Need help with Internet advice

[Annihilator]

Well i may be moving out to the county and curious who uses what to play games where DSL/Cable cant go.

Anyone have any luck with Wireless air cards/hughes net??

 

[Duality]

Stay away from aircards or satellite, they just arent fast enough and are very flakey.

Satellite (i.e. Hughes Net) only tops out at 768kbps download/256kbps upload, most aircards are much slower than that unless you have available (and pay extra for) 3g cell connectivity. Even then they usually hover between 1mpbs - 2mbps download/128kbps upload but can go much slower and costs alot more than traditional internet.

Go for Cable or DSL service, just check the local cable and phone companies to see what they offer.

I have Time Warner Cable (aka RoadRunner) and pay about 45/mo before tax and I get Download speeds up to 20mpbs and upload of 512kpbs which is more than fast enough. DSL in most markets is slower than Cable but can be cheaper and sometimes have better upload (again depends on the area).

FiOS is really fast but pricing and availability vary greatly in different areas.

 

[Annihilator]

Thats the problem, there is no Cable/DSL around the area that services that far out.

 

[ScrappyDoo]

The problem with satellite is not just bandwidth but latency. If your service provider uses a geostationary satellite, you're factoring a bare minimum latency delay of about 237 ms (44,000 mile round-trip against the speed of light). And that doesn't count the network latency on your end or the server's end.

There are low-earth orbit satellite's which are cheaper and a lot faster (about 50 ms ping) but their bandwidth is much more limited.

 

[trykael]

I use hughes net at my office because we're too far out for dsl/cable.

I don't think you're going to be doing much, if any, gaming with hughes. First off, the speed is terrible. We're running on their 1.5 meg connection. I believe their upper end caps out around 5 megs. However, that 1.5 meg is SLOW. It's a very theoretical number. Also, they cap traffic.

Secondly, as Scrappy said, latency is a HUGE issue. Secure sites are iffy, ping is terrible.

Thirdly, bad weather slows down and/or stops all internet activity. While regular clouds don't seem to affect things too badly, any sort of storm clouds throttles down speed quite a bit, and if it gets too windy or the rain gets heavy count on it being out for a while.

So, the upshot is for browsing it's a heck of a lot better than dial-up, but you'll find it's absolutely horrible for internet gaming of any kind.

**edit** just ran a quick speed test. This morning my numbers are:

 

[Annihilator]

Thats what i was afraid of guys, I could care less about download speeds, i really dont download much, but I am looking for something I can atleast game with. I guess I will start looking around now, before we move.