I consider satellite to be the last resort option. If you can't get cable, dsl, or fast wireless access you are left with satellite. It's better than dial up but does have some flaws.
The average person does not have a real good understanding of what 'speed' is. They think of speed as being one thing and the more of that one thing the faster websites will load. The most common thing companies advertise is their throughput measured in bits per second. This is the only number the average Joe has to work off of. The throughput or bits per second of satellite is generally pretty decent.
In the world of 'speed' there is an often overlooked factor. This factory is latency. Let me try to explain latency. Imagine a pipe. The pipe has a certain diameter and also has a pressure. The capacity and pressure of the pipe determine how much actual water goes through it.
Let's say that you have a very large pipe. 1 foot in diameter. You could obviously pump a lot of water through this. Now let's say that this pipe is 1,000 miles long. You are sitting on one end of this pipe and on the other end you have a lake. You decide you want some water so you open a valve. It would take quite some time for that water to travel 1,000 miles to you. You could make the pipe smaller, or larger, either way it's not going to matter much. It'll take time for that water to get to you. This time is latency. Once that water does reach your end of the pipe, the larger the pipe, the more water will come out of it if the pressure is the same.
Megabit/Kilobit/bits per second is throughput. Think of this as the size of the pipe (always 10 psi). The larger the pipe--the more water you get. But the throughput of this pipe really has little to do with how long it takes that water to get to you initially.
Satellite often has good throughput but terrible latency. It doesn't matter what *ANYONE* tells you that latency is always going to be terrible. Let's run some math.
The satellite is 22,000 miles from the Earth. The speed of light is 186 miles per millisecond. This equals 118 ms AT best for a signal to reach the satellite from Earth. When you send a packet to the internet it must:
- Go from your computer to the Satellite 118 ms
- Satellitle to Server on Earth 118 ms
- Server on Earth to Satellite 118 ms
- Satellite to your computer on Earth 118 ms
This is a total of 472 ms at *best* in a perfect world to send a packet to another server on the internet. In the real world you have delays in the equipment. You have packet loss from the atmosphere and quite often you are sitting more around 2000 ms (2 seconds!)
Your average cable/dsl connection does this in about 60 ms. You are probably thinking well those are just miliseconds--not even a second! That doesn't matter!. Well it does matter because your requests to load a website will often involve thousands and thousands of packets.
Now let's think about this. We can generally get pretty good throughput through the satellite (think about that pipe again) but terrible latency. This means that website surfing from site to site isn't *NEAR* as snappy as cable or DSL. Actually it's pretty similar and often worse than dial up. When you start to download a file though things improve. Once those requests are made that satellite can beam a constant stream of data to you and download at a pretty fast speed in bits per second. The problem is the more people that are using that satellite the more this will slow down.
In conclusion what I am trying to tell you is this:
- WildBlue offers up to 1.5 megabit of service. The daily web surfing will *NOT* feel as fast as 1.5 megabit of cable or dsl. Not even close. The latency is *VERY* noticeable.
- Satellite internet is your last resort option.
- If you can't get cable/dsl/decent wireless go with Satellite--it's better than dial up.
