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Smells like something funny on the provider side. I assume the satellite was geostationnary (35786 km from earth). So given that the signal travels at the speed of light, a RTT between you and the provider hub should be: 35786 / c * 4 * 1000000 = 477ms

I lived and worked in the Eastern Arctic between 1994-97, so my information is somewhat dated, but at that time, 1.2 seconds was an average round trip time, because in order to reach our Internet backbone in Yellowknife, we had a double satellite hop. For reasons that the Northwestel techs were never able to explain, traffic coming from Baffin Island landed in Northern Ontario, then got shot back onto a satellite in order to send it to Yellowknife.

Back when we created what was at the time one of the most remote commercial ISPs in the world, we paid the telco CAD 3000/month for the privilege of a 56Kb digital connection. I asked about T1 (or equivalent) and was quoted CAD 100,000/month.

Nonetheless, we managed to provide service to about 1000 customers, creating a few IRC junkies in the process. Believe me, any service at all was better than none out there.

More on topic: Jeff Phillipp and the guys at SSI Micro (based in Fort Providence, but with a presence in Yellowknife) are the best people in the region for Internet connectivity. They did pioneering work getting the diamond mines' communications systems up and running, and have since developed processes that have been used everywhere from the Arctic to Africa to the South Pacific. They know exactly how to squeeze value out of any Internet connection. I can't recommend them more highly.

Yellowknife is considered a city because it's a capital ... though we only have like ~20,000 people... a company called SSI Micro has basically blanketed the city with WiFi...

http://www.ssimicro.com/

Yay we're on the bleeding edge North of 60!

Well in Yellowknife we have a wireless WiMax network provided by SSI Micro.

http://www.ssimicro.com/article20040324.php

I know... not WiFi... but it is wireless, and it does blanket the whole city.

This isn't really surprising. The tech started here in the US, so that made us #1. But the rural spread of our population makes market penetration quite difficult, thus resulting in countries with higher population densities pulling ahead. As Mark Twain once said, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics."

The company I work for, SSI Micro, has provided full-mesh frame relay and Internet services over satellite throughout northern Canada, well into the high arctic, since early 2000. We continue to expand the number of communities we service across the north all the time. The Outback almost sounds like a walk in the park by comparison - assuming you don't mind snakes. We also recently deployed a six site satellite network in Zambia to provide Internet services to an international development organisation there. Certainly each of these remote regions provide their own set of challenges.

In addition to dial-up, we have always used wireless technologies as a last mile solution. We used 802.11 for many years in those applications, and continue to do so. Currently we are also working with Inukshuk to roll out MCS wireless services, as mentioned in an earlier Slashdot story, and it is simply an amazing technology. The broadband picture keeps getting better and better up here all the time.

Satellite is definitely here to stay. It is going to be a long time before every nook and cranny of this world is wired, and frankly, I hope it never is.

[Disclaimer: Our company was the first to roll out MMDS based service in Canada, back on February 11, and we are partners with Inukshuk.]

We have been working with wireless technology for years, and until a few months ago I would have agreed 100% that non-line of sight was snake oil, a holy grail, and called it a few other things inappropriate for mixed company.

OFDM is simply black freaking magic. We have had somewhere in the order of 95% penetration in a 4km radius of our primary base station. (Fido's distance estimate is highly conservative.) We have a second base station online now, and it is almost impossible to find places in this town where you can not find a hot signal. As someone who never would have believed it possible, it blew me away completely, and continues to do so.

Frankly, we never would have launched the service if it wasn't true non-line of sight. This product is true multi-path, and is transmitting at high power. There is a 200' hill of ROCK between my house and our base station, and in my basement, facing away from the base, I get a perfect signal. Any suggestion that it is remotely similar to or even resembles 802.11 is completely off base.

We have rolled quite a few CPEs out the door now. Pretty much without exception every single customer has gone home, plugged it in, and it has worked. I am not lying when I say literally not more than 1% of end users have had a problems getting a signal. Of the 99% who had no problem, there are a good handful who are in marginal areas and it has fully tripped me out that they found signal.

Anyhow, this stuff is seriously cool technology that has a real chance to compete with cable and DSL.
Cheers,
Graham Blake
Manager, Network Operations
SSI Micro Internet Services
Yellowknife, NWT

However, it's clear that China doesn't block HTTPS/SSL or even SSH, so any of the ordinary transport-layer proxies would do, as would simple ssh-based port forwarding.

It looks like India could be joining Saudi Arabia and China in the list of countries where HTTPort is an essential install.

Egress filtering. Application-level firewalls. This is EXACTLY what they exist for.

Sadly, they exist more to make a quick buck by giving ignorant admins a false sense of security.

Transports which tunnel through the HTTP application layer (not just SSH on port 80) using fully obscured forms of encryption are prevalent and readily available to the non-technical PC user. Such applications are very popular in Saudi Arabia and China, for example, primarily because there are presently no proxies capable of blocking them.

As soon as such proxies appear, the HTTP application layer tunnels will implement polymorphic protocols. There is no hint of evidence that the proxies have any chance of keeping up.

It is well known in the steganography community that any open channel, even email, is transparently insecure. Unless such channels are closely monitored by a professional cryptoanalyst, there is no chance that they can reliably prevented from carrying unwanted traffic.

No really, blocking SSH/ESP and tracking HTTPS is a reasonable suggestion -- if anything, I'd say the above doesn't go far enough.

Reasonable? Pointless.

Applications which tunnel through the HTTP application layer (not just SSH o port 80) using fully obscured forms encryption are prevalent and readily available to the non-technical PC user. Such applications are very popular in Saudi Arabia and China, for example. Primarily because there are, at this time, no proxies capable of blocking them.

And as soon as such proxies appear, the HTTP application layer tunnels will go polymorphic in their protocols. There is no hint of evidence that the proxies have any chance of keeping up.

It is well-known to the steganography community that any open channel, even email, are insecure. Unless such channels are closely monitored by a professional cryptographer, there is no chance that they can reliably be monitored to prevent unfriendly traffic.