Quote:
Originally Posted by pmulcahy11b
On a different but related track, a recent PCWorld report says that Internet speeds to Earth are only about the same as dial-up speeds here on Earth. That's something they're working on to speed up; It will be essential before you can have a large civilian presence in Earth orbit. The problem is that the ISS is moving, the Earth is moving, and the ISS constantly has to change tracking stations while it orbits. Those tracking stations weren't designed for Internet traffic.
Beyond Earth orbit, forget it. The time lag will be to great, even from high Earth orbit to the ground, to play games like Warcraft or something like that. And of course, civilians will be upset about that...
A Canadian astronaut has already tried to play Warcraft from the ISS on his day off and found out the slow internet connection stopped him from effectively doing that.
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You also have to compensate for the Doppler effect too, which I'm sure would affect internet speeds. As the space station approached you, their radio would be slightly higher in frequency and as they retreat, it goes lower in frequency, you have to compensate for that, either by manually tuning or some sort of automatic frequency control like mane FM radios have. Maybe if you had a wider bandwidth to your signal, you might get a higher speed, I don't know.
I think in a hypothetical situation, a person on Mars cannot play a real time game with someone on Earth, even Earth to Moon would be tough. You might have to have a duplicate server systems on Mars for things like Wikipedia and so on that are updated between the Earth and Mars every night or two, much like the old Fidonet system. So you would need a mirror system on Mars and one on Earth and they would keep on synchronizing as they update.
For Earth to Moon, you might not be able to game in real time but you should be able to surf with a second delay or so. At least you can still surf for porn.
