High ping, download speed is 30 on Hughesnet

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hayley3

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Jan 19, 2011
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I'm helping a friend. They have a Sony Vaio, so their computer is decent.
Their internet is slow and videos are intermittently pixelated.
So I did a speedtest by Ookla and the ping is 600 but the speed is 30Mbps.
My own speed is 6 and my internet works better than his does.

So I can't understand how ping could be so slow yet the internet download speed be perfect. I thought Hughesnet was throttling him but the speed is saying otherwise.

Thanks,
Cheryl
 
Solution
USAFRet


Because that's what is coming down from the satellite, at this particular moment.
'ping' is a whole different measuring thing. It is the total time for a round trip of data from you, to the remote server, and back.

His Hughesnet gets data directly from the satellite.

Here, it goes...
From the PC, through whatever phoneline connection, to the ISP (Hughesnet ), then from them UP to their satellite, then from the satellite back down to your PC.
The satellite is a geosynchronous orbit, at ~26,200 miles. So a round trip of 50,000+ miles, with a slow phone line and a lot of circuitry conversion in the middle.
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Snipergod87

Snipergod87

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Hughesnet is satellite, which as you can tell from the ping has extremely high latency which will cause general web browsing to be a lot slower than a wired connection (non satellite) even if the wired connection is much slower, as far as the pixelated videos could be packet loss from clouds or issues brought by latency

A good wired connection would have a ping response of usually 20ms or less depending where you are testing to.
 
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grimfox

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With Hughesnet the signal has to bounce from a satellite and come back. Basically every packet of data is travelling a distance equivalent to a couple trips around the Earth before it even starts on it's journey to the source. Modern internet doesn't like that high ping and doesn't like buffering, sending more data than it has too. Thus the pixelated video. There really isn't a fix, that's just how current satellite internet is. It works for basic things like e-mail and online banking but it doesn't work so well for entertainment like videos and gaming.

If any of the cell carriers in the area provide coverage to your friends house that would offer a better ping and quality of service (costs may differ). But odds are if they've already picked out Hughesnet, it's because you didn't have another option.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Satellite (hughesnet) is download from the satellite, upload via the phoneline, generally DSL or regular phone line.
Lots of moving parts, and LOTS of distance.

The 'ping' WILL be high.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Because that's what is coming down from the satellite, at this particular moment.
'ping' is a whole different measuring thing. It is the total time for a round trip of data from you, to the remote server, and back.

His Hughesnet gets data directly from the satellite.

Here, it goes...
From the PC, through whatever phoneline connection, to the ISP (Hughesnet ), then from them UP to their satellite, then from the satellite back down to your PC.
The satellite is a geosynchronous orbit, at ~26,200 miles. So a round trip of 50,000+ miles, with a slow phone line and a lot of circuitry conversion in the middle.
 
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Solution
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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The ping time (ie latency) used to limit data transfer speeds. It is a very complex topic called TCP window size. Because the server will wait to send more data until it receives confirmation it was received you can limit your speed if the window size is small. This used to have a maximum value or 64Kbytes which would limit the speed on high latency connections. This restriction is pretty much gone but it does affect small file transfers and web pages. So speedtest which can use a large window size will show large transfer rates but you will still get very sluggish web pages because they send many tiny files which can not take advantage of a larger window size.

If they really wanted to video can be send very easily over satellite by actually streaming the data and not transferring it like a file. Satellite TV works that way, they just send it out and don't expect any confirmation it was delivered. Games are extremely interactive. The game client and the game server need to be kept in sync to keep location information correct. Many can tolerate fairly high latency but the 500ms or so you see on satellite is much more than they can handle.
 
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hayley3

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Thanks...I knew satellites were slow but the 30Mbps speed was really confusing. So he is capable of 30Mbps but the latency essentially throttles the speed.
Thanks to all of you for the help.
 
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