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?

Comments

MSN is Gilat

[Space]

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.

Latency is bad

[Anonymous Coward]

This might work for surfing and email if you can't get DSL or cable, but it's pretty much worthless for any real networking where latency is an issue.

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.

Re:*Upload* via satellite - Impossible!

[Zilch]

No, it's impossible to upload data to a satellite. In fact becuase of this, all data that you receive from a satellite has to be generated up there, so they employ heaps of midget space-faring webmasters to create pages for people on the service to view. :-)

- Zilch

Re:Latency

[gammatron]

What kind of latency could we expect from an upload / download connection?

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!
--

Great! More idiot newbies all over the place!

[8Complex]

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!

DirectPC the same basic service. Big deal.

[Svartalf]

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.

No good for gaming

[Bourbon Man]

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.

I can see it now . .

[Money__]

. .Thousands of Gilat satelites conected to linux boxes, all aimed at Redmond.
[cue maniacal laughter]
[pet kitty]
[kiss pinky ring]

not to be a wet blanket, but theres a bright side

[stevarooski]

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

Re:uploading to the satellite?

[Sport]

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!

Broadband over powerllines: some information

[rxmd]

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.

GEO and LEO

[Money__]

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.

Re:Round trip time

[ereuter]

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.

"Why..."

[supabeast!]

"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.

Better be a LOT richer if you want a T...

[GW Hayduke]

Ok I hear a LOT of people talking about how they'd rather just get a t-1 run to their house (read pipedream)....
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 :)) So go figure about another $1650 a month

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)

Re:Better be a LOT richer if you want a T...

[pjrc]

I suppose this is slightly off-topic, but at the risk of losing karma, I'll respond to GW Hayduke's rant about how expensive T1 service is.

I have a fractional T1 service... but "fractional" can mean a lot of different speeds, and in my case it's only 128 kbps. It is expensive to set up a T1 service, but at least in Portland Oregon, it's not quite as bad as you make it out to be.

The most expensive part is the upstream service from an ISP. Most ISPs are quite expensive. I did quite a bit of searching in my area, and I found two with competitive prices. I went with Internet Arena, because the other was some christian place with filtering at their router, and we've all heard about how well filtering software works.

Not far behind the ISP is the telco. In my area, it's GTE. A year ago their prices were lower... it seems strange that they're increased. Unlike the ISP, at least where I live, you're stuck with your local telco. The service is Frame Relay. In Oregon, and probably in many other places, there's no room for a bargain, since the rates are set by a utility commission.

Of course, you then need equipment. I wanted a low cost Linux based solution. At the time, the only real option was Sangoma. They sell a card that goes in your PC that more or less does everything you need. The mounting bracket has one 8 pin jack (same size and shape as an 10baseT ethernet connector) but it's for a T1 line. Like ethernet, only four wires are used, a pair for transmit and a pair for receive. I'll give more details about the wiring below. You can always email me if you're trying to set it up and have a question.

Indeed it is expensive. I don't recall all the costs down to the penny, but here's more or less how it worked out:

• Setup: Samgoma card, $950
• Setup: Telco install fee, $350
• Reoccur: Telco, $123
• Reoccur: ISP, $150

Now I'm sure your thinking, dear reader, that that's a rip-off for only 128 kbps service. Indeed it is expensive, and perhaps in a year or two when DSL is finally available in my area, I may switch. The one really cool thing about frame relay service is that the ping time is about 20 ms, and many installations (but not mine) seem to run at a 10 ms ping time. However, I don't play network games...

Now I could go on about why I decided to spring for an expensive T1 service, but that's really getting off-topic from and already slightly off-topic post. The main point of this post was to respond with the actual costs of setting up a low speed fractional T1 service.... or at least the actual costs in my area, as they were about a year ago. A secondary purpose was to give a little bit of info about how to do it. To that end, I'll ramble on just a bit more about the setup.

I called both the ISP and the telco and asked about how to set things up. My experience was that it's better and easier to deal with the ISP. Finding a cool ISP is not easy, but they're out there. Dave at Internet Arena is a great guy, so if you're in the Portland area, I'd suggest you give Dave a call. He's got a bunch of other really high speed/moderate cost options for certain areas, using leased T1 lines instead of the telco. Anyway, the point is to talk with ISPs and make a visit to any you want to do business with.

Often times the ISP will call the telco for you to set up all the details, but you can get involved if you want. I did. Each T1 line has a circuit ID number. Your new service will get a number. When you hear your new number, be sure to write it down and don't lose it. You may never need it again, but it's a pain to find someone at the telco who knows enough to look it up if you ever have a problem with the line.

Frame Relay is a protocol, much like the ethernet 802.3 frames. Like IPv4 gives 32 bit IP addresses, frame relay provides DLCI numbers. Unlike IP, a DLCI number is a short integer which is unique only on your line. The phone company establishes Permanent Virtual Connections (PVC) through the frame relay network, by adding routes and doing who knows what else. Ultimately, the PVC will link a DLCI number (short integer) on your your circuit ID (big long number) to a DLCI number on the ISP's circuit ID. You'll probably never use the circuit ID number, but you do need to know the DLCI number to set up the sangoma card.

Since I bought my card, Sangoma has made some major improvements in the setup process (I set up another card for someone a couple months ago). The installer looks a lot like RedHat's text based installation program. It will ask you about for various bit of information, and it'll want to know about each DLCI you have. You'd probably only establish one PVC to your ISP, but it's possible to have lots of PVC to other people, all running on the same line. After the installation, each PVC will appear as an interface. I named mine "fr16", and it looks like this when I run ifconfig:

fr16 Link encap:Frame Relay DLCI HWaddr 4096
inet addr:207.149.244.8 P-t-P:207.149.244.1 Mask:255.255.255.224
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:4889031 errors:0 dropped:12 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7655668 errors:136874 dropped:51 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
Interrupt:7 Base address:0x360 Memory:c00de000-c00dffff

From here it's just the usual linux routing things.

Well, that's probably enough rambling on. If anyone reading this is looking to set up a T1 service on linux, on a budget, hopefully this has helped a bit instead of just creating more confusion. It's not cheap, but also not as bad as some people make it out to be.

Nah, it's all good guys..

[murray_fox]

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

Re:Gilate...

[davmoo]

I signed up on Gilat's list several months ago to be a beta tester. I live in the proverbial sticks (to most people around here, "high speed access" means anything faster than 28.8kbps), and cable access or DSL are years away. I would love to have something faster than my current 56kbps.

A couple of weeks or so ago I got the formal invitation in my email to get in to the program early as a beta tester. I turned it down for several reasons.

First, as someone else has already mentioned, just to be a beta tester you had to fork up $499 (plus a hefty installation fee unless installed before Sept 15th). What the previous poster didn't mention was this was because you were buying a whole new friggin computer...you can't use any old machine you got laying around, you MUST by a new one from them, and use their OS (Windows) and hardware. Hence I can't use it with my notebook and I can't use it on my own Linux box without doing a network of my own (see the third point below).

Second, in reading the fine print I discovered that they only guarentee access at 150kbps. After the beta period is over (January 1) I am not willing to pay $69.95 a month to have access that is only going to be 2 - 3 times faster than what I have now for $19.95.

And third, and this was the biggie for me, VPN is forbidden. They consider this a "business" service, and if they make VPN allowable, it will be for "an additional fee". And while they don't explicitly say no networking or internet connection sharing, they don't support it and won't help make it work either.

So my opinion after reading everything was that, at least for me, their service is not offering me anything that would make it worth $69.95 a month plus all the up front cash.