Why does Viasat Internet Service perform slowly?
To those subscribed to Viasat satellite internet, the most common question one might ask is, “Why is my Viasat internet so slow?” There are several reasons why Viasat’s internet speeds are slow or significantly reduced during certain peak bandwidth usage.
Latency Issues
Latency perhaps is one of the primary reasons that has been attributed to slow internet speeds on Viasat. Viasat satellites offer service beyond the geographical orbit of 22,236 miles above the Earth’s surface. So when your browser opens to load a particular site, the request takes a round trip from your home to the satellite. This incurs a lot more latency compared to cable or fiber internet service providers, who can forward information directly. These additional transmission delays can have a huge impact on the loading time of the pages and will highly affect applications that require real-time rendering.
Network Congestion
This comes from the fact that Viasat can serve many customers in a given geographic area with bandwidth from only one or two satellites orbiting above. Hence, if many people are logged in at certain times, say during early evenings, the network can easily be jammed. It reached a point where, if the networks are busy, one can barely surf the internet. Viasat does limit the amount of data each customer uses to avoid congestion, but this same measure makes the situation worse for households that have used up their allowance early in the month.
Inclement Weather
Sometimes, due to a technical issue like heavy rains or snow, the satellite signals might get compromised, causing a momentary slowdown on the internet. Such weather-related issues naturally occur more frequently with satellite internet than with wired internet services. Thus, if you have storms near your locality, they can contribute to Viasat speed problems.
What Can Be Done?
If you're consistently dealing with slower than advertised Viasat speeds, there are a couple of steps you can take in an attempt to troubleshoot or improve performance: If you're consistently dealing with slower than advertised Viasat speeds, there are a couple of steps you can take in an attempt to troubleshoot or improve performance:
1. Contact Viasat customer support. As they are IT experts, there must be some technical hitch that you are facing in terms of connectivity that they might help you fix.
2. This may require you to transition to a better Viasat plan. The unlimited, higher-tier plans give the customer enhanced speeds and larger allowances that could reduce congestion problems.
3. Limit your internet usage during certain times of the day or week, or explain when they will be able to get online more easily and expect faster downloads from their neighbors during peak usage hours.
Yes, satellite internet inherently has some latency and consistency issues, but in most cases, if you work with Viasat support, change the plan, or try to change your usage pattern, sometimes you can get better speeds. If Viasat consistently fails to provide the advertised speed after each troubleshooting, they need to seek out other internet service providers within their region.