How Bad is Satellite Internet Speed for Gaming

Satellite internet sounds a lot faster than it actually is. I would put it somewhere between dial up and cable. Which sounds promising when it comes to gaming. However, as someone who loves gaming and used satellite internet I have a bit to say about it.

Where I lived there were two options for internet: satellite internet or dial up. So satellite was sort of an upgrade from dial up. Sort of. Because while it was faster in some ways, it was worse in others.

In terms of speed, satellite internet is faster than dial up. However, the advertised speed equated to faster download speeds, not gaming experience. In terms of latency, satellite internet wasn’t much better than dial up.

Bandwidth matters for gaming to a point. 56k sucks. 8 MB or more is fine for most games. Latency, aka ping times is crucial for most games. The lower the better, but 50-100 ms is acceptable. While some satellite internet providers are capable of those ping times, they are not consistently at those ping times.

I found satellite internet throughput fluctuates, making for a terrible gaming experience.

Similar to satellite TV, satellite internet works by sending a signal between a satellite orbiting the earth and a dish outside your house. The connection starts at your computer and goes through a modem connected to your satellite dish. A satellite in orbit sends and receives signals to both your dish and the internet service provider.

Satellite internet is most similar to wireless, only the wireless signal for satellite internet is capable of going for much longer distances.

Instead of local towers sending and receiving wireless signals, the “tower” is in outer space. Which is why it requires a large satellite dish instead of a small, built in antenna in your phone.

The hardware required for satellite internet is:

• Satellite dish
• Modem
• Cables connecting the dish to the modem and the modem to your computer (or wireless router).

Whether it’s Starlink, HughesNet, or Viasat they all require a dish, modem, and their connecting cables. The primary difference between the three providers is HughesNet and Viasat use high earth orbit satellites whereas Starlink uses low earth orbit satellites.

Satellites orbiting at 22,000 miles produces prohibitively high latency (500 ms+), eliminating any possibility of gaming, except maybe card games. While satellites orbiting at roughly 340 miles produces somewhat normal ping times (50-200 ms). It still makes for a less than ideal gaming experience.

While satellite internet providers boast about their download speeds, what they fail to mention is latency. Gaming relies as much on latency as bandwidth. Most games aren’t sending massive amounts of data over the internet. Instead they rely on speed.

The best gaming experiences I ever had were with cable. My download speeds were a paltry 8 mb/s but my latency was always less than 80 ms. Even dial up provided a satisfactory gaming experience back in the day.

In my experience, ping times for dial up, cable, and DSL stay consistent. While they rise and fall during times of peak usage, lag spikes are rare for dial up, cable, or DSL. I’ve found ping times are extremely inconsistent with satellite internet.

My experience with satellite internet felt more like fast dial up for gaming and browsing. Web pages weren’t as snappy or responsive. On the other hand, when it came time to download large files satellite internet felt more like cable or DSL. For example, satellite internet could download a 750 MB file in about 20 minutes. Dial up would take over 8 hours to download that much data.

Where I lived the only options were dial up or satellite internet. Dial up hasn’t been up to the task of gaming since the early 2000’s. Satellite internet offered some hope but at the end of the day it just lagged so horribly I gave up on most games.

Eventually, cellular service became available in my area. It actually worked better than satellite internet. Much more consistent ping times and better bandwidth.

Cable, fiber, 4G wireless, and DSL are much better options if available. There’s hardly any comparison to satellite internet, those options have better latency and offer more bandwidth.

The biggest advantage of satellite internet is it’s availability. In some cases it’s satellite internet or nothing. Satellite internet is great when your only option is dial up.

You can stream services through satellite internet. There is more buffering or lag than other internet services. But it does work.

It also offers faster download speeds than dial up. Meaning you don’t have to take all night to download huge files.

The main drawback to satellite internet is cost. The cost of the equipment is much more than cable or DSL. The monthly fees are also much more than cable or DSL.

For all that money, satellite internet isn’t great for gaming. Any game where lag is crucial is not going to work well with satellite internet.

Some games are better than others. For example, most first person shooters are out. However, Mario Kart did okay. Certain games handle lag spikes better than others. Starcraft pops up with a lag timer giving one player time to catch up with the others.

Another drawback is satellite internet is affected by the weather. Light rain or partly cloudy days didn’t do much. However, on extremely cloudy or stormy days it completely went out for hours at a time.

I was surprised by how even high gusts of wind caused buffering while streaming. It goes without saying how this ruined any gaming experience. But lag spikes were common during any gaming session.

My advice is to avoid satellite internet for gaming. If it’s your only option for internet, then Starlink is better than HughesNet, or Viasat. However, it isn’t going to work for every game.

Expect to pay a lot for the equipment and monthly fee’s. Don’t expect a good gaming experience. Yet, at the end of the day, satellite internet is better than no internet.