is that they limited your download. The $60/month used to only be around 20G a day, after that they would throttle your portal.

Satellite is the ISP of last resort. Do not get it if you have any other options.



You have at minimum 800ms added to anything you do since you have two trips into space and back. Usual pings when I have a clear connection are in the 1200-1600 range. This makes gaming, interesting. You have to get very good at predicting mob movements. Of course that's more problematic when you are in a party with other people as you can't predict their movements and how the mobs will react to those. It's also enough of a delay that some internet connected devices time out and won't work with the internet at all (my poor Wii.)

You are being pointed at a satellite with a ton of users on it so everything gets queued and the delays to get your data into the queue get longer when you're in the heavy use hours.

During peak hours you can also see your available speeds drop to under dialup and you won't be able to do much more than soloing. Think of the old school Shroud lag where you would be seeing things that already happened, except that it can be caused by just hitting the training dummy depending on the severity. This has been worse lately.

You also have a fairly low bandwidth cap. If you have several people sharing or you like to watch YouTube, you're going to run into it all the time. DDO doesn't use much, so it's not really a problem there. As far as consumer connections go, Hughesnet is fairly nice on their caps as they're daily soft caps (so if you go over today, you only get slowed down and it will be normal tomorrow) and you get free download time in the late night.


Something that could alleviate some of these issues is that Hughesnet just launched a new satellite and they should start selling access to it around November. You'll still have latency, but the other stuff should be unnoticeable until they get a lot of subscribers on it.

Terebinthia wrote on Jul 17^th, 2012 at 2:49pm:


I can at least tell you what I do when my cable goes out. My phone (HTC Desire; Android) has the ability to act as a Wifi router ("Portable Wi-Fi hotspot", in my phone's lingo). When this is turned on, it goes into 3G mode and acts for all the world like my main Wifi router/cable modem combo. There really aren't that many settings to configure on it, so while limited, it's also easy to get going. Once you set up the SSID (hotspot name), security type, and passphrase, it pretty much works out the rest for itself.

Also, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9221336/Wi_Fi_tethering_101_Use_a_smartph...

It's not as fast as my cable, and YMMV depending on your provider, phone type, cell signal, etc. That said, I think I'm probably in the "average" category for all three of those and it works fine for me in most cases.

Some caveats: when gaming in this mode, the phone runs hot. I make sure to set it where it can get decent airflow and as good a 3G signal as possible. It also sucks electricity like mad, so plugging it in is a good idea. You'll also want to make sure that your data plan can cover the needed bandwidth. I honestly don't know how much data gaming nightly for a month would use, compared to what my plan offers; I haven't bothered to do the math as I usually only need to do this a few times a year for a night or so at a time when the cable goes out of some reason. DDO isn't that heavy on the bandwidth, though.

To chime in here sat is terrible for gaming, not really bad for pure downloading but even web browsing feels slow as shit on it.  I went from dial up (rural area) on which I used to do fairly well in fps games (kicking the shit out of someone with a 30ms ping with a 300 is golden) to sat and it SUCKED horribly for everything I used the internet for.  Thankfully dsl finally became available a year later and I got the fuck out of that contract and got rural dsl, slightly better than dial up, WORLDS better than sat.

Thanks all.  Sounds like the new house will suck as far as gaming goes.
Anyone know anything about personal wireless hotspot devices, like AT &T's Cradlepoint?  Maybe that would be a better option than using a phone all the time.

You might look into sprint and t-mobile to see if they still have the unlimited data plans.

Glenalth wrote on Jul 17^th, 2012 at 3:05pm:



I was on Hughesnet about 10 years ago, and I may be misremembering about the daily allotment, but it wasn't enough.

By the time I got onto the computer for gaming after my wife working all day and the kids doing their stuff, I could barely play, and many days I couldn't. They eventually told me they were throttling my data because I was going over the limit everyday.

Back then, they didn't tell customers that there was a limit. Someone let the cat out of the bag by accident when I was complaining for the umpteenth time.

PlaidPooka wrote on Jul 19^th, 2012 at 12:04pm:


Tons of DSL sellers will tell you that they can give you access, 90% of them are lying. Figure out how far you are from your CO. Typically service levels will start degrading after 9,000ft and drop off completely sometime after 22,000ft (line conditions can lower these significantly.)

Sometimes you can get a decent deal on a T1 and share it with neighbors that will help split the costs.