Question How to decrease latency with Satellite (Xplornet) Internet?

[t0sh]

I am in the country working and I have noticed that the Satellite Internet is extremely slow. It works for FB and Youtube, but not for gaming (which I average 600-1,200 Ping). Below is the information about my connection speed and type:

VPS.net says the following:

min: 614 ms
avg: 699.6 ms
max: 868 ms
median: 654.5 ms

Speedtest.net says the following:

Download Speed: 20-36 MB
Per-Second
Upload Speed: 1 MB Per-Second
Xplornet

I realize that my latency is far too slow for online gaming, but is there a work-around? Can I decrease it? Is there any conceivable way to do this?

I read this on Wikipedia:

Reducing satellite latency

--------------------------------

Much of the slowdown associated with satellite Internet is that for each request, many roundtrips must be completed before any useful data can be received by the requester.[35] Special IP stacks and proxies can also reduce latency through lessening the number of roundtrips, or simplifying and reducing the length of protocol headers. Optimization technologies include TCP acceleration, HTTP pre-fetching and DNS caching among many others. See the Space Communications Protocol Specifications standard (SCPS), developed by NASA and adopted widely by commercial and military equipment and software providers in the market space.

--------------------------------

It seems that there are possibilities, but I do not know how to do so myelf.

 

[bill001g]

You need a magical device that can bypass the speed of light. Your problem is distance, the satellites are very far away and it takes time to go all the way up and come all the way back.

Your download tests show your PC is already doing some of the tricks you mention. Lets say data transfer works like ping does and sends only single packets and waits for the response. So if you send a maximum size packet of 1500 BYTES..ie 12000bits. you could send about 2 of those per second. So you download speed would only be 24kbits/second. So to get faster the sever will send multiple packets without waiting for a response. To get speeds in the 20-36mbit range it has to be sending close to 1000 maximum size packets without waiting. There are a couple problems with this. It will cause large issues if one or more of those data packets get damaged, it will take a long time relatively for your machine to tell the server and have the data re transmitted. The second problem is web surfing uses many small files. The contention never has time to really get up to full speed before it has to wait for you to ask for the next file or web page.

The reason youtube works is it sends buffered data...ie it does not wait to see if you received it before it sends more. This trick does not work for anything that is "live". This is why you can hear the lag if you use something like skype and video conferencing has huge lag, you used to see it all the time when you saw reporters on tv using a satellite to talk back. Game work very similar they can not buffer traffic to get past the delays so you see the high latency in the games.

 

[jsmithepa]

The only thing I can think of is reducing TCP/IP window size to the minimum? so quick ACK is achieve. Am really talking out of my behind here, since I never played with this before.

Surely you are not the first user having this issue, somebody done something with it, IF FEASIBLE. Isn't there a large gaming community forum out there?

But like Bill says, don't expect miracle improvement, I know they use low orb sat now, not those old geosync, long distance 3 seconds latency but still it depends how many sat the vendor is using.

 

[bill001g]

They actual increase the window size so you can send 1 ack for a bunch of packets. If you decease the window size you send 1 ack per packet so you must wait the round trip time for each piece of data.

This was fixed quite a few years ago when they increased the maximum window size from 65k bytes to 16mbyte, but this is one of the key causes of bufferbloat. Then again bufferbloat helps everything except games.