Why?

sURF SPEED...

What I see looks like bogged down servers during peak hours.

We need to revoke broadcast licenses and replace them with narrow casting only those signals that people want.

We need lotsa different source options for those signals. The high cost of installation locks people in.

Marks256 said:

So satellite is broadband? Ok... Then DSL runs on the phone lines with more speed than dial up, right?

Well, either way. Have i mentioned that Wild Blue sucks?

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Do you have a DSL filter for your phone line? Noise might be causing the problem.

General article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSL

DirectPC used to have a "fair use policy" where they detected that I was using "too much" bandwidth (like 50 megabytes in an hour) and throttled me down to 64K unless I logged off for an hour.

Check your "terms of service".

Satelite? Yack, you're never going to get good torrent download with Satelite. The upstream of a satelite connection is still just a phone line. DSL is over a phone line but is a completly different system than modems or telephones. Out of all the high speed connection methods I can think of satelite is the worst, the latency is horrible and in theory the downstream bandwidth can be good but the upstream bottleneck and latency make any real world uses very limited. Unless for some reason you can't get DSL or cable in your area satelite is a poor choice.

Mark256 may appeciate that the said speeds are between the service provider and his PC . Later the actual speed varies depending on the site browsed or the url from where the download is sought. these are dynamic depnding on the traffic load at a given time.

i have also had observatons when Firefox is used vis Fedora core6, our site https://www.electro-tech-online.com comes up fast. and downloads are little better-- (i am sure that i am not having earlier viewed files as cookies and they come up from local copy--NOT SO.

Perhaps you have crapware running in the background, whether it be malware, Winblow$ update or anti-virus update, it'll slow your download speed down.

Try booting from a live Linux to see if it's any faster.

Sceadwian said:

Unless for some reason you can't get DSL or cable in your area satelite is a poor choice.

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That is EXACTALLY it. We wanted to get cable VERY badly, but every company refused. We live about 5 miles from the nearest town, and have crap for options.

Hero999 said:

Perhaps you have crapware running in the background, whether it be malware, Winblow$ update or anti-virus update, it'll slow your download speed down.

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I'm a little offended there... I loaded my OS (XP pro) from scratch, and only put on the best software i had. In other words, no, i do not have any badware running. Running linux is no different than windows.

Have your parents check with the local laws, depending on the county/city state and the federal laws they may be required to run wire to your place if one doesn't already exist. Sounds funny but it may be possible, depends on how much fuss you're willing to put up with and the locally applicable regulations.
Satelite may technically be called broadband, but because the upstream signal is sent over a modem and the satelite signal is shared over so many users (many more than cable) latency (the time it takes a packet to be sent to a site and back) is VERY high, transmission protocols require two way communication to do various acknolwedge bytes and what not to verifiy the right data is being sent and received, that latency dramatically throttles the bandwidth you're going to get, no matter how fast the connection itself actually is. Satelite providers will do just about everything to keep this information from consumers. Torrents also only download at a ratio that's dependant on how fast you can upload.

If you use satellite and upload via a modem/phone line and are getting crap upload speeds via the phone line, it stands to reason that the download speed via satellite will suffer also. This is because with TCP, every inbound packet received must be acknowledged with a small outbound packet sent back to the server via the phone line. I would suggest the problem lies in your phone line / modem connection and to check that first.

There are programs out that that can optimize the TCP/IP stack to use connections like that better. I haven't used one in years because the latency on cable and DSL is so low. They adjust the transmit and receive buffer/window sizes to allow more packets to come or go out before requiring an ack which can dramatically increase transfer speeds. Your ISP actually should offer such software free.

There are programs out that that can optimize the TCP/IP stack to use connections like that better.

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He could look at increasing the MTU size (Check your router config) and see if that improves things.

MTU and the receive window are very important, I'd do a little research to find out what other satelite users are using for those two. Your latency already sucks so you're probably going to want to use the largest MTU and RCV window you can.

Wildblue.net offers a speedup program... but only if you are running windows. But since Microsoft stole the LInux tcp/ip stack anyway, I mite already be optimized.

I'm running Hughes.net at this location. dont really have that much of a problem with the speed, but then nearly everthing I do is read/write ascii, either posting like this, or looking for specs.

But the mail server at hughes sux. And they dont have a newserver for usenet. Wildblue, at another location seems to have the same d/l speed, 40kb/sec, just as jerky watching Youtube. which I dont do much of. I can read five times faster than anyone can talk.

But when the hughes setup had a problem with the cable when wet, it was a week before the field rep got out here. I have plans for a product to be sold online, glad I wasnt trying to do that just yet. One of the reasons I've been grateful to use both wildblue & hughes.

As for local ISPs, there are 3 small outfits to choose from. I've tried them all, and seen their servers crash on friday nite, and not come back up til monday morning. One monday, talking to 'support' about the problem, I mentioned that I used linux. the response: "What's linux?"

No, I need a wireless link that'll go 30 air miles to Conway or Russelville on I40 with the usual set of national ISP choices. They have competition, and they know that.

Marks256 said:

That is EXACTALLY it. We wanted to get cable VERY badly, but every company refused. We live about 5 miles from the nearest town, and have crap for options.
Yet another reason why some of us are working on a long range wireless system with a wavelength longer than pine needles or than can go over mountains.

I'm a little offended there... I loaded my OS (XP pro) from scratch, and only put on the best software i had. In other words, no, i do not have any badware running. Running linux is no different than windows.

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There is some diff. There are lotsa diffs among the distros as well. Microsoft has always stolen software. programmers picked up on this, and began installing 'back doors' into their code. Other hackers have found out about these backdoors. I dunno how long you've been online. But the first national virus problem was a "michaelangelo", and eventually, they tracked down the dude who wrote it.

but the case was thrown out, and the media shut up about it. He didnt upload it onto the BBS nets. He had been in negotiation with a large software house, and realized that they were not going to be accomodating, and that furthermore, they had enough lawyers to keep him in court forever. He installed the virus in his own code. The software house *STOLE HIS WORK*, complete with the virus, so it was on the disk, in the shrinkwrap, right from the factory. There was no case because they had no right to be using it in the first place. Unless the source code is published, you have no idea what is in it.

You recall that Micorsoft code was discovered to have the LInux tcp/Ip stack? In any case, Linux has not created the armies of enemies that Micorsoft has, and since the source code is published, programmers can, and have, examined it to see if there are ways to hack into it. I dunno of any malware problems with Linux.

I never download 'patches'. Now, I have had problems with linux, but then again, I run gray market cheap hardware, cheap as I can find it. My own work gets copied onto dos partitions, so the only thing I tend to loose is bookmarks or email addys.

I usually run Xandros because it finds and mounts all the drives and paritions it finds, DOS, win, os/2, BSD, or other linux, and *never* tells me I dont have 'permisison' to access anything on any of them. It reads and writes all the windows file formats.

kchriste said:

If you use satellite and upload via a modem/phone line and are getting crap upload speeds via the phone line, it stands to reason that the download speed via satellite will suffer also. This is because with TCP, every inbound packet received must be acknowledged with a small outbound packet sent back to the server via the phone line. I would suggest the problem lies in your phone line / modem connection and to check that first.

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No, no. Our internet comes over a satellite. It has nothing to do with our phone line... I don't understand what our phone line would have to do with it... It is all cat5 from the satellite modem to my router...

daybrown said:

There is some diff. There are lotsa diffs among the distros as well. Microsoft has always stolen software. programmers picked up on this, and began installing 'back doors' into their code. Other hackers have found out about these backdoors. I dunno how long you've been online. But the first national virus problem was a "michaelangelo", and eventually, they tracked down the dude who wrote it.

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I meant that there is no internet speed differences in internet between the two os's.

Marks, the satelite internet upstream connection is over a phone line, they don't do two way satelite that I know of, not unless it's at absolutly insane price. (multiple hundreds of dollars a month)

We don't have anything connected to the modem. As far as i know, the satellite is bi-directional... Actually i know for a fact that it is.

How much does that cost? It's a horrible waste of airwaves.

No, no. Our internet comes over a satellite. It has nothing to do with our phone line.

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Ah Ok, different kind of connection than what I was thinking of. But basically, the solutions Sceadwian and I proposed are still valid if the latency time of the connection is long which it will be because the packets are going into space and back. Maybe download DrTCP or something like it to optimize your connection.

Hughes has a "Fair Access Policy" where your bandwidth essentially shrinks to dialup (or slower) rates if you download more than 169 megabytes in 4 hours. You may have to stay offline for 8 hours to restore your full speed.

For the painful truth, google hughes fair access policy.