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Try http://www.tachyon.net/ Very fast and reliable (expensive) service.

I live in rural Ontario, approximately 3.5 miles from the nearest town (Dundalk: pop. 2,000) and approximately 1 mile beyond the DSL limit. No cable available. So I use a Ku-band satellite. I get a reliable 1Mbps downlink and 256kbps uplink.

As it so happens I DID install kubuntu on one of my machines here just 2 weeks ago. Via satellite Internet. It took about 75 minutes.

The speed-of-light (SL) latency (about 550ms) is a bit of a drag when dealing with large numbers of small files, but overall the speed is quite good. IP spoofing is used at the downlink point to avoid SL latency on every packet. I have 56kbps dial up for backup (which usually doesn't connect at more than 33.6 kbps) and there's no comparison. I'll take the satellite any day.

Perhaps all the people here that have been crapping all over satellite Internet are thinking of the previous state of the art. These days things are quite impressive. Check out Xplornet for the low end home/small business stuff, or Tachyon for high end enterprise type stuff.

The coolest system of the three that Tachyon offers is the 'Auto-Deploy CAS' system, where you just plug it in, push a button and the thing finds the satellite on it's own.

A bit spendy, but we've found them to be the most reliable solution for broadband communications.

I have an iPAQ with a PCMCIA card slot, sometimes hooked to a AirCard card (sweet wireless 128k download speeds in a taxi!), and sometimes to a Cisco Aironet wireless LAN card. We recently demoed this working through a Tachyon 1.5 meter dish satelite connection, routed to a wireless base station. I was streaming MP3s to a cow farm in Germany. Amazing applications, but one Achilies heel...

The problem: Power. My battery (even with the extra battery in the PCMCIA sleeve) runs out in less than 2 hours. As soon as I pop in an 1 Gig IBM Microdrive, it drops to about 1 hour, if lucky. To counter this, I've build a little laptop backpack that has 4 rechargable D-cells putting out the 5V DC that the iPAQ wants... backed up by a 12V DC-AC car converter and 3 solar cells mounted on the backside of the backpack (yes, I know it looks geeky, but stick on a couple Rage Against the Machine stickers and people think it's just a fashion statement, the latest in do-it-yourself geek-wear.)

So, the bottom line is now I carry a bag as big as a laptop whose sole purpose is to power my handheld laptop. Of course, I also charge my Digital Camera and Cell Phone off the same bundle, but I still feel like I'm missing something...

tachyon will. latency over satellite is terrible though..

Yes yes, we all know that you have high latency with a satellite connection. Perhaps one day we'll have communication laser contact with satellites doing optical routing and it'll get better. In any case, the real problem with Tachyon is that it's expensive.

The second tachyon retail partner I tried actually had pricing on line. (Never trust an ISP which doesn't have their pricing listed on the website, by the way. If they lower prices later, you may never know, and continue getting shafted.) But here's the real kicker; It's US$4250 for the "access point"! (Leasing options available). I wonder what it costs to lease; They don't tell you THAT on the 'net, which is a warning sign. Furthermore, installation is $950! Let me get this straight, you're going to come out to my property and anchor a dish which for that price should be aiming itself, and charging me a thousand dollars for the privilege?

But here's the really crappy part; The LOWEST level of service (C1-Lite) has a 300K (Is that Kbit, or KByte (note capitalization)? they don't say, of course. Since the downloads go up to 2 Mbps, though, you can see it's just Kbit. Not very exciting, really, since for 300Kbps down and 64Kbps up, you pay US$400 a month (on top of your four grand of hardware and grand of install) and you only get 1GB of bandwidth for the whole month.

This is ridiculous. The only impressive part is that if you get the expensive version (2.0Mbps down, 256Kbps up) you can actually get two megabits out in the sticks. I'm not horribly impressed by that except that somehow they must be funneling a hundred Mb up to the satellite or something. The high end service lets you get 10GB a month (or is that send? or get OR send?) but it's (get ready for this one) US$2099!

As much as this service costs, you'd be better off getting, say, half a T1 to someplace which actually has access and has LOS to your location, and then using the Laser-based ethernet to get 1mbps from wherever your T1 is dropped to your house; Microwave is another possibility. While somewhat expensive hardware-wise, you can get 768Kb T1 for around $500/mo if you poke around. You can also get 768K SDSL from Covad (in covered areas) for, uh, much less. They seem to have changed their website around a great deal. They also think DSL is not available in my area, but I have pacbell DSL right now, and Covad's hardware is in the telco, so I happen to know I'm within range.

BTW, Covad's webpage is indicative of weak management. They have two different forms to check for DSL availability. Oh wow, ANOTHER one just popped up, make that three. This is pretty pathetic. (Then again, so is this stream-of-conciousness /. post.) Okay, so I finally found it. 1.54Mbps SDSL from Covad through LMI.net will cost you $335/month.

Anyway, the whole purpose of this long, rambling, mostly pointless post was to step all over tachyon, which is ridiculously overpriced.

Oh, and one last comment on tachyon; They want like $500 for a de-icing unit. (I closed the page in disgust already, so I don't know just how much.) But for $500 I'll buy myself a snowsuit and a bucket, and go de-ice it myself.

tachyon will. latency over satellite is terrible though..

//rdj

Both Tachyon and Starband use "latency mitigators" (my phrase) to spoof TCP and cache web. The resulting response time is actually very good, in spite of over 500ms of round trip delay.

A company in San Diego by the name of Tachyon, offers 2-way satelite internet connection to businesses that don't have access to cable or DSL, but they're not aiming at consumers yet.

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.

satellite link to the US