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My brother has been using sat for internet 3 hours from nearest paved road for last year or so. It works great! I took a grandstream budget-tone(preconfigured to connect to my asterisk server) with me last summer when I went down there to visit. It blew them away when I called time and temperature at a local bank and the audio was crystal clear. They laughed at me when I tried to call my wife and all she heard was strange noises-lol Oddly enough we could hear her fine. Very weird to hear a perfectly clear voice that far out in the middle of no where. The radio phone going to a little town 80km away sounds ok, but you can tell its over a radio.

My brother has started using skype and its bearable. You almost have to say over at the end of each sentence.

I set up a wrt54g running http://www.openwrt.org/ and it acts as a little ap there for them. The really cool thing is, I left it running openvpn, so when ever they fire up the generator it will connect up to my server. I thought using putty over a dial up was bad, this is around 800ms-1000ms, still very cool to be able to ssh into a router in the middle of the amazon. Ya, I know I'm a nerd....

the only bummer about the sat service is you have to use a windows pc for the connector. It has some client software that runs to connect it..

here's their website if anyone know someone that needs internet in south america for $65 a month

http://www.gilat.com/

How about Gilat satellite? They offer speeds up to 3 megabits.

Starband is offering high latency, high bandwidth 2-way satellite access, and a bird should be in geosynch over europe fairly soon. This means no modem connection, true 2-way to satellite communication.

The problem is that all packets have to travel 44,600 miles one way. At 186,000 miles/sec that means a .24 second delay one way, and a half second is added to any ping.

Internet gaming is out, but e-mail and surfing will rock.

I spent a couple of hours on the phone with a very clueful guy who runs their tech support. He said that they dont mind linux (he runs it himself) or server hosting. The upstream bandwidth is limited to about 50K, and a popular server would probably be frowned upon, but a personal website wouldn't be any problem.

Also, since this is mostly owned by Gilat (an Israeli company) there should be European coverage pretty quickly. According to my source, Gilat has planned on 3,000,000 people in the US using the service.

Anyway, there are 3 options.

1. Microsoft + Radio Shack (yeah, right)

1. Dish Networks ($100 for 150 channels + net)

1. Starband alone

Starband is offering high latency, high bandwidth 2-way satellite access, and a bird should be in geosynch over europe fairly soon. This means no modem connection, true 2-way to satellite communication.

The problem is that all packets have to travel 44,600 miles one way. At 186,000 miles/sec that means a .24 second delay one way, and a half second is added to any ping.

Internet gaming is out, but e-mail and surfing will rock.

I spent a couple of hours on the phone with a very clueful guy who runs their tech support. He said that they dont mind linux (he runs it himself) or server hosting. The upstream bandwidth is limited to about 50K, and a popular server would probably be frowned upon, but a personal website wouldn't be any problem.

Also, since this is mostly owned by Gilat (an Israeli company) there should be European coverage pretty quickly. According to my source, Gilat has planned on 3,000,000 people in the US using the service.

Anyway, there are 3 options.

1. Microsoft + Radio Shack (yeah, right)

1. Dish Networks ($100 for 150 channels + net)

1. Starband alone

Unless I am mistaken the hardware StarBand uses is made by a company called Gilat They are funded by Microsoft and when I was seeking docs from them to write a driver they told me that company policy is unfriendly to anything non-Windows. Now this is all assuming that it is running on the Gilat hardware. I hope it isn't.

Try Gilat. Depending on where exactly these remote sites are, they may be able to use these guys. Gilat also just signed a deal with Dish Network awhile back to provide 2-way satellite internet for users, no dialing up with a phone line anymore.

Dish Network had a demo at the MN state fair this year. The guy was really hyping it up. I played around with it a little, I couldn't get anymore than what a 33.6 modem would get, and latency to the gateway was ~750ms. I don't know if the gateway was the satellite, or a ground station. The satellite is 22,000 miles above the equator, hence the high latency.

If a Gilat dish would work for you, you could just do a tunnel with ipsec over it to connect it to the other offices.

For short messages, Orbcomm is pretty popular, but it's strictly an email message type of service. You can use it for short messages from things like pumps and other SCADA systems.

You probably already know that GlobalStar is about the only game in town for satellite phones, now that Iridium bit the dust. I wouldn't hang my hopes on them, it looks like they are having the same sort of problems that Iridium had.

Finally, the global WAN provider with about the best international coverage has got to be Equant. They seem to be able to get just about anywhere.

Have fun. Once you relax, international networking to remote locations can be a hoot.

The 2-way satellite connection is provided by Gilat-To-Home a digision of Gilat which has been used by companies for a while now. The dish has to be professionally installed to make sure you dont accidentally transmit at a military satellite or something. To alleviate the problem of rain fade common in DTHTV signals, the receiver will step down its reception speed to verify all incoming packets. The advertized speeds are minimumn upload of 128kbps, nominal 384kbps and maximum burstable download speed of 1.5Mbps.

Note: I'm not the orig. poster, but a little web surfing found these links that are probably what he or she was refering to:

gilat is gilat.com

and isky is isky.net.

I hope these are what the orig. poster inteded, but to help you out here I can tell you that isky is has no price on the site stating, "Exact pricing will be finalized nearer to our late 2001 service launch," but they have all sorts of neat info on their satilite locations in the sky so you'll know where to aim your playstation missle if you are upset at the service.

Gilat didn't jump up and hit me in the face with pricing or any ordering informaion for that matter, but I'm probably just not clicking on the right silly-sounding-word-that-sounds-like-every-other-c hoice (TM) (choices are things such as SkyBlaster, SkySurfer, WebSat, etc..)