Question I posed to Starband: I am interested in your Starband product. My primary application will be for day trading. I need to know all aspects about the reliability of this service since I will be receiving streaming real-time data. I am not able to tolerate service interruptions or delays in data of even a few seconds. A few seconds of delay, or interrupted service could cost me thousands. Please respond as to the suitability of your product. Answer I received: Starband is not recommended for realtime applications or day trading. As a result, these software packages cannot take advantage of these enhancements which are designed to compensate for the delays caused by the 44,000+ miles round trip for the signals. Without this acceleration, many of these packages will either work very slowly or sometimes not at all due to timing issues. What did they Say? I guess I'm stuck with a lousy dial up. It sure is nice living in the middle of PA surrounded by trees and animals, just no decent ISPs.
I guess they're saying that there is so much latency in their system that it wouldn't be really be appropriate for something like real-time trading where you need up-to-the-second info on a continual basis. If you were downloading a big file from the net, that couple seconds of initial delay before the download begins wouldn't be any big deal, so starband would be ok for something like that. I'm not sure what they are talking about when they say "enhancements" though.
Shorty, I know a lot of people using Starband or DirectPc, it has problems, but it is far better solution than you have.
Hi guys... I have and use Starband... I don't have time to give your questions the reply they deserve...market opens in a few minutes...just do a search for "Starband" and you pull up most of my observations and complaints. If you need more info than that, just ask. Great trading! Jim B.
A satlink isn't especially well suited for REAL realtime two-way computer-computer interaction, VoiceOverIP, etc. due to the 1/2 second or so bidirectional latency. But for a basically one-way data stream application it shouldn't be a big problem. You'll just have to recognize that the dataflow will probably be about 1/4 second or so delayed than if you received it via ISDN/DSL/etc.