International Space Station Internet Too Slow for Games

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
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I suppose if I was on the International Space Station, I could find several other things to do rather than play video games on the internet….and it’s a good thing too. No real complaints from the astronauts on the slowness of the connection, just a casual observation. :D I really wonder who is the ISS ISP?

Hadfield noted that since the spacecraft travels at eight kilometers per second, the speed of the station's Internet connection is about the same as dial-up.
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All the more reason to build a space elevator... you can pull up a fiber optic cable with it and give them a nice connection :D
 
Dialup isn't too slow for games, most of us used dialup for a long long time.
 
I don't think the speed of the station has much to do with the speed of the connection. It's an infrastructure and routing thing. They could probably make it fast with money.

So, that's two things Space Internet and race cars have in common.
 
Used to play Team Fortress Classic on dialup back in the day. Wasn't that bad but once cable internet was available it was like night and day.
 
remember the old days of quake 3 with dial up.

you figure with $100 billion every year nasa would have some decent internet.
 
I used top play Heretic and a flight-sim over a dial-up modem. Played fine for the most part.
 
The biggest problem with providing a solid internet connection is that it is a moving target for both sides of the transmission. The area of focus for the dishes that would provide this connection is incredibly small in relative terms. I would presume to make up for the difficulties in continuously moving the antennas on ground (and there would have to be a large multitude of ground based antennas since the space station is in fixed orbit) they likely use lower gain antennas as a tradeoff. The lower gain antennas would reduce the practical transmission rates.

An alternative explanation for what Hadfield would experience with online gaming is just the hard limit of latency from the time it takes an RF signal to reach the space station. For example, making this post I am currently on Satellite based internet.

Minimum = 752ms, Maximum = 1113ms, Average = 926ms
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Given this information on a system where the data has to go from Earth, to space, then back to earth, (double the latency of the space station) I would assume that the average latency for them would be in the neighbourhood of 350-500ms, which, as nearly anyone would tell you is far too damn long to get any decent headshots :D

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Did a bit of googling, and the altitude of the ISS is ~400 km, which is only 1.33 ms away at the speed of light. This throws my latency assumptions out of whack, even if the internet uplinks are few and far away. Is there any alpha geeks here that can shed some light on this?
 
That should be fine for some old classics like Starcraft 1 or C&C Red Alert.
 
humm it might be a good idea to put interconnect platforms in space that way we could mesh network all the satellites in orbit independent of the ground then ground stations all over the world would connect to geo synchronous interconnects... each interconnect then connects all within range to both the ground and to the communications network they could put weaker broadcast antenna on smaller satellites while maintaining a better connection with the ground at all times...
 
Considering that they are forced to use ancient computing hardware that has been "ruggedized" for space and radiation exposure, I doubt it's powerful enough to play any games anyway.
 
Meh, I've played modern MMO on internet no faster then dial-up! If you need your fix, then you need your fix.
 
GotNoRice said:
Considering that they are forced to use ancient computing hardware that has been "ruggedized" for space and radiation exposure, I doubt it's powerful enough to play any games anyway.
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They use commercial, off the shelf Thinkpads. T61 is the latest model up there, I believe.

Not ruggedized, but sure as heck not gonna play any games.

300px-Thinkpad-on-ISS-400px-TORU_docking_system.jpg
 
Why dont they take a nice gaming desktop with Dual GTX590's a i7 2600k, 16gb DDR3 1600, 1tb SSD and a 6tb Raid 1+0 lol.
 
Ya I'm going to say this is an infrastructure issue some than anything else. I've seen them do video from it. NTSC video is 6MHz, that is enough for 30-40ish mbps of network.
 
hoeding said:
Did a bit of googling, and the altitude of the ISS is ~400 km, which is only 1.33 ms away at the speed of light. This throws my latency assumptions out of whack, even if the internet uplinks are few and far away. Is there any alpha geeks here that can shed some light on this?
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I assume the same can be said for call towers and your cell phone. You dont get instant pings with your cell phone even though you're a fraction of the distance from it than the ISS is from earth.
 
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