It’s not really oversold bandwidth. It’s just that the turnaround time for a bolus of data is too long for two-way video conferencing to be smooth or reliable. It’s like video conferencing using post cards :) -mel
On Apr 21, 2020, at 11:36 AM, Brian J. Murrell <brian@interlinx.bc.ca> wrote:
On Tue, 2020-04-21 at 11:11 -0700, Sabri Berisha wrote:
Hi,
Hi,
Where I worked, phy transmissions are scheduled based on tokens. A UT must have a token to transmit data. If there is no congestion, a token will be available and the UT or ground station may transmit. Congestion does not need to exist in the ground network or even the transponder. It can even be in the spectrum of that geographical area.
Interesting. So basically as Mel said, over-sold network. :-(
To overcome the latency,
Latency (AFAIU) is not really his primary issue. it's the lack of consistency in bandwidth. Periods of a second or two even where there is no transmission of anything at all followed by a second or two of transmission bursting even beyond his subscribed "rate". This effects his subscribed rate but in a really bad way for real-time traffic such as live/two-way video. He'd much, much more rather get a consistent pipe at his prescribed rate rather than an average of it over longer periods of time because then the codec would not have be encoding for those super bad periods of time where there are 1-2 seconds of no bandwidth at all.
Satellite is obviously not the optimal medium for video conferencing,
Indeed.
but I would recommend that your friend tries to ratelimit their transmissions.
He doesn't need to. The over-congested network is doing that for him. :-( In any case, I don't know that he has any way to put a rate limit on the tools he is using.
The reason why your latency is higher than you expect,
It actually isn't. It's nowhere near as high as I had come to (anecdotally -- I'd never had reason to do the math on the latency before now) believe it would be.
Fortunately he might be a candidate for Xplornet (or others') WISP services. Hopefully they are a bit more stable.
Cheers, b.