Satellite Internet

[Nihilist_santa]

I have to use satellite internet to connect and was just curious if anyone else does or if anyone knows of a way I can help enhance my connection? I frequently go LD while zoning and re-logging in or zoning takes me about 5-10 min sometimes. While the nostalgia of classic zone times was cool the first time it sucks now and I need to know if there is anyway to make it so I can at least zone without losing connection. I understand the latency on satellite has limitations so I am not expecting miracles here. Also would dial up be better? I played on dial up for the first year of EQ and it wasn't too bad compared to this garbage I am dealing with now.

[Frieza_Prexus]

You may have already considered it, but if you haven't, I have had a lot of success tethering to my cell phone.

If you have a smart phone, there's a lot of free apps that can enable tethering without a monthly charge. I use a Droid Razr and the app PdaNet. Latency is, at most, 70-80 ms, though crappy network coverage happens from time to time.

[Nihilist_santa]

I can deal with 70-80ms, currently mine floats around 1000 - 1200. There is a WISP provider I could use but wasn't sure if it would be any better for gaming. Thanks for the idea I will look into the WISP.

[Kizzik]

In general my experience with satellite and 3G/4G internet with eqemu servers has been poor. The servers are coded with very little tolerance and seem extremely eager to drop your connection if you have a little bit of packet loss for a while or an extended ping time. With Verizon 4g they like to change your IP every 2 hours, which doesn't matter if you're browsing a web page, but if you're in a raid or something you won't get that connection back until you relog. This isn't the sort of thing that will ever realistically get fixed either.

So if I were you I would try the WISP provider, and maybe some day you'll get some of that last mile broadband all the telecom companies got billions of subsidy dollars for. Probably not though.

[Arterian]

Man, I remember satellite. I used to live where there was no cable/DSL and all we could get was satellite. It was brutal with the high latency and throttling.

I would absolutely try WISP - I hear the latency is closer to 100, rather than over 1000.

[Byrjun]

I could be completely wrong here, I have absolutely no networking experience and this is all conjecture.

Failure to finish loading while zoning happens frequently on eqemu, especially for connections that are packet lossy (like wireless/satellite). My assumption is that EQ is dumb and if it fails to send a packet, it can't realize that and won't try to correct its mistake so it just hangs. Due to where I live I have a wireless based internet connection and the latency is especially high around prime time and sometimes I have to relog every time I zone. But when the connection is "strong" (very low latency, morning / late night) I rarely have trouble zoning.