I need of high speed,one option

[GRYDE001]

I live in an area that has no access to DSL or Cable. Has anyone tried DirecTV Sat. High Speed Internet. I want to use it most often for games. Should I consider this or just wait for my town to catch up with technology?
Thanks

[Black Hawk]

Satelite sucks for gaming due to the high latency.

[primesuspect]

GnomeWizardd and Muddocktor both have satellite access. I think, for gaming, it really sucks because your upstream is still on a dialup. Only the downstream is high speed. I'll let someone who actually uses it correct me if I'm wrong...

[muddocktor]

No, both ways are through the satellite now, but as VoE said, the latencies kill you for gaming, unless you're playing solitaire or something like that. No FPS games for sure. Also, while the downpipe is as good as cable, the upstream linkup is only about 56k, so it's not real skippy for sending files. Finally, direcpc has something called the "Fair Access Policy" (fap, for short), which limits your downloading to about 160-170 MB every couple of hours in the daytime and evening, which really sucks! :mean: :rarr:

But, it's the only high speed connection around for me and I don't game online so I got it and put up with it's deficiencies. With that said, if Cox ever, ever brings cable internet around the house I'll dump this in a heartbeat.

[GRYDE001]

Are ISP's such as Net Zero Highspeed any better than regular dial-up,or are they just a flashy name with the same slow speed?

[primesuspect]

Flashy name with same slow speed. Dialup is dialup. They use caches to make common sites load slightly faster, but it's not a faster connection.

[muddocktor]

If you read the very fine print in those ads, you will see that it says that it won't speed up your downloading. I figured it was some kind of caching scheme to make static pages load faster, like prime was saying.

[MediaMan]

Yes...I always get a laugh from the NETZERO ads. I want to scream to the veiwers "It's not faster...they're fooling."

[Straight_Man]

GnomeWizardd and Muddocktor both have satellite access. I think, for gaming, it really sucks because your upstream is still on a dialup. Only the downstream is high speed. I'll let someone who actually uses it correct me if I'm wrong...

High-speed upward two-way sat internet is available, but hyper-expensive as sat can be weather sensitive and thus highly variable as to feed for data-- it takes extremely high power signals to get through an electrical storm, or use of frequencies that are restricted in US. Electrical storms especially play havoc with satellite only nets-- and affect hings between satellite and ground, while solar interference affects sat-to-sat bounces more. Either that, or they are hyper-slow due to redundancy to cull out junk through iterative content filtering passes.

John D.

[celcho]

satellite is slow because of physics and the speed of light. when you have to transmit your 22,000 miles up and back to a geostationary satellite, the speed of light limits you. it takes 118 ms each way just to get the electromagnetic radiation across the distance. so 236 ms plus any time spent in the satellite processing the data, plus any time spent at the ground based station, plus the lag of the internet even when you're on fiber, and you get a very slow connection. maybe they'll be able to make low earth orbit (less than 1000 miles altitude) satellites to support internet. of course, these satellites would require an interesting antenna, as they move in relation to the earth and go in and out of view. more likely, we'll just all have something based on the ground within the next 10 to 20 years. it might be radio based, like some of the current wireless technologies, but eventually we'll have fiber everywhere.