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I'm trying to determine from a reliability standpoint whether internet service from a satellite provider is as good as a cable or DSL provider. Obviously nothing is perfect nor has a 100% uptime, but relatively speaking is satellite internet service as reliable as cable or DSL service? To make it more objective, state how you would classify satellite internet service reliability:
- As good as cable or DSL (same amount of downtime.)
- Less reliable than cable or DSL but hardly noticeable (instead of three outages a year, maybe satellite has 5-6.)
- Noticably worse than cable or DSL (outages frequently occur.)
In general, wired connections are considered more reliable than wireless. – MaQleod – 2011-06-02T18:58:02.593
I figure the same, but wonder if there's any hard data. – Ken Pespisa – 2011-06-02T18:59:32.890
@Ken Pespisa Imagine being born as a tiny little internet packet. Would you rather travel 1200 miles into radiation, through space, at the mercy of the elements on a tiny rocketship with only your thoughts to accompany you...or 3 miles underground on a guided wire? – P.Brian.Mackey – 2011-06-02T19:19:00.533
4@P.Brian.Mackey, the space one - I hear it is quite a view from up there. This isn't a question about whether a wireless connection is better than a wired one. I believe that is fairly obvious. I want to know about the reliability of the service and service providers. We have a wired connection at work, for example, with a wireless connection as a backup. I've personally experienced more outages from telecom techs cutting the wrong wire, or cars hitting phone poles, than we have on our wireless connection. – Ken Pespisa – 2011-06-02T19:26:44.267
1@Ken Pespisa - Ah..I can empathize, my cable service is always out...Considering DSL myself. I think reliability is going to be region specific for the most part. BTW Oh my goodness that little baby is the CUTEST!!! If she is yours you should put her in a baby contest or something. – P.Brian.Mackey – 2011-06-02T19:28:24.423
@Ken, that depends on what you include in the definition of reliable/unreliable - a storm that knocks out service for an hour for satellite? or floods a bbox where your DSL is hooked up? or a backhoe that takes out your cable on the street? or a baseball that knocks over your dish? There are tons of ways that either connection can go down, it is really hard to quantify that kind of thing. It is just not possible to give any sort of reliable forcast on, without extensive probability studies (area growth, weather patters, age of community, traffic patterns, cable placement are all factors) – MaQleod – 2011-06-02T20:52:48.360
@MaQleod, I concur there are a lot of ways the connection can go down, and in fact that may be the only reason my wired connection ever goes down. But I could still tell you that it only goes down every few months or so, and only for a short while, and most folks would agree that's normal. If you've had experience using a satellite-based service, how does your "normal" compare to my "normal." – Ken Pespisa – 2011-06-02T20:59:05.320
Honestly, I don't know a lot about satellite, I do however do support for an ISP that does T1s and DSL, and we have circuits that repeatedly go down, and some that go years without issue. A large percentage of perceived outages are customer over-utilization or LAN issues, not circuit issues, but on the ones that do actually go down a lot, it is usually related to the last mile. Typically, the chronically bad ones are in areas where flooding occurs or where the copper is just really old, but there are definitely exceptions to this (bad smart jacks, corroded dmarcs or bboxes, etc). – MaQleod – 2011-06-02T21:03:32.823