Satellite Internet
 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.