WiFi upload speeds are consistently slow

[AZgl1800]

ViaSat is offering me Unlimited Data use, as long as, it is not consumed during the heavy night prime time hours....

I specifically asked the rep about my daughter watching NetFlix at night after midnight, and he said that would not apply to the data cap.

VnStat is showing that my own laptop is is running

$ vnstat

rx / tx / total / estimated
wlp3s0f0:
Oct '18 29.69 GiB / 1.53 GiB / 31.22 GiB
Nov '18 18.96 GiB / 1.43 GiB / 20.39 GiB / 34.49 GiB
yesterday 2.93 GiB / 133.01 MiB / 3.06 GiB
today 521.96 MiB / 41.33 MiB / 563.30 MiB / 811 MiB

[AZgl1800]

I've not only been stuck on satellite internet,but for years use to install them. What limit is excede offering you. As generally its like 30gBs max anyways =(. I guess maybe they have upped them sense I last looked. Generally anymore their are internet services where you point an AP to a tower to get internet, but of course not available everywhere sadly =(.

We have a local Tower Service Provider that just this week came out offering 50 mB unlimited downloads in "selected spots" in town.....

my ViaSat rep is friends with them, and he said that "spots" are very selected, like just towards one of the churches we have in our community. so, if you are within the beam width of that antenna, you can get on that plan.

I am going to call them tomorrow and see what they can do for me...
as of last month, they were only offering 5 gB download rates and customers are posting on Facebook that their service is awful.

I can say one thing for ViaSat, so far, there has NOT been a single outage period in the last 3 days of testing with it.

[silvatech]

I've not only been stuck on satellite internet,but for years use to install them. What limit is excede offering you. As generally its like 30gBs max anyways =(. I guess maybe they have upped them sense I last looked. Generally anymore their are internet services where you point an AP to a tower to get internet, but of course not available everywhere sadly =(.

We have a local Tower Service Provider that just this week came out offering 50 mB unlimited downloads in "selected spots" in town.....

my ViaSat rep is friends with them, and he said that "spots" are very selected, like just towards one of the churches we have in our community. so, if you are within the beam width of that antenna, you can get on that plan.

I am going to call them tomorrow and see what they can do for me...
as of last month, they were only offering 5 gB download rates and customers are posting on Facebook that their service is awful.

I can say one thing for ViaSat, so far, there has NOT been a single outage period in the last 3 days of testing with it.

Keep in mind to they can technically if someone else can get the signal that is in your site. Bounce the signal from that house to yours. Might have to though work out something with the guy your bouncing off of though.

Satellite internet generally stays up fine. Its just the slow upload, latency and limits to downloads permonth that stink.

[AZgl1800]

yeah,
even though the "special speedtest app" can show rates of 35 down, and 5.5 up,
that is not valid in the "real world" with PCs and browsers. just does not work out that way.

I told the ViaSat app, that he needs to stop bragging on the satellite's speed with that app, as it is accurate for the "real world" and he will have a lot of customers mad at him.

I did a test earlier with a 25mb video upload to youtube, it took 5 minutes to finish, and that is only a few minutes worth of video.... so uploading a real movie of 30 minutes is just not workable even on the satellite service.

I just now tried to run the Google Speed Test, and it logged 20.9 mB down, but it crashed doing the Upload..... at 18:50 hours during the rush hour bandwidth crunch.... folks are getting home, and firing up their PCs...

as of right now, I don't know what we are going to do....
have to talk to Atlas Communications tomorrow and grill them hard about that new service they are offering, and at what cost.

just gave Google a 2nd try, it made it this time....

Google at 1856 hours.png

[AZgl1800]

just had a discussion with the local Radio ISP provider, Atlas Broadband...

they told me that I can get 50mbps Unlimited data/month for $99.95
and he guarantees that the speed will NOT drop off in prime time evenings.
he says that we will have 15mbps upload speeds.

told him to set up a site survey to make sure that we are in range of their radio tower.....
he feels that we are from experience, but they have to make sure.


I called US Cellular, Sprint, an T-Mobile.....
everyone of them caps the data at 30 gB/month and then slows you down to about 2.5 mbps for the rest of that month. and that is for Cellphone data, not a Hotspot WiFi for all of the PCs and the Smart TV. Everyone of them caps the MiFi device at 15gb/month.... what a joke.

none of them will give me unlimited DATA on the WiFi device, except for Verizon at $700/month...

that is simply Unacceptable to us.... my daughter watches Netflix all day long, it is running in the background nearly half the day..... I'm not much of a TV geek, l like NCIS, FBI, Forensic Files, and that is about it....


So, the drama continues....

the ViaSat is going to disappear late this evening, I have had it for free to test it out for 5 days.
it is not a bad service, but the 650-690 mS Latency is a killer for me. ( I'm one of those folks who demands "right now" click and its' there on the screen..... got spoiled by Cox Cable in Arizona 10 years ago with 50mbps even back then.

[AZgl1800]

just had a discussion with the local Radio ISP provider, Atlas Broadband...

they told me that I can get 50mbps Unlimited data/month for $99.95
and he guarantees that the speed will NOT drop off in prime time evenings.
he says that we will have 15mbps upload speeds.

told him to set up a site survey to make sure that we are in range of their radio tower.....
he feels that we are from experience, but they have to make sure.

AT&T DSL today, had 5 outages, and they are always 2:10 to 2:15 in length....
very irritating, on one occasion I had just hit SUBMIT and the monitor blared out "no service".

The Atlas Broadband guy came out today and did the site survey, to get line of sight to their transmitting tower, requires a Radio Tower Pole, concrete to hold it solid. then the $$$ started adding up.

Mid America Rentals, trencher
$125.00 for 4 hours. for trencher
$100 install
$100 antenna pole to contractor
plus $100/month standard “install fee”

or I let them trench it for $2.50 per foot, at 150 feet… $300 for that? ugh.

Bottom line, I opted to go with ViaSat....
and lucky me, the Test Station stuff is still setting on the ground

Called the rep up, and he is bring me out a modem to plug in, and I will be back in business.
the ~650mS Latency is just something that we will get used to, and not worry about it.

He will come do the Permanent Install some time next week when the sun is shining.

the upside is that for the 6 days that ViaSat was working for me, UptimeNetMonitor did not record a single outage.

so, closing my little thread, and thanks to all who helped out.

[AndyMH]

Assume you quizzed him on a proxy server and got a nil result. Best of luck, I never got used to the latency, particularly on those sites that then pull info from lots of other sites. You should be fine with streaming netflix, etc.

[AZgl1800]

Assume you quizzed him on a proxy server and got a nil result. Best of luck, I never got used to the latency, particularly on those sites that then pull info from lots of other sites. You should be fine with streaming netflix, etc.

the only site that was really noticiable on the "lots of other sites" was Amazon.com, we have a Kindle account and the very first time, I had Firefox Network monitor turned on, and was watching to see how much was pulled down. that first time did have a more noticiable delay, but later requests were more normal and the Network Monitor was not scrolling so much data anymore.... Firefox had cached most of the other links.

Proxy server.... the rep has not arrived yet this evening, will be sure to ask him about that.... although, he is not a Techy type person, and has to relay a lot of my questions to upstairs folks.

He told me that the ViaSat in orbit servers download more info to buffer up future requests. so they don't have to send a repeat query to their ground station.

I have noticed that on some of my surfing, that I get a page displayed back on screen in less than 1.5 seconds....

I feel so far, with the 5 plus days of using it, that it will be okay.
I will follow up over a week or so with more experiences with it.

[AZgl1800]

Matt, the rep came out tonight, installed the new modem and "married it" to the dish electronics.
that was a very tedious mess, miss a step, and you have to start all over.
but it works.

here is the Speedtest App on Win7

ViaSat Speedtest App.png

and the Google Speed Test on Firefox

Google Speedtest.png

and the pings to 8.8.8.8

Ping 8888.png

I'm satisfied for now.... will check back in a week or two.

the Proxy server?
Matt said that he does not think there is one on Via Sat, but he is going to quiz the IT folks at corporate.

[AndyMH]

ViaSat in orbit servers download more info to buffer up future requests

That's what I was thinking, but hoping they'd be doing it on the ground at the other end of the link.

[AZgl1800]

ViaSat in orbit servers download more info to buffer up future requests

That's what I was thinking, but hoping they'd be doing it on the ground at the other end of the link.

but, IMO, they are doing it right, by buffering the full web request at the satellite itself.
that drops 1/2 of the round trip equation immediately, as the satellite itself parses my new update request....

that seems to be what is happening on some of my surfing results.
I click on a page..... then later on the same page, I follow a link,
and then that new request is on my screen in <1.5 seconds....
that is half the normal turn around time.

at the moment, I am just happy to have a solid surfing experience, that is dependable w/o dropouts.

oh, I asked about beam coverage..... he said that the satellite has several different beam antennas on it, and that the beam I am using is restricted to Joplin, MO going north, to Muskogee, OK going south.
Circular wise, it is about a 200 mile circle, instead of just being one user trying to get a response on a beam that is covering the entire CONUS.

he also told me, that ViaSat has a schedule setup for midnight to 5 a.m. heavy users, they unleash the speeds to the limit for the plan that you are on... so if I need to upload videos to YouTube, schedule them after midnight to 5 a.m.

here is a speed test that I did at 2 a.m. this morning

Speedtest 2AM.jpeg

[AZgl1800]

just had this happen.

I refreshed the 'new posts' and that took about 3 seconds to display.

I read down the list on page 1, didn't see one that I wanted to read,
so then I clicked on the 'page 2' button and that result came back in 1 second...

I counted "one thousand and" and there it was on screen.

so the sat itself is buffering a request for future possible requests off the same page.
it has to be one smart algorithm to know to only buffer up the 'new page' links and not the threads themselves.

[AndyMH]

Sounds like you are sorted

You are now getting better speeds than I do with FTTC (fibre to cabinet, where the cabinet is more than 1/2 mile away = rural village). 30-35M down and 5M up, but of course latency measured in a few ms. From the general chat on this post, does sound as tho' internet is a lot more expensive in the US than the UK, I'm paying about £35/month inc. land line and it is unlimited.

[AZgl1800]

I have observed that in the UK, there is a more reasonable fee schedule for Internet service.

during the Prime Time, which adds up to a lot of Network Congestion,
the speeds slow down to the mid to lower 20mbps...

but contrast that to the lousy DSL service we have been using for 10 years now,
as it "at the time" I signed up for it, it was the ONLY game in town.....
promised speeds of 10mbps and 1.0 uploads....

the "real world" results were 2.5-5 down, and 0.200mbps uploads.

then add to that, the dropouts of which the UptimeNetworkMonitor program logged 27 of them last Sunday... in a 14 hour period.

at least now, we have a solid experience that is predictable as to how it will perform.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me out on this thread....
I have enjoyed learning from everyone as to what your experiences are.

[all41]

I have observed that in the UK, there is a more reasonable fee schedule for Internet service.

during the Prime Time, which adds up to a lot of Network Congestion,
the speeds slow down to the mid to lower 20mbps...

but contrast that to the lousy DSL service we have been using for 10 years now,
as it "at the time" I signed up for it, it was the ONLY game in town.....
promised speeds of 10mbps and 1.0 uploads....

the "real world" results were 2.5-5 down, and 0.200mbps uploads.

then add to that, the dropouts of which the UptimeNetworkMonitor program logged 27 of them last Sunday... in a 14 hour period.

at least now, we have a solid experience that is predictable as to how it will perform.
So what kind of plan did you settle on? You said you have unlimited wee hours, but outside of that what is your data limit?

Thanks to everyone who has helped me out on this thread....
I have enjoyed learning from everyone as to what your experiences are.

[AZgl1800]

at least now, we have a solid experience that is predictable as to how it will perform.
So what kind of plan did you settle on? You said you have unlimited wee hours, but outside of that what is your data limit?

on my 2nd day of the official ViaSat, for starters, I have chosen the Bronze Plan which is the lowest cost option they offer.

for normal surfing it is "good enough", uploads are fairly decent most of the time.
but, trying to watch NetFlix on our Smart TV last night was not so pleasant, the Bronze Plan throttles the download for video to 360p.

in order to halfway enjoy the movie, we had to Pause the video and allow the TV to buffer up a bit of the movie...... seemed like we needed to do that about every 20 minutes.... didn't put a stop watch on it.

we are going to use it as it is for a few days.... the next step up in Video resolution is 480p which will cost an additional $30/month...

Talked with my daughter this evening about that, and she is the main NetFlix viewer, and when she does, it is on her Kindle Fire which is about 360p anyway. so, she thinks we should just try it out for a while and see if " I am happy " with my surfing....

as bad as our DSL is now, when it is working, it is more than fast enough for full HD on NetFlix... it runs at 11 Mbps nearly all the time.... but..... we have been experiencing outages of 20-30 times a day....
and when I complain, they change a modem and call it good.... and it is not fixed.

I just got pissed and said "enough" and started looking for a better provider....
the best provider here is Atlas Broadband which can provide me with 50 Mbps at $99/month.
that is a decent price for a rural area....
but, the downside for me, is that the "line of sight" requirement means that the antenna will have to be installed on a tower about 250 feet west of our home...... that ups the install price to $500 up front.

I had to think on that pretty hard, and decided to go with ViaSat with free install, and $80/month for 25Mbps but only 360p video....

ViaSat can provide 100 Mbps, but for $200/month, that is not something I will do, as it will quickly eat up the Upfront costs of going with Atlas Broadband.

all of them are Unlimited Data.....
ViaSat just slows you down once you reach a certain data cap, during " Network Congestion periods ".
meaning more folks on than the sat can support....

the sat download speed is opened up from Midnight to 5 a.m. without any download cap....

the final vote is not in, it is going to take me a while to decide what I really want....

as for that, Absolute Full time service w/o any interruptions is #1... and so far, ViaSat is able to do that.