Technical Advice Wanted

Hello all.  I am in need of some technical advice.  I will be moving in the next few months to a rural area that does not have access to a cable or fiber internet provider so my options for internet are slim.  As of now I have a couple options: Satellite (Hughnet, DishNet, etc) or a different type all together through a company called Roadstat Internet.  Roadstar uses E-Band Millimeter Wave technology.  Not exactly sure what that mean but basically it needs a direct line of site with the radio tower and broadcasts the signal via radio waves I think.  It "utilizes 5.8 Mhz, 2.8 Mhz, and 900Mhz frequencies in the unlicensed spectrum." Again I am lost with that jargon so I am looking for advice.

The pros to Roadstar is that I am not capped on data usage, the down side is the it gets 1.5 Meg download speeds. (do they download speeds affect gaming other than downloading patches, is it the ping or latency I need to worry more about?)

The pros to Hughesnet satellite is that it has 15 Meg downloads but I am capped at 20 Gigs a month usage (only counts downloads as usage.)

I really am unsure if either is capable of gaming, the reviews I read when Googling the topic are so varied.  Does anyone else out there use either of these types of tech? Does anyone now what a typical hour of online game play uses data wise?  My wife also works from home so I need to know that it is ok for her uses, voice chat, massive amounts of emails, etc.  I know we have some very technical people in the family hopefully one of you could shed some light on this for me.

Okay I know for a fact 1.5M DL is not going to be an issue.  I usually wind up at 300K on my internet by the time it gets to my house even if my DSL supposedly can do 3M though my meter usually clocks out at 1.5 on a good burst.  I definitely have no issues with games due to this.  Most of my issues come with how fast your processor and graphics run along with RAM.  And I think the latency I get most times tends to be out on the internet or at the games end where more stuff may get bottlenecked rather than my final leg of the journey.

I think both will be impacted by heavy rain.  I know Hughsnet definitely is.  Also, snow makes a dish not work so well if you get enough of it.  We have a dish for TV since our company that gives phone/DSL/cable does not have the cable part out this far.  We had it buried once and one time it did not work becuase of how the snow stacked up on the antenna.  Not sure what is used for the Roadstar in order to connect with it.

I have no clue what the average game usage does to the DL totals, but you definitely should figure out what amount your wife needs for your job and then figure out where to go from there.  I do know as soon as you DL a new game you are going to definitely kill most if not all of your monthly in that DL.  Most don't stop you from doing so, but the charges for going over can be nasty based on your contract if set to a limit.  I know someone who had a limit on DL and had issues some how that made them need to DL a game twice in a month and the bill was not pretty.  So definitely figure how the cost of both and what Hughsnet does if you go over.

I am only on dsl as we don't have fibre yet, and 1.5mb dl is fine for my gaming. I have never used satellite except for tv and I know heavy rain affects my tv signal..but it has to be really really torrential downpours. (Happens about twice a year and usually comes back on fairly quickly).

I would be more worried about a 20gb cap ...I use 150gb on my own! (per month).

Check out some tech forums I reckon.  No point in comparing your service with mine as I live in a different country. But I can confirm the dl speed is not affecting my gaming.

OK, i found another solution which is Verizon HomeFusion.  Basically it is a 4g/LTE service for the home place.  It uses an antenna(which looks like a bucket) but it uses 4G service.  Download speeds and pings sound amazing.  Again it is also capped at 30G for their highest plan.  I looked at my family's monthly usage and we use are 40-50G of data a month.  Most of that is netflix stream which can use 2+ gigs for one movie or .5g for a 30 minute show off which my son watches a lot.  Sorry kid, time for you do explore more of outdoors....

If you can get LTE I'd go with that. It's actually faster than most cable/DSL options and it's only getting faster. That cap is going to suck; is it more economical to just buy two service plans or just pay for overage?

It would be cheaper if I go over to have two plans.  It is $10 per extra Gig.  I don;t know if they will let you do two plans though.  It is very frustrating to see a few companies control the market.  it is ridiculous that we should have to have caps or even if caps remained a lower price on the plan or high cap threshold.  But when you only have 2 or 3 large companies controlling the market on anything you end up with price gouging.