Slashdot Mirror
Broadband From The Sky In 2002?
Krendle writes: "A company named ISky is claiming that they will deliver high speed (2mbps down, 1/2mbps up) 2-way satellite Internet access by the end of 2001. One issue I've seen raised in newsgroups (in reference to satellite internet in general) is that of lag. With Internet applications like telephony and online gaming, etc., gaining popularity this is an important issue. 2Mbps from the sky still sounds cool to me, especially where we can't even get cable TV. What do you guys think -- will latency be a problem?" I'd be happy to "settle" for always-on wireless access faster than dial-up and cheap as DSL, but the iSKY Q&A page is short on price details. But it does say "iSKY is planning on being able to support all platforms including Macintosh, Linux, Solaris and Windows."
However, don't expect satellites to replace cable any time soon. There are difficulties when you try to scale up to the silly bandwidth levels required:
Your satellite is at least 300km up, and making microwave beams really parallel is tricky (unless you want to use a huge dish, which adds weight and cost to the satellite). This means that, even pulling tricks like having multiple fairly-narrow-angle transcievers per satellite, you still get everyone within a few tens of kilometres sharing the same uplink. Fine for low-density areas, but not for cities.
Microwave beams have a data bandwidth comparable to their frequency - a few Gbits/sec. at most. This is the maximum _shared_ bandwidth per uplink region, and the maximum bandwidth of the pipes between the satellites. Bump the frequency up to get more bandwidth, and you start getting blocked by light cloud cover and thin walls (and ceilings). While you could do something like have an optical link from satellite to satellite, your uplink/downlink bandwidth is going to be pretty crummy compared to, say, a fiber backbone serving the same area.
I'm not trying to bash satellite data services - as mentioned above, they do have their uses. I'm just trying to stave off the inevitable flood of "Wow! Now everyone in the city can get cable bandwidth from their palm-pilots!" messages.
Their web site says their satellites are in geosynchronous orbits.
Geosynchronous orbit is 37500 km. This translates into a minimum roundtrip speed-of-light latency of 250ms.
Any netrek player will tell you that that amount of latency is too high for effective gaming!
Hi, just figured I would ass my 2 here. /.ers to be) the latency shouldnt be a problem. Email, web, FTP, and say, CC authorization, and maybe even a small webserver would run fine over these connections. :)
I currently sit on a 2.4 GHz wireless lan (breezecom pro.11-D to be exact) which handles almosy 3mb on the wan and has a T1 to the net... the distance from point to point is ~2.5km and on the WAN I notice latency ~12ms and to the internet ~200ms. I am not a huge fan of Quake, but it seems to run fine, other games such as EverCrack run just fine... websites fly, and well.. I have no complaints. So on the subject of satalite connections, I think that for most home users, (not power users, which I find most
To address the problems of picking up a large area of signals making some satalites lagged if they fly over dnesly populated areas.. I can think the most simple solution to this is fly multiple satalites over an area and make them addressable, the internal bandwidth of these things could be 100's of gigabits, and they choose based on it's address which packets to then route to their land based internet feeds...see where I'm going? competeing cell phone companies do this kind of stuff.
Of course the other option is to have satalites opperating at diffrent frequencies over the same area, that woudl work too.
Anyways hope that adds to this
-Doug
Q. What's it take to get a story posted on
There are a couple of external factors involved in the pricing of digital satellite service. First, it has to compete with cable in areas where cable is available. I've compared the pricing. It looks like satellite services substitute a few more (non-local) channels in place of the local service they can't provide at very similar price points for their packages in our area at least.
Second, they have to build sufficient volume to keep the price at that level. The equipment that they have to maintain is different from cable. The cost per user scales quite differently. With cable, each new neighborhood needs its own lines. With satellite, the infrastructure is centralized or in space. It gets paid for in big chunks.
They'll be competing with cable modems, DSL, and for rural users, ordinary dial-up access. And they are comping in after those services have gotten a head start. They are going to have to sell an attractive package, or they won't generate the customer base they need to keep going.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
The other thing I would add is that the 250ms latenncy is only the physical layer. If you add on the rest of the networking required for data to reach a wireless device, it won't be uncomon to see 500ms or more.
___