Bad latency, great download speeds? The internet Gods are fickle.

Cade

For the longest time my cable internet has been lackluster, away from the cities, not the newest lines and likely too many people using what already exist. I got pretty fed up with it and found out a new provider was now in the area and that you could get much better speeds. It's not cheap and was to my surprise satellite internet, since I got it installed I can get pretty good download rates, everything loads damn quick for me compared to what I was getting better. Only one problem exist, basically it seems to have a rather high latency level. Play online games? Forget about it, usually around 710 to 820 or so which is no good at all. Is that a byproduct of satellite internets? With me being able to download at several MB getting such latency is a bit surprising, always thought such things went hand in hand, bad latency, bad download speeds.

So any suggestions, people in the know or the like able to explain to this poor serf? Should I be complaining to my provider? Is it some ports being blocked?

Hahnsoo1

Satellite internet is going to have bad ping/latency. It's just a nasty side effect of being on satellite.

Foomy

pretty much just how satellite internet is. Speed of light and all that the signal just can't go any faster from your house to however far away the nearest ground station is, then the 35,000 miles to geostationary orbit, another 35k back down to earth to the providers main base, and then however far to the server you want at the end. and that's just one way, repeat for the signal coming back. Because of all this distance even at best you just can't get anything below about 700ms.

Cade

Bah.

Ah well, I'll just make do with fast downloading then. Thanks for the input!