Broadband Shuffle

[Richard, John]

Latency sucks, and you will never get a ping under 400 ms. Don't even
try to play Quake 3 over the link. Has to do with the fact that the
signal has to travel to the satellite in orbit at 22,000 miles, then
back down. That takes time.

I used to work for a startup that was doing this. TCP isn't happy with
this latency. We had to install Mentat SkyX gateways at each end of the
satellite link to encapsulate TCP in the skyx protocol then back to TCP
at the other end of the link. TCP works without doing this, but the
throughput sucks. UDP was fine.

john
-----Original Message-----
From: Brian J. Conway [mailto:bconway at WPI.EDU]
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2001 2:37 AM
To: Numberwhun *****
Cc: discuss at blu.org
Subject: Re: Broadband Shuffle


> My coworker also has Starband.  We have been playing with the Sparc
machine
> running Solaris 8 from work.  Today we were able to get his website
visible
> from the internet.  Starband blocks port 80 so we used a different
port.
> Works like a champ.  He likes it and says it is MUCH better than
dialup even
> though it is a little pricey.  (About $750 for the equipment then
about $60
> a month.).

How is latency?  That's the one complaint I always hear against
satellite.
I know a few people with it, one of whom I believe uses Starband, and he
can never get better than 500 ms ping times to anything a hop or two
away.
Download speeds are great, though from what I hear, just don't try an
ssh
session unless you're patient. =)

-b


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