Forum Discussion
Buffering!
The satellite is approximately 38,000 km from your dish. Even if your ground station were in the next county it would still be a 76,000 km trip to the gateway, and a 152,000 km round trip. The latency on that is still a half a second, given the speed of light. Latency has nothing to do with the location of the ground station and has everything to do with the fact that the satellite is about 36,000 km above the equator in a geosynchronous orbit.
As for many lanes, look at an open source satellite coverage map (pick one, there are many): Each spot beam is aimed at a specific region of the country. The beams are serviced by and distributed amongst the ground stations in order to try to balance the potential population per ground station. What mysterious undocumented lanes were you looking for in particular?
Bottom line: What are you talking about? Or, did you just make all that stuff up?
Edit: And as for "switching the channel", sometimes the IP gateway that you're associated to gets overused. Simply rebooting the modem will re-associate you to a lesser used IP gateway... it's not magic and you didn't need a tech to do that.
Thanks for the quick response, and I apologize for my satellite technology ignorance. I am old guy, so you can understand my thinking that a gateway in Wyoming would have more latency then one closer. Your explanation was very good, thank you.
As for the lanes, I was referring to channels, but stand corrected, there are a set number of channels. Here is a link about the channels - https://us.hitrontech.com/blog/what-are-network-channels-and-how-does-it-affect-my-wifi/ . So, I'm assuming the tech switched my channel from whatever it was on to channel 1, 6 or 11.
If I made anything up, it was not intentional and I apologize for the confusion.
Follow up question on latency, - if the distances are always the same, why do I get different latency values when running speed tests?
The WiFi itself is how the satellite internet is delivered to your devices and is completely independent upon satellite latency and speed. Depending upon the protocol used, your WiFi signal may use multiple channels to widen the available bandwidth from 20MHz, up to 80MHz. The only way this can be impeded is if you have one or more neighbors whose personal WiFi may be using one (or more) of those channels, therefore interfering with it and creating a problem with your local WiFi usage. Usually, WiFi systems will analyze the local environment and pick the first unused set of available channels, but there are WiFi channel scanners for computers that can detect them as well.
Regarding the latency values in speed tests: You shouldn't put any faith in them, primarily because of the way satellite internet works. The latency tests weren't designed for the inherent latency that occurs due to the sheer distances involved, nor the additional effects of beam and gateway loading from high intensity of pings that result from server-intense activities such as streaming. The results would be all over the place at any given time. The only credible latency test that should be used is the one provided in the System Control Center's Connectivity Test, which provides an accurate assessment of the latency between your computer and your particular ground station (Wyoming) that includes radio signal latency as well as any processing delays due to user congestion. Given that, any additional latency from the internet backbone, that the ground station is connected to, is negligible for all intents and purposes (basically milliseconds as compared to 600+ milliseconds).
Thanks for the great explanations. You knowledge of this is impressive. Perhaps you can explain
why it I get so-so streaming between 12pm and 4-5pm, then unusable streaming from 5ish to 11-12
and then so-so streaming again? I have plenty of data tokens, so shouldn't be throttled for that reason.This is why I was thinking congestion was the problem.
Could the 'beam' distribution you mentioned above be the problem?It is congestion: Other people are trying to stream at the same time, which is pounding the **bleep** out of the ground station. It doesn't take much to disrupt one person streaming, and it doesn't take too many people trying to stream to disrupt a ground station. Streaming is a very ping-intensive operation and the inherent latency impacts the timing required. It just gets exponentially worse as more people are banging away at constantly eroding time windows until the system just becomes unresponsive.
