Satellite connection

[Candi Clawtooth]

If I have satellite for my internet provider will I be able to use Secondlife??

 

[Rowan Amore]

10 minutes ago, Candi Clawtooth said:

If I have satellite for my internet provider will I be able to use Secondlife??

 

Maybe?

 

[Lucia Nightfire]

I used Hughes internet with SL from 2006 - 2009.

It used a 2 watt LNB and latency was about 0.25 seconds on avg.

I used it because at the time, dial-up was my only other "broadband".

I had to deal with a 250MB daily download limit and later, low speeds during prime time hours because Hughes started catering to other markets and shafted their internet users.

Today, I would hope latency has improved, but the nature of satellite tells me it won't be by much.

[Chaser Zaks]

You should be able to use satellite. While it is fast, it has the issue of latency, which means requests may take a few seconds to initialize, but the stream will overall be fast. A good way to explain this:

	High speed	Low speed
Line based	Fast and responsive	Slow but responsive
Satellite based	Fast but delayed	Slow and delayed

So while assets may download fast, you will likely experience a larger than usual delay, imagine pressing "w" on a line based connection and you moving instantly, but pressing "w" on a satellite connection and you move about maybe 0.4 to 0.6 seconds later.

[Candi Clawtooth]

Thank you all , I am cancelling the installation of satellite!!!  Glad I researched this!! 

[Rowan Amore]

15 minutes ago, Chaser Zaks said:

You should be able to use satellite. While it is fast, it has the issue of latency, which means requests may take a few seconds to initialize, but the stream will overall be fast. A good way to explain this:

	High speed	Low speed
Line based	Fast and responsive	Slow but responsive
Satellite based	Fast but delayed	Slow and delayed

So while assets may download fast, you will likely experience a larger than usual delay, imagine pressing "w" on a line based connection and you moving instantly, but pressing "w" on a satellite connection and you move about maybe 0.4 to 0.6 seconds later.

Is satellite effected by weather?  I know whenever it rained badly at my sister's, it would go down.

[Chaser Zaks]

1 minute ago, RowanMinx said:

Is satellite effected by weather?  I know whenever it rained badly at my sister's, it would go down.

Yes, we still have satellite TV where I live, and if the weather gets bad enough, it can cause issues. But technology is a lot better than it used to be, I remember when a slight rain storm would cause the TV to go out. It would take really severe rain filled clouds to take out the signal.

As for internet, I'd say some corrupt packets may occur during any form of non-clear weather, but those would mostly either get corrected or re-sent without the user even noticing.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

I used hughes and viasat at my parents place 12,000ms pings where um, no.  lol and that's low compared to some of hte reports I was reading

[SpiritSparrow Skydancer]

2 hours ago, Candi Clawtooth said:

If I have satellite for my internet provider will I be able to use Secondlife??

 

In my experience, I was up in the mountains of Montana with only a satellite connection and no cell service what so ever. You are only allowed so much data on them during the day but after 1 am I believe it is free until I think 7am... Anyway, my experience with it was that I could connect but nothing would rez and if i dared to go to a event.. instant crash..

So, yes you can run SL however it will eat up your data allotment and you will be VERY, VERY slow to load and lag horribly.

This is from personal experience with hughesnet

[Lucia Nightfire]

Yes, rain, rain clouds & snow always cut out my connection. During the 2006 - 2009 years SL was such an addiction, I'd take the chance of falling off the roof and dying to wipe the lense on the satellite LNB of any rain droplets or snow build up until I made an access hole through a window an A/C unit occupied and used a long pole with a rag attached to the end to do it safetly. Those were the days...

Yeah, Hughes used to allow unlimited downloading between 2am and 5am (can't remember which TZ I was offsetting), but then when they started catering to other markets, that went away too.

[Candi Clawtooth]

I cancelled satellite , I'll stick to 1mbps with stinkin Centurylink..............grrrrr.

[Sorciaa]

https://www.starlink.com/

 

hear this will be much better then what you can get now. or atleast light a fire under the current providers butts to get them updated

[ballparkdogg]

Satellite internet is good for normal internet stuff.  But for gaming it has a tendency to cause a lag and I assume the same might be for secondlife

[AeroIbanezz]

This is an old thread, but my experience with Starlink may still be of interest to some.

I have now been connecting to Second Life via Starlink for 6+  months, from Auckland,  New Zealand.  Subjectively, I rate the performance as excellent.

My system:  64Gb ram, Nvidia 3080Ti 12Gb, 4k Screen.  Running Linux Mint Cinnamon 20.3,  Firestorm (Linux) viewer x64 6.6.14.69596 .

I had my first glitch yesterday, login failed with the error message "Despite our best attempts......".  General web surfing (Firefox) was not affected.

An older Win10 machine reported the same failure.

I de-powered both the dish and the router for about 2 minutes, then restarted. Problem fixed.

I use Ethernet cable, not WiFi.

Below is a typical Starlink performance report, latency typically 20-35ms;  DL speed is very variable,  0.5 to 50+ Mbps, 10-30 Mbps is typical.

[AmeliaJ08]

Satellite or Starlink?

I would say that regular Satellite latency is going to be too high to be tolerable in SL, SL does cope with high pings though since it's not really something where you need to react fast but lag is lag and above 300ms things get a bit annoying.

That said: the location of SL's sim servers means relatively high latency is just normal for everyone outside of the US using SL and it's not really an issue, it's just that satellite will make that 600-700ms (or frequently more) instead of the approx 200ms we outside of the US experience.

If you're in an area where satellite internet is a thing you would probably want to look at Starlink as an alternative, much different technology with much lower latency.

 

edit: damnit old thread!

 

Edited August 17, 2023 by AmeliaJ08