So, my parents livr in an area where the only internet available is satellite. It sucks.
However, they also have satellite TV and can watch that no problem.
What’s the difference? Is it just a scale issue where TV has more money and resources compared to satellite internet companies?
In: Technology
Latency. It takes a minimum of 2,000 milliseconds (2 seconds for the signal to travel to space and back. Many times the latency is much higher, like 5 seconds or more. When I had Sat, a few times it spiked up to 20 seconds. This takes gaming completely out of the picture. It is really not possible. And other services will time out after a few seconds of delay and fail.
With TV the signal is 95% one way, and the signal is not interactive, so no one notices if the signal is delayed unless it is by hours.
Many companies also block all ports at the Network Operations Center (NOC) before the signal reaches you, which can also interfere with many services.
Lastly, bandwidth. Internet signals take much higher bandwidth than TV signals, and companies never have enough, so they institute data caps. Hughes Net had a 300MB cap per day. It sounds like plenty, but they count every bite, ever show streamed, every picture loaded on every web page, everyone data sync done in the background on your phones, every single piece of data from every Device on your network. It will eat through that Cap before you know it. After the cap, the service barely works, it is around 28.8k dial up, when it works at all.
Avoid Satellite, it is not worth it. It is also expensive to install and has 2 year contract, with a min 400 dollar early termination fee.
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