Bitcoin Forum

I am considering getting Hughesnet Gen5 - It is supposed to have very good speed, but I don't know if it would be problematic in terms of latency issues, stability, etc. Right now our DSL service has literally become unusable - consistent 0.03Mb (yep that is correct 0.03!!!!) So, I switched to cellular data - put in a cellular router and feed everything in the house. It works pretty well - but is expensive and limiting. Hughesnet should be faster and we'd have much better overall data use - just not sure how the mining will be affected. I have an Antminer S9 on the way.

Any advice - especially personal experience with using Hughesnet to mine would be great!

I never used Hughesnet, but I mined on an Exceed sat connection for about 2 years which should be pretty much the same story.

Occasional outages during stormy weather or heavy rain (but LESS than expected), speed and usage cap were way overkill for JUST mining, latency around 700ms all the time cost perhaps 1% on extra stale shares over a DSL/CableModem type fast connection.

Thanks - That's what I was after. I will look into their latency time to see how it compares. Their Gen5 is supposed to be a 25Mb connection - I'm sure that varies per location. But I don't know how much that would affect latency - I'd like to expect with new hardware and this speed that it would be better than 700ms, but surely would be worse than wired connections.

Thanks!

The latency is UNAVOIDABLE due to the distance from geosynch where the sat is at to ground.

 It has nothing to do with the hardware, it has to do with the speed of light taking time to get the signal from you TO the sat, back to ground, to the server, back FROM the server, back TO the sat, back to you - even if you were on the equator directly under the sat the "speed of light latency" would be a hair less than 500 ms JUST for signal transit time, it gets longer as you move away from "directly under the sat" because the distance gets longer - THEN you get to add "normal Internet Lag" on top of that.

Ok, I didn't know the latency minimum from ground to sat. New hardware can affect latency if the old systems were slow and/or overloaded compared to new equipment, but like you said, if 500ms is their (min) just for ground to sat signal travel time - reducing from 600-700ms is not likely in any significant amount.

I have read about some people getting long latency times with Hughesnet - even on Gen5 of 2000ms+ - Would that much latency be an issue for the bitcoin miners? I am network savvy, but I am not bitcoin protocol savvy yet. I would be running in a pool - probably to start with Slushpool. Any thoughts on that?

I went ahead and set up an install for next Friday of Hughesnet Gen5 - but if there are max latency or packet loss numbers I should be watching for, I'd appreciate that information. I'm thinking that latency of a second or two would not really matter - but I'm just not sure how responsive the protocol and/or the pool's hardware/software configs are to know if that's true. And about packet loss - I obviously don't want any or very very little, but is there a point where it would become a problem for mining?

Thanks!

2000ms would probably drive you up a percent or so on stale shares - depends on what your're mining, something with faster blocks like Litecoin will be more affected by latency than something like Bitcoin would be.