I live in the wilds of Cambridgeshire in the UK - but only 5 miles from a reasonable size town.

I have a terrible ping on dialup even with all the tweaking of around 380 plus. I've had really bad problems since the latest PB upgrade (even after oading up 995) and have been looking at getting a faster link to the net.

BT have told me that my village will never get broadband because it's too small and too far away from the exchange. My only options appear to be ISDN or satellite broadband. ISDN is expensive, my mate Jack Bastard has it and it's crippling because it's pay as you go - BT doesn't seem to offer an 'anytime' flat rate monthly package. I've done some research and posted about satellite broadband but am getting conflicting respones. One set of people say that gaming via satellite is a non starter another set are saying it works OK. Do any of you games via a satellite link? If so what's it like? Can Raven technical pitch in on this one and let me know their views?

Satellite is great for downloads/uploads, but very poor for games. The reason being that although it can send and recieve huge packets at a time, the refresh rate on it is terrible, you have to wait 10 seconds or so before each packet (depending on the actual service), but each packet carries LOTS of data. For serious gaming you honestly NEED broadband, and at the very least ISDN. An online game needs to keep sending small packets of data back and forth very quickly, which is what the 'rate' setting is all about. Modem users will use about 2500, broadband possibly up to 20000. Satellite I would guess at best you could set it at 100.
I don't, and have never played, on a satellite connection, so everything I have said is from other things I have read. Try and get someone who has the same satellite uplink you are thinking of getting before making a decision.

*hugs his 1Mbit connection*

In my educated opinion......

Satellite is great for downloads only.  It has such a HUGE range in bandwidth that you can recieve large amounts of data very quickly.  However, satellite has no direct upload.  You still need some sort of telephone wire to upload your signal.  As far as I know, DL is the only great thing about satellite internet.

It's like when you order a pay-per-view movie on satellite.  YOU HAVE TO HAVE a phone line plugged into your sat. reciever to order the movie.  Unless you wanna call them on the phone and order it manually.  So you see, phone wire is the common link no matter what.

So a big fat NOOOOOO!!  On satellite for gaming.  Great for business that require HUGE bandwidth for downloads, and thats about it.

A friend of mine has Satelite and I tried, just for goofs an giggles, to connect to SOF2. No such luck. I connected on a different game, and the smallest ping I saw was well over 2000. His satelite is a two way systems, but like T¥RANITH said. its for sending large packets at long intervals. I have seen it spike up to 1.5 Mb/s, but its rare. For genral gaming its just not going to happen.

Is there any cable companies?
NTL,Telewest...I live in a village and have NTL cable and its a great service(apart from the customer service)with the 512k service my pings on uk servers are no more than 30.
Put your post code in this link and hope it comes up as ok in your area:
http://sales.ntl.com/index.jsp?cust=ntlhome_intbroadband
Goodluck.

The latency for satelite link is shocking. You're better off with a dial up link.

Acuually Satilite has upload as well. Back then it didn't. Grimm.Org home computer is satilite and he has no problem on SOF2. Only for a bout an hour a night, the company restarts the towers and he has horrible ping, but again its only an hour. To talk to him go to Grimm.gamerz232.org he'll let you know more post at the forums!

I have heard similar to what you have already been told, that you still require an physical connection, a piece of cable, be it dial-up or whatever, connecting you to the internet.

But I also know that there were some ppl I used to play against who had a satalite connection, and were getting LAN like pings. But! ..they were at university

So an internet satellite mounted on the outside of your house sends a microwave beam back up into space to the satellite in orbit??      Ooook.  

I can see universities or other large businesses having an upload satellite connection.  They pay for a chunk of signal space thats gets beamed up to orbiting sat's.  That makes sence.

Satellite is crap for gaming due to the inherent latency is the connection. You'd probably be little better off than you are with your current dialup. Of course for anything that is timing critical you should be a lot better off.