Satellite Internet- anyone know if SL will work with it?

If anyone has any knowledge of the efficacy of satellite internet, specifically (if possible) whether it will work on a boat (within 100 miles of shore line and within the footprint of the provider) in accessing SL.

I just bought a boat and plan to live on it and am trying to find out if that means the end of my SL days - i reeeeally hope not.

So if anyone knows ANYTHING, (you heard that your brother-in-law's mailman's cousin had one) i would love to hear your input.

tanx

Ping times on Satellite is horrible, you need to call up every time you want to download something, constant streaming (like SL use) is toooo slow on that.

Unless someone else know about it that what experience i had with it, to laggy , useless unless you want to pick 1 file to download and do that, multiple then lag goes sky high.

The latency on Satellite Internet is..... Brutal - We're talking 1000ms - 2000ms ping times. Plan on a 1-2 second delay on everything you do.

What's more, many Satellite providers enforce "download limits" - and drop your connection to the equivelent of Dialup when you exceed it. With SL, its not too hard to happen.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

As far as I know the latency (ie lag) is massive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_internet

I presume on a boat it would be 2 way:

"Uplink speeds rarely exceed one megabit and latency can be up to one second. Satellite phone services such as Iridium also provide data services at the rather tame speed of 2400bps."

Living on a boat tends to mean living at a marina. Many marinas, especially around large cities, carry cable services and there is the possibility of cable internet.

There is a new cell based broadband service that is coming online in some selected areas and expanding as time goes on that might work if you tend to stay close enough to shore for cell communication.

Another thing is two way satallite requires a stable, precise alignment with the satallite so unless you have a gimballed, steady position disk antenna all you will be doing it is calling ET or flashing other satallites as the boat rocks.

A friend of mine had satellite and used SL. or tried. said it just wasn't really doable. she'd suddenly freeze for like 30 seconds at a time, or miss whole chunks of conversations. oddly she was never really crashy, just seemingly losing lots of packets.

Thanks everyone for your info and experience- even tho what i am reading does not thrill me Better to know now before laying out several thousands on a satellite set up that makes me grind my teeth to nubs.

If anyone knows of a better way- i would be pretty happy to know about it. While i can make lots of stuff in world, i am a total window licker when it comes to tech stuff. So advice is very welcome.

Or i guess i will have to go back to HBO and *gasp* book readin' for my entertainment. eep.

thanx again