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Satellite-Delivered Broadband Gets Louder
David Savage writes: "AOL and MSN are about to announce the release of broadband Internet connections that will allow users to access the Internet at cable and DSL speeds via satellite dishes. The MSN service will allow users to download and upload data via a satellite dish. The AOL service on the other hand will require users to upload data through a regular dial-up connection and download through the dish. Both plans will have prices that compete with current cable and DSL prices, but will have hefty setup fees (in the hundreds of dollars). Both companies are planning to begin offering their broadband services, which will be available almost anywhere within the U.S., in the next couple of months." As the article points out, satellite access has been around for a while but whether because of cost, complexity or low marketing not made the splash that cable and DSL access have. But when the 800-pound gorillas (AOL and MSN) jump in, that scene could change a lot. I'd like a little price competition in space (since it seems more likely than among local land-bound connections), but why can't the dishes and setup be free like they are with satellite TV promotions?
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.
I Don't Work Here
Weren't the Iridium phones transmitting to a satellite? In fact, since they weren't directed antennae (thus the signal can is strong even outside a narrow beam), wouldn't the FCC have had a greater problem with those than with these?
As to your other point, I would darned well hope that the signals were encrypted or (the dereaded security through obscurity method) were only receivable by special devices.
Mmmm.. Donuts
They still want more people to come on despite the hit to quality because that means more people giving them money. The local cable guys are getting to the point where many older customers are switching to one of the ADSL providers, just so they can have a guarenteed bandwidth and more reliable service. In all the time I've had cable, I've never seen a download above 70K/s, and usually I'm around 40. Still faster than a modem, but not as fast as they advertise it as being "capable" of. The fleeing customers have prompted a really cheesy ad campaign that's trying to convince people that just because _every_ subscriber won't be using the service at the same time, it means that only one will.
Intolerant people should be shot.
I see an awfull lot of people pointing out the problems with this service, and yes, most of them are right...however, I think we all need to keep 2 things in mind. 1)this is new technology...most new technologies are expensive and sucky...it will probably get better in both regards, given just a little time 2)I dream of one day taking off and going and living in the middle of nowhere in the rocky mountains...For much of my work, I am very dependant on my high speed net links (but also, I could survive bad latancy). Unless somebody with way too much money starts putting fiber in absolutely ridiculous places....this is the only way I will ever be able to fulfill my little dream...
A satellite in geosynchronous orbit is 22,300 mi away, minimum (at least according to the linked article). According to my math, that's about .12 light-seconds. In other words, it takes a signal 120 milliseconds to get from the satellite to the earth.
Think about telnet, or quake, or something like that. You press a key, and a packet gets sent. 120ms later, it reaches the sat. The sat sends it back down to a station, that takes another 120ms. Ignoring any latency on the ground, the ack for that packet takes 120ms to reach the sat and another 120ms to get to you. We're up to nearly half a second. Now add any ground-based latency, and you are one sorry-ass High Ping Bastard.
And of course your actual rate of download will depend on how large the TCP window is, 'cause it takes the same half a second for you to ack that MP3 file being beamed to you from outer space...
Low earth orbit satellites make *much* more sense for Internet because of this problem. Too bad no one could redo Iridium satellites to route IP! Of course, your favorite billionaires, Bill Gates and Craig McCaw, are collaborating on an outfit called Teledesic to do LEO sat Internet, but they are targeting 2004 for service start... which probably means more like 2006+, if ever.
- Zilch
Short answer: Its rilly, rilly bad.
Think about it. That satellite is a long way away - geosynchronous orbit is 22,236 miles up - and your packets have to up to the satillite and back down to the ground station - thats 44,472 miles one-way. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, so in optimal conditions, you're looking at almost 500 milliseconds for a ping to your ISP.
Games are pretty much unplayable. Large transfers are fast, as long as you don't drop any packets. Filling that pipe is a bitch!
--
http://gammatron.weblogger.com
Months ago, I visited Gilat2Home's web site to express my interest in 2-way satellite Inet access. I live in the middle of nowhere, and dialup is just too slow. 28.8 connections are almost unheard of here. Anyway, to beta test the Gilat2Home system, they wanted $499 up front, which entered me in a contract to subscribe to their service at a cost of $69.95/month after the trial period. What if I don't want the service afterwards? Well, that's just another measly $400 to get out of the contract. Hmmm, seems like a great way to win people over, eh? Oh! Also, for those of you out there who haven't realized it yet, Gilat2Home and DirecPC are their own companies and provide Internet access completely independent of MSN or AOL. That's just a new twist :/
Will these two new online services limit the amount of time to be online? I know DirectPC does this. The download speed is nice, but the latency and upload speed are still problems, especially if I want to run a server and play online games. xDSL and cable modem services are not in my area. :(
I look forward to receiving comments on this.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Details on how it will work here ,as well as receive DISH Network satellite television programming from two EchoStar satellites. Additional information about this combined offering will be provided in the near future on this Web page.
From the page: "The GTH system both sends requests to the Internet and receives the requested Internet content via a Ku-band satellite in geostationary orbit approximately 22,300 miles above the equator. The satellite, in turn, communicates with GTH's hub facility, which has a direct connection to the Internet. The result is two-way satellite Internet service that provides high-speed, always-on access on par with other broadband technologies, such as cable modems and DSL. Best of all, no telephone connection is needed, no terrestrial Internet account is required, and the service is available in any location that enjoys a clear view of the satellite. The GTH satellite dish is also capable of receiving EchoStar's DISH Network? 500-channel satellite television programming. By taking advantage of this capability, a single antenna can provide two-way satellite Internet service
It makes sense to offer low-cost dial-up plans for people who are legitimately *really* poor, just like the phone company does...but whining that DSL and cable are just too expensive and about how the "elites" are keeping it all to themselves? Gimme a freaking break. It's expensive to lay the infrastructure for high-bandwidth connections, and contrary to popular belief, phone and cable companies are not making money hand-over-fist off these services.
(I know, I know, cry me a river...but these companies are in business to make money, and they've got to cover their costs like anyone else.)
Someday, high-speed access will be cheap/free, when bandwidth is no longer a scarce good. But by then, we'll have changed our idea of what "high-speed" is, so people will be whining about that, I'm sure.
---
In IRC: "Come on! Just send me the RedHat ISO, I'm on Sattelite!!"
On web sites, 1.2meg 1280x1024 graphics scaled down to 30x30 graphics thanks to Microsoft Frontpage(tm) and all the chaotic pages it creates.
In email, problems with people trying to send 15 meg file attachments and recieving them back constantly.
Talk about a Tech. Support nightmare!
Well the MSN one sounds good, but the AOL one has a problem. You still need to upload via dialup which means you cant get rid of that phone line. For me personally, aside from the speed increase, I could justify a $40/month cable modem because I could get rid of the extra phone line I was using for dialup. $20/month for an ISP and about $20/month for the phone line so going to a cable modem cost me nothing. So i dont really see too many people jumping over to AOL's satellite service just for this reason alone.
First off: Didn't the FCC regulate the transmission of data via satelites to recieve-only? I thought you had to have a special permit to send data.
Anyway, my question is: Wouldn't it be easier to eaves drop on a satelite internet connection (especially one that's used to both send and recieve data) or is the transmission encoded before it gets thrown out as electromagnetic radiation?
hobbz
What kind of latency could we expect from an upload / download connection?
What would be the maximum speed per satellite?
How well will these dishes be able to sync up on a very cloudy / stormy day?
I guess, still you cannot dare say these will be as reliable as a dedicated connection. But does anyone know the answers to even these SIMPLE questions?
Ever need an online dictionary?
The only thing that makes this news is who's doing it. DirecTV's been doing it for some time now. It works ok if you're pulling news feeds or streaming media, etc. but stinks on ice for anything else because you're placing proxy requests with the landline (@ 33.6k or less) and they fulfill them at high speed via unused channels. This whole thing could be thought of as a interactive version of DirectTV or Dish network but nothing more.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I had (briefly) a connection thru a local cable company who used vsat as their connection. My ping in quake shot up to around an unplayable 900. Gamers will not like satellite-based internet. On the other hand, people and businesses who need bandwidth and won't be affected by lag will find it very nice. My download speed was phenomenal. Web pages loaded *much* slower than on my current DSl due to the lag. The one second delay in requesting the page is enough for DSL to have the page already displayed. One of you physics/math types should be able to figure out how long at C it takes for a signal to hit geosynchronus orbit and get back, times 2 for the return trip.
. .Thousands of Gilat satelites conected to linux boxes, all aimed at Redmond.
[cue maniacal laughter]
[pet kitty]
[kiss pinky ring]
Its certainly true that for ./ readers such as myself satelite links sound crappy and slow. But lets not forget the first priority of the whole shebang. . .to get new CUSTOMERS online. My grandma is a new internet user who lives out on the outskirts of Mesa, AZ. This would be perfect for her--hook this up to a web box like Compaq's iPaq and she'll be happy for the rest of her life with her email, news and most importantly, shopping.
Just imagine: instantly, there's world wide internet available EVERYWHERE, regardless of lag. Competitively price it, and then imagine the impact that this tech gone mainstream would have on the sagging, bloated internet economy.
s
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
the barriers to entry probably consist of
1. network buildout (laying the cable, setting up bandwidth, etc)
2. overcoming advertising of companies like timewarner
3. some other things i probably forgot
to be more explicit, in (2) above i refer to timewarner. what i mean by that is timewarner is a juggernaut. they own the cablemodem internet service that they provide and they own the tv service they provide. the tv service sells quite well due to the semi-monopoly mentioned previously and gives them an advertising advantage. in order to overcome this advertising advantage you would either have to provide your own tv service to consumers (with all the costs associates with THAT business) or you would have to pay them to advertise on their networks to reach their consumers, which would still cost you and put money into their pockets (which is their end goal anyway). either way it's tough and you're getting the short end of the stick in the competition.
in (1) above, i refer to network buildout. i don't know much about timewarner's buildout, but it probably involves quite a lot of cable laid in various places. this was probably expensive to do, which is a barrier to entry and paid off only over a long amount of time. (i could be wrong.) for the internet side of things, you've got to have your routers, servers, switches, bandwidth, and redundancy in all of those things. (not to mention personnel.) the last-mile war is probably more of a pain in the ass to do, though. several companies, like the one i used to work for (http://www.nucentrix.net if you care), are attempting to circumvent this by creating their own last-mile arena in the form of fixed-point wireless services. they hold licences for MMDS spectrum usage in certain areas, and are converting its use from wireless cable tv to wireless internet service. they put an antenna/transceiver on your roof which transmits/receives a signal from a local tower, run RG-6 cable down to a cablemodem inside the building, and a 10baseT ethernet jack on the back of that plugs into your pc/router/hub/whatever. there are limitations to this, however, the most notable that there must be line-of-sight from the transmission tower to the target antenna. line of sight is sometimes difficult to obtain, because even if the terrain map shows line-of-sight on the lay of the land, there may still exist other obstructions like buildings, trees in front of your house, etc. Multipath is also an issue, although since i'm not an RF specialist, i won't go into that. in any case, unless you build your own last mile you'll still end up giving the existing companies a share of your profits, and if you do build your own then you're incurring an even larger cost to yourself, at least intitially.
i would like to include a mild disclaimer at the end of this post: i don't guarantee anything i write to be 100% correct, and if you find that i speak falsely about anything herein, feel free to correct me. please just don't be a jerk about it.
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
As for Universities not deserving the reduced price bandwidth, give me a break... Tuition is high enough already. Did you know that many Universities lease out excess bandwidth to corporations and smaller schools? Savings aren't just squandered and resources don't go unwasted. Smaller schools struggle to make use of the limited bandwidth they even have. How else do you think the MP3 craze could bring campus networks to their knees? Legitimate research and information sharing is severly hampered in today's world when the bandwidth isn't available on campus.
Don't attack educational institutions... That is where some of the best developments in technology come from in the first place!
Ever heard of INMARSAT? More commonly known as those SEAL magnaphones you see in some action flicks. I can get a solid 64kbps up and down with one, and the latest models are no bigger than a laptop computer (with a fold-out flat "dish"). Those are direct connections though. Most typical VSAT setups use a 1.8 meter dish and a ~3watt head for uplink with a GEO satellite, and I've run those up to 512kbps down and 128Kbps up. The problem with uplinking however is the MAC protocol. The VSATs I've used employ slotted ALOHA, which is like CMDSA/CD only without the carrier sense. Essentially, everyone transmit at random and hope there's no collision! Count me out!
MSN is also a pretty simple dial-up PPP setup. hardly special stuff. using the sat would mostly likely involve special (read proprietary) hardware. MS is unlikely to port it to a non-windoze version, and it probably won't be easy to hack.
No. Really, all this "mobile no wire" stuff is still in the early-adopter phase. If the rich and committed like it and pay for it, eventually the economics of scale kick in and the price comes down. If you want to lower the price then I suggest either:
a) paying the high price now and contributing to entrenching this as a cheap technology for later on...
b) hyping it until you're blue in the face to people who can afford it...
My Dad's first calculator cost $500 and didn't do square roots. See the parallel? Sattelite connections don't do square roots either...
2 1337 4 u!
as for weather problems, as far as i know DSS and other TV sattelite users have no issues when storms come in because the signals penetrate the clouds, etc. the latency must be an issue however because the signal will have to bounce off multiple sattelites in each direction in many cases in order to receive data. perhaps these services will be competitive with cable/dsl (i've heard predictions of sattelite connections capable of vastly greater speeds than cable/dsl on the order of 40-100mbps available to home users within a year or so) but i'm dubious. i'm also considerably biased against this technology because my high school has had a sattelite internet connection for nearly 4 years now and it is terrible. they just installed a brand new enormous sattelite and it sucks even worse than before! the problem is mostly the fact that it's a 56k uplink but i still can't trust this stuff yet. the computers hooked up to the sattelite are PCs running NT (which we've replaced with linux in many cases) but i've found myself being forced to use the dammed iMacs in the other lab because they're on a 6 megabit DSL line! ugh MSN is going to have to do a whole lot to convince me that this is good technology. and i'd never trust anything from AOL.
I don't know what's going on in the powerline market over in the States, but here in Germany this has been in the media for quite some time (if you can read German, then check out this list of articles that were on the Heise news service over the last few months.
Development in the field is rather active over here. You can buy home spin-off solutions that are based on powerline communication already. One application that is already being sold is a (phone line) modem whose serial port is replaced by a powerline adapter, and by hooking up your computer to a second adapter you're able to access your modem from anywhere within your local house circuit. I am not quite sure what implications this has on security, but I am fairly sure that some measures are being taken. This is not really high-speed, though, even though it seems fairly reliable.
Powerline Internet access is a different matter, of course. In Cologne, they will be starting to sell powerline-based Internet and telephony by the beginning of 2001. A couple of field tests, also on a larger scale in a somewhat more public environment, have already been conducted.
The speed that is being claimed varies. Preussen Elektra (recently merger'ed into e.on Energie) claim that their particular system is capable of reaching 10 Mbps in-house and 2 Mbps for incoming/outgoing Internet access. Siemens claim they reach 1.3 Mbps over public lines and plan to extend this to 10 Mbps. So as far as cable or DSL are concerned, this is quite a competition. :-)
The central problem with powerline communications is that your average powerline is just a pair of wires arranged in an unpredictable network topology, and that the behaviour of the electrical properties of the system tends to be a bit difficult to handle because most electric devices emit quite a bit of noise. Take a look at the noise emissions from a 100 to 300 W dimmable ceiling lamp, for example, and then you'll immediately see why powerline network access took this long to develop. It appears that they got this quite under control, though.
The final problems introducing this over here appear to be of a legal sort, because there are quite strict regulations in Germany as to which emissions are allowed in which part of the spectrum. With powerline communications, one has the problem of the non-shielded wires acting like a very large antenna, so they have to take care as to which frequencies they're using and how they're reducing emissions. The carriers needed for 1 to 10 Mbit are well in the amateur radio spectrum, for example. Nevertheless, powerline internet has good prospects for the future over here because it is by far the least expensive way by which to hook up people to the network (and since all major electricity corporations here also sell network services, they are quite interested in extending their customer base) - practically every house is connected to the powerline network already and has quite a bit of wiring installed as well.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
I've got two questions that were left unanswered so far, so if anyone could help me out with these, I'd really appreciate it.
If there's anyone out there who knows a bit about how these technical details are tackled, I'd appreciate to hear about it... ;-)
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Wow, that is a rip off. Thank you for sharing it with us. I can get IDSL (144kb/sec MAX), but it costs over 100 bucks a month and you have to sign a contract (usually a year or more). I am not that rich! If I was, I would get a T1. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
check this out... I know it's not available in all of the US... but since it has been in AZ it has taken off like crazy... excellent package too: http://www.sprintbroadband.com adios -cipher
-ballpark
In regards to the bidirectional satellite Internet access...
I would assume that the satellite is not "aiming" signals at each receiver, so does that mean it's like cable modems where everyone is sharing the bandwidth (at least for a particular channel)? Will everyone's dish receive the packets of everyone else on that channel? And (therefore), will it slow down the more users that are using it?
If the answer to all that is "yes", I would be curious to know how much bandwidth each satellite channel has, how many channels, and how many satellites they actually have in orbit.
As for uploads, if multiple people are sharing the same channel, can the satellite handle many signals coming in at once, or does it need some Ethernet-style collision detection? Is the signal actually digitally processed by the satellite, or is it just "bounced" through some sort of analog retransmitter?
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
System Requirements
- PC equipped with Pentium II or better running at 300 MhZ or better
- 128MB of RAM or more
- 300MB of free HD space
- Windows2000 or WindowsME
- Mouse
No Linux, no BSD, no Solaris, no MacOS, no BeOS. Maybe they'll let you plug your XBox into it, but otherwise it's gonna be pretty restrictive.
Not to mention what the user access agreement looks like. "In exchange for this service you agree that we may, at any time, make available, with or without notice, information which may or may not be personally identifiable as coming from you. Failure to agree to these terms will result in termination of service. Termination of service does not release liabilty to fufill your usage contract, which will, in the event of termination be due in full at time of termination..." And so on.
Of course, this is just speculation, based on past behavior, and is as likely to be completely wrong as not. Just don't say I didn't tell you so. Me, I'm sticking with DSL, thanks.
Where the value of X-Mailer: is the true measure of a man...
This is a friggin' amazing deal for the bandwidth we get, plus there is infinite expandability, since all they have to do is add another antenna if the demand gets too high. The upload rate is slightly lower (256K/s), but it is comparable to the Frame Relay we are using at work.
One of my coworkers is getting in on this deal for many of the reasons shown here. He is sick of using his DirecPC connection with a dialup for upload. I would love to see this type of technology catch on, since it is infinitely cheaper than running coaxial cable through downtown streets. The only problem is that not every city has a mountain at the outskirts of the city.
Because you can't, you won't, and you don't stop...
Someone out in Podunk, Kansas will be thrilled to have a satellite connection after suffering thru sub-28.8 speeds for years. As for latency, yes its a factor. However, for your average home user playing games isn't a high priority. It'll be used mostly to surf the web and download files. Thus, it seems like latency isn't going to be that big of an issue to most people.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Any limitations in the AUP? Like how many MB, no servers, etc.?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
With all the posts about LEO (Low Earth Orbit) and GEO (Geosyncronous Earth Orbit) I took the liberty of diging up an old link you might find enlightning. Point your java enable web browser here and you'll see just how high up a GEO is, and thus how much latency such a system will have.
I think the sequence goes something like this:
1) Transit to satellite: 120ms
2) Unknown delay: x
3) Transit to groundstation: 120ms
4) Some typical ping time on wired Internet (roundtrip from groundstation to ping site to groundstation): y
5) Transit to satellite: 120ms
6) Unknown delay: x
7) Transit to home: 120ms
Add it all up and we have 480ms + 2x + y. Seems to me that could easily be 900ms.
I recently played the the beta GTH system, and even with only a few beta testers on it, it doesn't work.
I know about the whole speed of light thing(which is where most of the latency comes from), but sharing an uplink makes it worse. The problem is that although data is always streaming on the downlink side, people have to take turns transmitting. For example, when I was the only user with data to transmit, my ping times to the first router were ~700ms (pure speed-o-light), but when one person was ahead of me to transmit a packet, it quickly went to ~1500ms, then ~2400ms, etc. When someone is ahead of you to transmit you have to wait for them to stop transmitting data, for their transmitter to shut down, your transiever's rx-tx turnaround, your transmitter to come on, and then you can finally get your packet out. Imagine this whole sequence with ten people ahead of you(if the service became widespread, this could become very common)!
The other problem is that people with defective transmitters(or malicous people who modified them), could easily jam the transponder being used for the uplink. If someone is transmitting continuously(knowingly or unknowing), A SINGLE USER COULD TAKE DOWN THE WHOLE SYSTEM! How's that for bad security!
"why can't the dishes and setup be free like they are with satellite TV promotions?"
Because the hardware is more expensive, and targeting them is a pain in the ass. I used to work for DirecPC (The company that does this with AOL.) and their signal bandwidth is very tight, so a satellite must be pointed within several tenths of an inch, versus within half a foot or so for a TV dish. The TV signal is also much stronger, so the parts to pick it up cost less.
On top of that, tech support calls for the PC stuff are more common, and expensive to deal with. The call centers have specially *cough*POORLY*cough* trained staff who are all in front of high end windows machines (To simulate the kind of machine that someone hard-core enough to want satellite net access would have.) running these satellite systems as well as good, I mean, land-based internet connections, and the costs for all of that get high pretty fast, as opposed to TV where most of the calls are just "Ok now push the select button on the remote. It's the one that says "select" on it.
Anyway, these systems are pretty much guaranteed to suck, as they are all being run by companies that have done little more than muck up the net as it is.
Ok I hear a LOT of people talking about how they'd rather just get a t-1 run to their house (read pipedream).... :)) So go figure about another $1650 a month
Anyway... just incase you were really thinking about it.
1st.... contact your regional Telco and check out the pricing to lease the line. Depending on your location to the POP of the ISP/Tier service provider you want, this will run about $1500/mo
not to mention hefty install prices
2nd... Contact an ISP/Tier Service provider to see what the cost of the Internet connection would be.
(Better to go with a Tier1 provider like Sprintlink here... That way you KNOW your on a fat backbone rather than having your T run to an ISP that has 2000 dialups, a couple dds56K circuits and 3 more T-1's all going on a 3MB outbound pipe
3rd... don't forget the extra equipment, CSU/DSU (I recommend a good Kentrox), get yourself a decent router, Cisco 26xx would be good..
4th... Get ready to dowload your pr0n!!!!!
so all in all, figure into about 3K/month for your T-1 and about 10K in setup fees...
This is one of the reasons why mid-high speed access is expensive, the ISP's must expand their network infrastructure so you don't have similar problems that the telco's have today, and bottleneck all their customers.
(Most phone networks were created using the average call time of 5-10 minutes.... PRE-INTERNET days)
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
"but why can't the dishes and setup be free like they are with satellite TV promotions? "
Simple...Have you ever had to deal with an MSN/AOL user? They have to pay the install Techs "Danger Pay" to go in, and the possability of Millions in "Work Related Phyciatric Damage"
"Even Prophets don't know everything"
The satellite is a downlink. You have to place requests via landline with a standard analog modem (if you're using ISDN, xDSL, or Cable, you're already beyond the service level that this would provide...)- these requests would go to a central facility that would then pull it across the 'net and then beam them back down, not unlike the video feeds that you already get from the DBS satellite right now. This was something that missed it's time, I'd say. This would be useful if you already have a DBS system, didn't want to do much of anything but surf the net (it's not going to do much good for things like Quake gaming or IRC/ICQ/etc. chat.). If it's cheaper than xDSL or Cable (or you don't have either) then you might want to consider it. Otherwise, it's got no value proposition for anyone who they'd try to sell the service to.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
here's an article on that technology... http://www.lantimes.com/97/97jul/707a020b.h tml
We have had this down here in New Zealand for ages - They call it Ihug ULTRA (http://www.ihug.co.nz/ultra/). No setup costs here!! And only NZ$59.95 (which is roughly USD$29.95 I beleive) a month, with no data limit (but a 300 hours limit before you pay 0.50c US an hour after that). It's pretty sweet. I've got a service guy coming in this week to install my dish (it's a 90cm dish, which feeds down from an orbiting satilite). I'm getting the 512kbps deal, but they reckon it can do up to 8mbps or something. It's only downstream through the Sat though - Upstream traffic through your modem or ISDN ect. Can't wait!! - Murray Fox
GPS units calculate your location based on the position of satellites. They don't ever send data to a satellite. Each satellite beams down its current location in the circle orbit, and the GPS unit calculates how far away each satellite is by analyzing the time difference between pulses.
Get 3 signals and you're set. So don't worry, GPS isn't like big brother or anything. *You* are finding out where *you* are. You transmit nothing.
As for MSN's thing, transmitting back is quite a feat. I also wonder how fast their uplink really is. Just look at Iridium and Globalstar. Iridium could transmit 2400bps (although they went out of business) and the newer Globalstar can transmit 9600bps. I don't think MSN's thing is going to upload fast at all.
-Justin
Unless, I'm mistaken, this dish that you put on your house must be very big and very powerfull to be able to send to a GEO sat.
Has there been a quantum leap in technology?
The only satellite uplink dishes I've seen have been 4 meters across, and have had little brick houses next to them.
--- I hate my sig
You must have missed the part of the story where they mention it being bi-directional:
"Microsoft will also include "two-way" dishes that allow downloads and uploads just as fast as cable modems or DSL".