Residential VSAT experiences?

Tue Jun 23 00:10:12 UTC 2015

On Jun 22, 2015, at 4:39 PM, Nicholas Oas <nicholas.oas at gmail.com> wrote:

> Would anyone mind sharing with me their first-hand experiences with
> residential satellite internet?
> 
> Right now I am evaluating HughesNet Gen4 and ViaSat Exede and I'm thinking
> specifically as a sysadmin who needs to use the uplink for work, not surf.

My experience with geostationary was that latencies were around 720 ms in practice. Telnet was painful and it turns out my brain didn’t like typing things while I wasn’t getting instant feedback, though I understand there’s software for that problem now. 

Reliability was pretty good unless the satellite I was using happened to lose it’s control processors. I was using Panamsat Galaxy 4 when it failed. I don’t know how many angry phone calls we got about why we weren’t answering our pages about the entire network being down before we got into the office. In our case recovery involved getting access to another satellite and having people re-aim the dishes. 

My only real recollection besides that was that the signal was bad enough/long enough to induce TCP Silly Window Syndrome; but I can’t imagine anyone’s running an OS that old anymore. 

—
Mike