3 ms·

As long as you have bandwidth latency really isn’t that important for most activities. It can suck a bit for voice and video calls (but not as bad as you might

by Thlom 4y ago

As long as you have bandwidth latency really isn’t that important for most activities. It can suck a bit for voice and video calls (but not as bad as you might think). Online fast paced gaming is of course out of the question.

wolrah 4y ago
> As long as you have bandwidth latency really isn’t that important for most activities. As someone who recently spent a week at a vacation house that had HughesNet, you have no idea how wrong this is. Every single individual request your browser makes has an extra half second attached to it even starting. Every TLS handshake takes a full second and a half, multiplied by every different host you're connecting to while loading content. Every packet lost (and there will be a few) has an extra half second to be resent. Downloading files over satellite internet isn't the worst thing in the world, but browsing the web over it is not an enjoyable experience. It feels like back when I was still on dialup while most of the internet had started to assume broadband. The main reason QUIC exists as a protocol, aside from working around decades worth of horrible middleboxes that prevent new protocols from working on top of IP directly, is to reduce the number of back-and-forths required to establish secure communication which most significantly benefits high latency and mildly lossy connections like satellite and older cellular networks.
- matmatmatmat 4y ago
  I've done paid work on an airplane WiFi connection through Viasat and really did not find the latency to be an issue at all, including working in the terminal. No doubt everyone has different experiences and tolerance levels for latency, but, really, I think the latency issue is vastly overblown.
qeternity 4y ago
There is something beautiful in humanity's advancement to the point that we're debating the feasibility of playing multi-person video games over satellite internet while hurtling through the air at 500mph in a pressurized tube.

by Thlom 4y ago

wolrah 4y ago

> As long as you have bandwidth latency really isn’t that important for most activities. As someone who recently spent a week at a vacation house that had HughesNet, you have no idea how wrong this is. Every single individual request your browser makes has an extra half second attached to it even starting. Every TLS handshake takes a full second and a half, multiplied by every different host you're connecting to while loading content. Every packet lost (and there will be a few) has an extra half second to be resent. Downloading files over satellite internet isn't the worst thing in the world, but browsing the web over it is not an enjoyable experience. It feels like back when I was still on dialup while most of the internet had started to assume broadband. The main reason QUIC exists as a protocol, aside from working around decades worth of horrible middleboxes that prevent new protocols from working on top of IP directly, is to reduce the number of back-and-forths required to establish secure communication which most significantly benefits high latency and mildly lossy connections like satellite and older cellular networks.

matmatmatmat 4y ago
I've done paid work on an airplane WiFi connection through Viasat and really did not find the latency to be an issue at all, including working in the terminal. No doubt everyone has different experiences and tolerance levels for latency, but, really, I think the latency issue is vastly overblown.

qeternity 4y ago

There is something beautiful in humanity's advancement to the point that we're debating the feasibility of playing multi-person video games over satellite internet while hurtling through the air at 500mph in a pressurized tube.