Satellite internet

[Williamwoo]

Hi all,

Does anyone have any experience of satellite internet? Living in the middle of nowhere I'm getting increasingly fed up with poor speeds and was thinking of taking the plunge, but am concerned primarily about voip and whether it is unworkable due to the time delay. Some people I have spoken to say it is not a problem, others that it is!

Any advice?

Cheers.

 

[Giantvanman]

A friend of mine has been using it for years with various companies; he started with 3 and I was surprised at the speed and stability of it. I suppose some of it must depend on proximity to a suitable mast though.

 

[Sp!ke]

I would avoid if you have access to DSL or cellular data currently.

Downloads can be fast but latency is very high. Uploads are probably worse than what you have. Latency will be the killer if you want to use voip.

If you're in Somerset, how is EE for 4G data? Any signal?

 

[Dryce]

Does anyone have any experience of satellite internet?

It's been a while since I've actually used these sorts of links (Inmarsat, BGAN, R-BGAN) so I may be a bit out of date. But my experience was that generally the latency kills the apparent performance. It can feel more like a GPRS based system at times if you are using it interactively.

 

[V12]

Check the coverage map for all of the mobile phone providers. We found EE to be very good in some parts of Cornwall where O2 and Vodafone are useless.

The 4g roll out is gathering a lot of pace and we now have 4G on all operators here in Southampton. (Not out in the sticks I know but even strong H+ can be fast enough).

 

[Williamwoo]

Hi all, thanks very much for your replies.

I think I'll stick with what I've got for now - bizarrely, speeds seem to have suddenly improved in the last couple of days! The latency issue is the biggest problem for me - I would however like to try it for myself at some point, purely out of interest. Re the 4G point, there's no 4G anywhere near here yet - in fact, half a mile down the road they're still on 2G.

Thanks again.

 

[Spinal]

Do you mean satellite internet or mobile internet?

I.E. are you looking at 3G/4G or at things like BGAN (inmarsat, thuraya, etc)?

I used both the thuraya system and inmarsat - though I can't compare them as I was on 9600baud on the thuraya setup and (if memory serves) 250mb/s on the inmarsat one...

The downside? Cost was stratospheric (8$/mb at the time, may have come down) + the 1000$ for the antenna. It was a very well designed bit of kit though, with wifi, bluetooth and ethenet connectivity.

Re latency, I must be honest and say I didn't try voip over it, but used it for emails only. On the thuraya handset for phone calls, there is a time lag, but it's useable - like making an international phone call in the 90s....

M.