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Satellite Broadband? Satellite Broadband?

09-02-2013 , 08:35 AM
Me and the gf are due to be moving out into the countryside (in England) and I have found out that the highest broadband speed available is 2MB. We are due to be moving in on 14th Sep and are going to be siging the contract this week so I need to get this sorted asap!

I am currently getting 32MB so the thought of trying to play poker at 2MB (its actually 1-2MB so I could be running 1MB at new address) is worrying. First question to you guys is can I play poker with these speeds? I am normally 8-12 tabling with PT4, Skype and a few tabs open.

If 1-2MB is not sufficient I understand you can get satellite broadband. I have looked into a few of the companies offering this including Avanti and Ethnet but I really do not know anything about this. I know it will cost a small fortune but is it reliable? Also these satellite broadband companies offer different speeds for different prices but also have data limits and which data limit you choose GREATLY changes the price. Can anyone hazard a guess (or better still anyone who currently uses satellite broadband) how much data I would need per month to play poker 8 hours a day 6 days a week + Skype and quite a few open internet tabs?


Any help greatly appreciated!
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09-02-2013 , 09:41 AM
I believe it is enough. Poker is not heavy on speed requirements, its basically just a few numbers being sent back and forth between you and the server.
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09-02-2013 , 10:12 AM
Because of the high latency with Satellite I don't know that it would be very suited for poker, particularly multi tabling since a large part of your time to act would be waiting for bits to get to you or back to the ISP. However, I don't remember hearing one way or the other so you may be alright. Browsing at 1-2MB is going to be a hard transition to make...
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09-02-2013 , 03:34 PM
with cable/fiber/dsl, 1-2Mbps could be workable for poker alone. trying to do much more than that at the same time would probably be a little painful.

the biggest issue is the latency as kerowo describes. latencies are significantly higher with satellite internet and you will definitely notice it. technically it is probably still workable for the most part, but I would imagine that in more scenarios you will time out more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satelli...26_limitations

I did a bandwidth calculation for a previous poster based on 8 tables for 10hrs per day for a month on pokerstars. I believe it came out to be about 2GB. This will vary a decent amount based on your lobby habits and which site you play. browsing on a desktop, watching youtube videos, streaming music, etc, is going to add quite a bit on top of that.
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09-02-2013 , 07:28 PM
Thanks for the replies guys. I am still undecided wtf to do. Latency of satellite broadband scares the hell outer me and this is a 3 year lease on a live-in commercial property so I want to be sure before I sign the contract and agree to move in. So Joe to be safe if I went with satellite broadband something like 10GB would be ample?

I think I will try and find a friend who is running off 1-2MB (could be difficult) and test out running 12 tables with PT and go from there...
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09-02-2013 , 08:00 PM
really dependent upon your internet habits. for poker it should be more than enough (depending upon the software), but for example here is some info from netflix which shows you could still blow through that really quickly if streaming HD videos.
https://support.netflix.com/en/node/87

testing a friend's 1-2Mbps service will get you an idea of the amount of data you can move at once, but not the latency. call the dsl/cable/fiber providers if you have not already. sometimes they are in the process of adding service to areas and just haven't added it to their website yet or sometimes the address just isn't showing up correctly in their database.
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09-03-2013 , 04:20 PM
The 1-2Mbps is through cable not Satellite. I was just worried about the speed causing lag and other issues when playing 8-12 tables. I tried out a 4Mbps service today and net wasslow but poker was OK - how big a difference will 1-2Mbps be do you think?
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09-03-2013 , 05:06 PM
You won't notice much difference. poker is not intense on bandwidth usage
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09-05-2013 , 11:08 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben Ward
The 1-2Mbps is through cable not Satellite. I was just worried about the speed causing lag and other issues when playing 8-12 tables. I tried out a 4Mbps service today and net wasslow but poker was OK - how big a difference will 1-2Mbps be do you think?
My parents live in rural mid Wales (max speed of 1.2mbps) and were considering satellite broadband. It really is excessively expensive with latency of 800ms+ and patchy coverage because of the weather. Depending on the coverage in your area you would be much better off getting 1/2 usb dongles and grinding with them and using the broadband as backup.
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09-05-2013 , 11:19 AM
The few people I know with satellite have call complained about patchy coverage. This will vary greatly with the type of weather you get.

Have you considered something from a wireless provider? There are companies offering wimax to rural customers here. I don't know much about it but speeds are decent and I'd except there not to be a latency or weather issue.
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09-05-2013 , 11:24 AM
Op, you won't be happy with satellite. I had hughes for 3 yrs. Also to all the posters here saying poker does not use a lot of bandwidth, you are just simply posting misinformation.

Op, you will have unlimited data from 2-7 a.m. probably, thats the only hours you will be able to use the internet for poker or videos. If you forget the time on the morning, and stray past the unlimited data grace time period, you will get throttled.

During the rest of the 24 hour non grace time period, about all you can do is web page lookups. Even a few 5 min YouTube music videos will just about kill your data allotment.

These are just a few of the MANY reasons to stay the hell away from internet satellite. Google hughes satellite problems if you dont believe me. Im getting along fine now w 3g and tethering. I dont get greedy with the videos so my acct isnt flagged.
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09-05-2013 , 11:38 AM
I made a living playing poker for a long time on a 1MBs. Now I make a living trading stocks with the same connection
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09-05-2013 , 11:55 AM
Thats great for you gasoline.

The satellite was a huge fail for me, for more obvious reasons than just playing poker. Im just sharing my own personal experiences.
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09-05-2013 , 12:34 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by grenzen
Thats great for you gasoline.

The satellite was a huge fail for me, for more obvious reasons than just playing poker. Im just sharing my own personal experiences.
I'm not talking about satellite. I have cable internet delivered by Ethernet cable. I don't trust anything without wires
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09-05-2013 , 08:43 PM
Thanks for all the helpful replies people. I was too worried signing up to a 3 year lease not knowing if the minimum 1Mbps would be good enough for me to grind so we have pulled out and I am going to wait for another one in a better location.

In retrospect a few dongles with 1Mbps broadband as backup would have probably been sufficient but oh well.
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09-06-2013 , 05:20 PM
The other option you might look into is mlppp. You can bind together several 1Mbps connections to make a decent connection. This gets pricy since you have to pay for each line monthly and you might need to have some wiring done as well which is a one time cost but I was going to go this route until infrastructure upgrades made the speed I wanted available with a single line.
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09-10-2013 , 09:48 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Henry17
The other option you might look into is mlppp. You can bind together several 1Mbps connections to make a decent connection. This gets pricy since you have to pay for each line monthly and you might need to have some wiring done as well which is a one time cost but I was going to go this route until infrastructure upgrades made the speed I wanted available with a single line.
I wasn't aware of this possibility. So I could basically get 2 or 3 providers in the area to get me 1-2Mbps broadband and get a separate company to bind together the connections for me for a one off cost? This still sounds like it would be a lot cheaper than satellite broadband as the one off cost for satellite broadband is around £500 installation plus around £200-£800 a month depending what data limit you choose!
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09-10-2013 , 10:22 AM
You get multiple connections from the same ISP and then bind them.

So in my case I was going to get two 15/10 DSL connections and bind them into a 30/20 connection. The technician that was helping me with it said he had a customer with 4 25/10 lines bond together to get 100/40.

So basically your costs would be paying for the multiple lines so in my case $39.99/month but times two since there are two services plus an extra $4/month for the MLPPP service which also gets you a static ip which I was already paying $2/month for anyway. So grand total $83.98/month.

The upfront costs in my case would have been just the connection fees because there were already multiple phone lines running into my unit from the previous tenant. If that is not the case then you have to pay the phone company or a contractor a one time fee to install multiple lines from the demarcation zone to your property. It is the telephone companies responsibility to provide at least two line to the demarcation zone. If you're pretty handy you can do this yourself but paying for it is easier.

I never did get it because 50/25 became available in my area two weeks later but I believe I also would have needed a router that handles MLPPP which I think simply means flashing a standard router (the Linksys WRT54G is popular) with Tomato and you're good to go.
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