Satellite Internet faster than advertised, but latency still awful

The upload and download speeds promised by satellite Internet providers may not be huge, but it turns out that satellite service delivers much better speeds than it advertises.

Satellite’s latency has improved too, but unfortunately it’s still 20 times worse than non-satellite services.

The Federal Communications Commission today released its latest Measuring Broadband America report, and for the first time it included results on satellite technology alongside cable, DSL, and fiber-to-the-home. ViaSat is the only satellite provider measured. The company’s Exede service promises 12Mbps down and 3Mbps up, but in reality it does much better.

“On average, during peak periods DSL-based services delivered download speeds that were 85 percent of advertised speeds, cable-based services delivered 99 percent of advertised speeds, fiber-to-the-home services delivered 115 percent of advertised speeds, and satellite delivered 137 percent of advertised speeds,” the FCC said.

ViaSat upload speeds were 161 percent of what was promised, while “fiber-to-the-home and cable-based services delivered 108 percent, and DSL-based services delivered 99 percent of advertised upload speeds.”

The FCC tested speeds at the homes of 6,733 volunteers over the course of a month, in September 2012.

Satellite merited inclusion in the latest report because newer satellites have greatly expanded the performance of satellite broadband in general. Latency, though, remains satellite’s Achilles’ heel. The lengthy round trip that data packets have to make between Earth and satellites results in a noticeable delay between the moment a user clicks on something and the moment in which the user sees the result.

This is particularly troublesome for online gaming. The satellite providers themselves admit that satellite is generally only the best option in parts of the country where the other choices are dial-up or slow DSL service. Data caps also reduce the desirability of satellite. If you can get cable or FiOS, that would be the way to go (even if service offered by the major players leaves much to be desired).

“Satellite systems involve the transmission of information over long distances and have correspondingly higher latencies than for terrestrial technologies,” the FCC said. “ViaSat had a measured latency of 638ms for this report, approximately 20 times that [of] the terrestrial average.”

The average terrestrial service was measured at 29.6 milliseconds latency. Fiber-to-the-home services led the pack. “During the September 2012 testing period, fiber-to-the-home services provided 18ms round-trip latency on average, while cable-based services averaged 26ms, and DSL-based services averaged 44ms. This compares to figures from the April 2012 testing period of 18ms for fiber, 26ms for cable and 43ms for DSL,” the FCC said.

Despite that latency problem, the FCC is optimistic about satellite’s potential.

Newer, higher-capacity satellites and technological improvements “have decreased latency and improved the quality of satellite broadband service available to subscribers,” the FCC said. “While latency for satellites necessarily remains much higher than for terrestrial services, with the improvements afforded by the new technology we find that it will support many types of popular broadband services and applications.”

With older satellite technology, latency could hit 1,000ms, the FCC said.

“Beginning in 2011, the consumer broadband satellite industry began launching a new generation of satellites to significantly improve overall performance,” the FCC said. “In October of that year ViaSat launched its ViaSat-1 satellite, which has an overall capacity of 140Gbps. In addition to increasing bandwidth capacity, ViaSat and other satellite industry operators have lowered overall latency by making improvements to other elements of their architecture, such as by dispensing with the need to request communication channel assignments, adopting advances in consumer satellite terminal equipment, incorporating protocol acceleration technology, and developing new error correction technology to provide resiliency to rain fade. Despite these many improvements, latency for this new generation [of] satellite-delivered broadband remains high.”

With the exception of satellite’s addition, nothing too drastic has changed since the last time we covered the FCC’s Measuring Broadband research in July 2012. In previous reports, satellite stats were released as part of the raw data but not actually included in the final reports, because the FCC “recognized that the industry was on the verge of a major transition.”