[Cialug] Satellite ISPs

[Nathan Stien]

On 4/6/07, Jim Cole <jrcole at gmail.com> wrote:
> Are they really that bad?  I've never tried it but I work from home and VPN
> into my company..someone in my office had the satellite service for a bit
> and said VPN worked and it was usable. I've never experiences it.

It's "usable" in that I am using it right now.  But it's a big pain in
the ass and service drops off frequently, at least for this particular
location.  I'm currently a little bit north of Springfield, IL.

The best I've ever seen it perform is about 3 seconds between hitting
a key in an ssh session and seeing it echoed on your terminal.  Most
of the time, though, it's more like 5 and sometimes 10 or more.
Bandwidth-wise, I occasionally seem to get bursts of something like 80
kB/s, but it quickly dies down to something like 3-5 kB/s.  I get a
lot of dropped connections as well.  If someone's pulling a big file,
it seems to like to report a link outage more often.  The way it
reports a link outage is by inserting a message about it directly into
your http response!

I'm not saying all satellite internet is this bad -- this is the only
place I've ever used it.  Could be a bad receiver installation, local
interference, etc.  I don't really know.

-- 
Nathan P. Stien
Consulting Engineer / Software Developer
Embedded Systems Electronics and Software
http://linkedin.com/in/nathanstien
Mobile: 309.241.2581