Anyone use MSFS20 over satellite Internet with 50-150Mb/sec and 20-40ns lag? I am buying some property way out in the sticks of Florida and there is no copper based cable Internet offered in the area.
So I am going to try out Starlink.com. Thoughts…
Theoretically, most of your traffic is streaming in to you, so that latency shouldn’t have any real noticeable effect on you as long as your overall speed is good.
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Thanks. That’s good to hear.
Sorry if this doesn’t answer your question directly but I thought I should share my experience with satellite, with the hope that it helps you make an informed decision.
I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with a couple of satellite providers for the company I used to work
for and I will tell you a few things.
First, read you contract carefully before signing. In my experience, I never saw the service come even close to the speeds they advertised. In fact, in my experience, DSL was faster. Bandwidth was throttled during peak times. Also, there were data cap limits imposed during peak times and hefty penalties for exceeding that cap. Running something as simple as a credit card transaction took at least 30 seconds to a minute, which is an eternity for a mid to high volume retail store.
After dealing with all that, I told the CTO of my company that we should never open a retail location where satellite was the only choice.
Keep in mind this is solely my experience in the south eastern part of the US. And this was also about 6 years ago. The technology may have evolved since then. So take all this with a grain of salt.
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Do you have the option for DSL?
Sattelite is weather dependent. So if it snows and you have snow on the dish, your internet won’t be great. If it’s overcast, won’t be great. If it’s raining, won’t be great. If you’re in the woods, won’t be great.
Starlink makes alot of promises, I’m not sure how realistic a 20ms ping is, especially considering the distance that signal has to travel. 20ms is what I get at the Cable at my office, and my DSL at home gets about 10-15ms ping at 8 down, 1 up..
I will say this… My 8Mbps DSL at home might take 4 days to install FS2020, but generally doesn’t have a problem with photogrammetry, and I play alot of FPS’s online like CSGO, Titanfall 2, Apex, and the consistently low ping for that stuff I think is more important than sustained transfer speeds. Works great for zoom calls too.
Keep in mind this isn’t your typical “legacy” satellite providers. Those were painfully slow, terribly expensive, and not very reliable. This is SpaceX’s new Starlink service.
So far, Starlink has been getting some pretty positive reviews in terms of performance, being compared to cable internet more than what you’d normally expect from a more traditional satellite provider.
I have no experience with it personally, but a friend who lives out in the middle of nowhere and had horrid “other” sat service raves about it being awesome.
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Legacy satellite talks to satellites over 35,000km from the surface of the Earth up in geostationary orbit. Each provider has a small number of satellites and the speed of light delay alone results in pings over 500ms. Also the providers are pretty shady, and data transfer caps have to be really low because there aren’t a lot of beams to serve all the customers. Legacy satellite is terrible and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.
Starlink has 1000+ satellites at ~500km, the latency is way lower. There is currently no data caps. There is no contract for a fixed duration. It’s a totally different beast.
I’d check out the Starlink subreddit to get real users experience. You may wait a while to get setup, there is huge demand. From what I have read on the subreddit recently, depending on location there may be short outages of a few seconds every hour and some longer “beta update” periods of 10s of minutes a couple times a day.
If there is a TMobile 4G tower nearby TMobile now has a $50/month unlimited data transfer Home Internet service that uses their 4G and 5G towers. It might be good to weigh this against Starlink. There are videos reviews of this service from 4 or 5 people on YouTube. TMobile tracks how many people near each tower they have sold this service to to avoid overloading the towers. 8 years ago when I was stuck with legacy satellite with a 425MB/day (yes!!!) data cap, it was Verizon building a 4G tower near me that saved me. Back then I had to create my own homemade setup with a portable hotspot but the TMobile solution is way nicer.
Wow… Thanks for the replies. I am not sure how the signal is for Verizon in the area yet. Does anyone know if there is a site I can check for Verizon’s coverage in Florida?
I would not recommend a Verizon based solution, since all of them have data caps. The TMobile service has unlimited data transfer.
You can put in an address and confirm service there.
Watch this YouTube episode by Linus. If you aren’t familiar with him he’s a top notch computer tech and gaming nerd and highly respected in computer gaming industry.
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You’ll be fine 
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