[Lag] HughesNET

This is absolutely without a doubt the most inexplicably STUPID thing I have encountered since changing to HughesNET Satellite Internet over four months ago!

Every now and again while playing Second Life, I find myself experiecing lag the likes of which I have NEVER seen before. I'm not sure if it's been this way for long, but I started getting back into the Grid about a month ago and it's been doing it pretty regularly...generally during "peak hours"...off-and-on since. Lag of upwards of 100,000...200,000... I don't understand why it's doing this when World of Warcraft and Ragnarok Online don't... Those games are just about as bandwidth-intensive. Furthermore, I KNOW it's Second Life alone because while I can't send or recieve posts there, I can still free browse the web, send IMs through Y!IM, play other online games, etc. etc... This is absolutely ridiculous...

So, tell me what information you need and I'll give it to you. We'll see if we can't troubleshoot this thing a little, eh?

Thanks...

Games like WoW and such are nowhere near as bandwidth intensive as SL. I'm not sure why you'd think they could be or would be. In those games, the entire world exists on your local hard drive. The only information that needs to be streamed back and forth is where the characters are, what actions they're currently performing, chat data, etc. All of that is a very, very, very tiny amount of information.

SL, on the other hand, does not exist on your local machine at all. Literally every piece of information there is to know about the world around your avatar is continually streamed. That's orders of magnitude more data than any game on the planet will stream.

I hate to have to tell you this, but LL has long maintained that satellite Internet is not "true broadband", and that it's very unlikely that SL will ever work properly with it. If SL is important to you, I'd suggest you ditch the HughesNet, and go with a landline ISP.

Also, I gotta say, even with SL aside, Hughesnet's pricing is fairly ridiculous for what you get. I'm looking at their site right now. $59.95 a month for 1Mbps/128Kbps? That's ludicrous. That's the same amount I pay for Roadrunner, and I get literally 17 times the download speed, and 6 times the upload speed (17Mbps/768Kbps).

Unless you live on top of a mountain, in the middle of the jungle, or some other place with absolutely no access to land lines, satellite Internet is the worst possible thing you could have. Again, sorry to have to say that. I know it's not what you want to hear.

I used to have HughesNet, and now I have Wild Blue. Satellite is my only choice for high bandwidth.

First, you have to understand that satellite is completely and totally unsupported by SL. So complain all you like, it is not their problem, it is ours.

On the other hand, it works pretty well most of the time, for me at least. The latency of 1500 ms is the main problem, makes fasst twitch games pretty hard

Do NOT assume that your advertised maximum bandwidth will be available. Mine is 1.5MB, but I keep my SL bandwidth set to 250mb most the time. This greatly reduces the packet loss, and helps with most things.

I also have a sort of personal "style" of TPing to a new place, and then just kicking back and relaxing for a few minutes while stuff loads. If you get impatient, or angry, you are ruining the experience you *could* have if you were just a little drunker.

Also, how is your Hughesnet FAP? Could your poor experiences be due to slipping over the thershold?

Chosen...I don't think any of us intentionally get slow, unreliable, expensive satellite when any bettr option is available. Don't rub it in.

Sorry, Lee. I didn't mean it that way. After having worked in the satellite industry, and having witnessed first hand the way many of their retailers will say absolutely ANYTHING to get a customer to sign up, maybe I got a little carried away in my response here. My apologies if it was unwarranted.

If you've got no choice, you've got no choice. But there are people out there who DO have a choice, but get suckered in by dishonest sales people. I could tell you some stories that would make you cringe.

That's satellite for you. It has substantial latency. You're transmitting to space, and back down to earth again, and it takes time to cover that mileage. To say that SL lags and WoW doesn't on satellite is impossible: Latency is a factor of distance and bandwidth, not what application you're running. Covering 100,000 miles by radio is going to take longer than going the same distance 4000 miles directly via a cable even if both signals are travelling at the speed of light.

Truckers. But that's mostly because the rates truck-stop wifi generally costs is nothing short of breathtaking when you extend it over even a single month.

Are you TRYING to be quoted out of context?

No. Tryng to win Quote of the Day two days in a row.

And here I thought I wasn't going to NEED to put somewhere in my post "And don't tell me 'get a better ISP, dude' because if I could, I WOULD". ;P

Anyway, the way I figured it, once the world was actually LOADED, it seemed like Second Life used about as much bandwidth as Ragnarok or WoW, to me. So I dunno... I'm likely wrong as Hell. But my little usage meter listy thing says otherwise. O_o

Oh, I've gotten used to the non-killer latency (generally around 1,000ms) like that. It's perfectly workable if you're patient.
Okay, see...I didn't even consider that might help. o_o I'll try that and see what happens.
I'm definately not going over the threshold (currently 425 (450?) MB, upgraded from 200 MB as of Novemberish). Heck, even when I played for a little while yesterday after SOMETHING completely nuked my FAP ("Fair-Access Policy", for those of you who don't have any idea of what that acronym means) to Hell and back (1GB from 6:00 to 8:00 when I KNOW uTorrent automatically stops doing its thing at 5:59? What the HELL?), I was still getting the average low of 1000ms. So I don't think that's it at all... But I appreciate you asking and VERY appreciate the suggestion. Hopefully, it'll help!

Alright, sorry to double-post, but I have an update...

Basically, changing my bandwidth settings seemed to help for a WHILE...but today, the lag is worse than EVER! I DO have my bandwidth on low but I'm STILL getting Sim Pings of upwards of 25K! And this is immediately after log-in, mind you. Before, it took a little while... Ugh...this is so frustrating... I don't understand it at all... There's NO REASON for it!

Does anyone else have any ideas? That don't involve me switching to dial-up, the only other available ISP in the area?

ANOTHER UPDATE: It turns out I'm not not-sending things into Second Life. I posted something in Second Life and despite the fact my lag was 100K+ at the time, my friend told me it displayed on their screen just fine. No, what's apparently happening is I'm not RECEIVING updates on my end!! This is even MORE befuddling than simply not sending things! And again...there's no REASON for it! Argh...

I sometimes see the ping goes crazy effect. Any ping times over 2000ms, I just relog. If that does not help, I do something else until tomorrow. Like you, I have seen ridiculous ping times, like 19000ms.

Same for packet loss. Sometimes nothing I do helps, so I write it off to

a) sunspots
b) satellite congestion
c) wife's hair dryer

and do something else.

The fact that it works at all ever is good enough to keep me amazed. How do they get the photons to hit the right spot on the screen?

When I had Hughesnet, I hit the 450mb/day FAP all the time. The main reason I switched to WildBlue is that they have a 17GB/(30 day sliding window) FAP, so I can balance a few extreme heavy days with some light ones.

In a CRT, it's electrons that hit the screen, which cause phosphor dots to emit photons.
In a backlit LCD monitor, there's a light, usually a fluorescent light, or more than one light, which shines through the pixels, the pixels being filters that absorb and transmit different frequencies of light.

Lies! Pixels are actually tiny genetically enhanced life forms, usually based on brewers yeast or slime molds, trained to rapidly move through a tiny grid of cages and pens in response to very very small bribes. They don't live long because of the dangerous levels of RGB radiation they're exposed to in order to fine-tune their colors, but they breed very quickly at high temperatures (which is why it takes a while for your display to "warm up" if it's been off a while).

Not to sound huffy, but can we perhaps get back to the topic...? Is there a cure for this issue or am I just plain stuck?

EDIT: nevermind. Apparently the only (applicable) solutions to the problem ARE switching to dial-up or becoming my own ISP via T1 line. Depressing...