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Two-Way Satellite Internet Is Here!
spectro writes: "Wired is reporting the first two-way satellite Internet service has been launched by StarBand.
The service promises speeds up to 500Kbps down and 150Kbps up, but a ping latency of about 400ms, so gamers are out of the question. Anyway a nice alternative for those of us who cannot get DSL yet, but watch out... The Evil Empire is part of the joint venture." It's nice to know that someone has finally made the leap, after years of promises and millions of R&D dollars. Check out the article for information on some of the competition, too.
- A.P.
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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Pro: Loads of bandwidth, great mobility.
Con: High latency, unnecessarily tied to Windows, unnecessarily tied to Radio Shack, unnecessarily tied to Dish Network.
I'll pass.
At least WildBlue, at least thus far in its development, is slated to support all major platforms (including MacOS and Linux) and isn't tied to a particular retail chain or satellite TV network. Latency is still a problem, but it's about the only one left.
But all the same, I'd rather have a cable modem or DSL. Too bad neither one is in my area yet (unless you count IDSL, which I don't). Guess I'll have to wait...
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On a high latency network, services such as fpt and http would work amazingly. You'd be suprized by the number of countries serving their web sites via satellites. eg Dhivehinet in Maldives and so on. It's true, this would suck for quake and other online games. But a 400 ms is good enough even for telnetting. I've admined boxes hosted on satellite feeds for months (two way). True the latency shows, but it's not that big a deal.
Even with broadband applications (phone stuff). You only notice a slight gap in transmission (it's like those old cnn show's where the guy on the field hears the anchor a full second after he stops speaking).
Enjoy.
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Or maybe I'm not a karma whore.
Dish Network was at the technology building at the minnesota state fair pimpin' this thing. They let me play with it. It totally sucked.
I was lucky if I got downloads much faster than a 33.6 modem, and the latency to the first hop was around 800ms. Total piece of crap when I tested it. Maybe they had it aimed wrong or something. The guy told me the satellite is at an altitude of 20,000 miles in a geosyncronous orbit. I guess that would explain the latency.
If they improved the speed on it from when I tested it, it might be worth it if you're in total BFE.
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Yeah, i work at rat shack, we have the demo service available here, and well, when it gets going the downloads are awesome, but frequent downtime, too much latency, and the rediculous start off costs make me hate it. i mean, come on, who is going to buy a computer (a compaq, to top it all off) just to get two way satellite? ive noticed that the transfer cuts off in the middle way too often (like, when i read this article, the html stopped right in the middle of the comment.
My manager has their service very fast about 2 to 3 meg and very low pings. Stuff like this is the future.
You didn't give any numbers for what you claim are "very low pings," but there's a pretty darn hard-to-avoid minimum ping.
Your signal's gotta go up to a satellite and back down to a receiving dish. It gets routed and handled, then your reply goes up to the satellite and back down to your own dish.
So, four times the bird's altitude, times the speed of light, gives you what MINIMUM ping delay? I don't have the numbers, but I expect someone here does.
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How many acres of land do i need to fit the dish? And will i become a military target if i install it?
I am !amused.
Nice to hear there are more options for rural folk. Look already has two-way internet, with speeds comparable to DSL atleast up here in Canada so they may be the first satellite service with two-way internet but they aren't the first wireless one, I don't know if a similar service is avaliable anywhere else.
Now if I could only get this working in my car!
And of course no, 0, that would be zip support for anything but Winders. Um, This sucks now for something that will be really cool once they get out to the rest of the world check out Air Switch . My manager has their service very fast about 2 to 3 meg and very low pings. Stuff like this is the future.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
This summer I had the bad luck of working tech support for DirecPC -- a Satellite ISP service. Their 2way sat service has been up and working for some time and they have been beta testing it for about 3 months. See DirecPC Homepage For more info.
What I can tell you is that while DirecPC has been talking about this for QUITE some time, GILAT HAS been delivering this 2 way for some time now.
If you are bored and like to hear DPC people rant try alt.satellite.direcpc.
In Cincinnati, Main Street Ventures just opened their doors for business under great fanfare. Their goal is to be part of an inner city renovation where the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood is seeing many of its historically significant buildings reworked into trendy yuppie lofts.
At the opening, they had a ceremonial golden plug to be pulled apart when Main Street's new wireless service made the area officially "unplugged." This tented event for a few hundred spectators and camera crews took place in The Salvation Army's 12th street parking lot, with representative from Lucent and Microsoft, and Ohio's Governer Bob Taft.
They sure know how to inspire my distrust. ;-)
I think I agree. My internet company, InternetCDS gives you the choice of DSL or wireless, if you can't get DSL, you get wireless. They also promise 256kb both ways, however 90% of the time (and I kid you not..) it's under 100ms but gets to my IP and hits 1000ms. Not only that, if you get two way wireless, for the love of god CHECK AND SEE HOW YOUR ISP UTILIZES THEIR LINKS. Do they have time share? Do they put 50 people on a satalitte that's only designed for 20 users? Can one user take all the bandwidth? Please please, ask these questions and double check BEFORE YOU GET INTO THIS KIND OF THING. However, if it's all setup PROPERLY, it's quite a nice solution.. :\
I've got a good friend who can't wait to get this. I just emailed him the ./ link but inserted that cable and dsl give better bandwidth with lower latency. Sucker.
I'm gonna avoid like the plague, this kind of service(?) which is closely related to Microshaft, Compaq, and RadioShack. The first two will never get anymore of my money. RadioShack is a good friend of mine.
I don't want an internet service which is subject to the weatherman's cloudcover prediction, or solarflares. My cable company has worked hard enough to keep their service up when the wind blows.
So, given that we'll be on a phased array, geosynchronous satellite network (this really sounds cool), the communication is lagged by the high latency. Wasn't broadband created so we can have fast transfers without the high latency? Surely they can do better than 500/150 kbps. I get 1500/300 kpbs with my cable service which is 3x/2x as fast with probably less cost and one tenth the latency.
I'm gonna skip this thing. I can already see it coming down with Iridium. Or M$ will sell it off to keep their financials in the black.
I also live in an area where neither cable or DSL is available, so I'm considering getting a setup similar to this despite the high latency and slow upstream connection.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
However, I think you, Anne Marie have a career writing commercials for wireless web providers. This sounds like exactly the kind of saccharine bullshit they'd use to sell their product.
Bullshit. Use a cellphone, everyone else does. Not to mention the difficulty, nay, near impossibility of bouncing a signal off a geosynch satellite from a moving vehicle. Nope, this is just another hi-tech toy for the middle and upper classes only. The rest of you poor unwashed can have it in 15 years when it's broken, or when we technofetishists find something far better to waste disposable income on.It's just that it's not that commonly used. I installed a bidirectional, mobile satellite internet link 2 years ago, with T-1 speeds. Granted, not the cheapest thing to do, but it was still there. And it sucked, at least for web surfing, which was why we installed it. Unfortunately, we didn't have much of a choice since we needed a mobile solution, and Ricochet wasn't up to speed yet.
Typically, satellite data streams have about a half second latency. That means you send out a ping to your next hop, and it's at least 500ms before you get the response. Now when you're doing a stream of data in, this isn't so bad. You have a half second latency when you're setting up the connection, but then you have a nice even data delivery. However, for things like web surfing where you're setting up lots of connections (up to 30 or 40 per page sometimes), it's unbearable.
Satellite internet connections are useful if you're in a remote area and can't get anything else. But if you have anything else, even IDSL, you're going to find it a better choice for things like web surfing and gaming.
-Todd
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"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
Why not just use AOL?! 2k up and down is all anyone really needs. 2000 bytes is alot.
This is very empowing stuff.
And that's not the half of it. Imagine you're a foreign newscaster stationed in the backroads of Afghanastan or Somalia. Do you know how much your life is put in danger every time you try to "link up" and communicate with the agencies back at home? Most often, the telephone infrastructure is nonexistant, and the rest of the time, it's bugged.
Or imagine you're the driver of a van delivering groceries and blankets to the homeless. Do you know how many lives are lost every year owing to exposure, simply because of miscommunication between relief agencies and dispatchers? A continuous link with home would solve that dilemma while providing incidental benefits like letting the homeless check their email or search for jobs on the internet.
Radio will get you somewhere, but cbs are subject to a lot of abuse. Recently in NY, disgruntled ambulance drivers were (illegally) jamming the airwaves by blowing on the receiver each time a dispatch went out to a non-union ambulance. Thankfully, no one was (apparently) killed by the practice, but just the same, it's a scary prospect, and it'd be a lot harder to jam a satellite feed.
The sooner we realize real lives are at stake, the sooner we'll embrace this technology, for the greater good of humanity.
-- Anne Marie
Sure, wireless brings forth a whole new series of security concerns. And that means encryption has its part. But it does nothing to address insecure hosts on persistant broadband connections.
What do you want to bet that the new satalite service providers will do the same as their xDSL and cable competitors and ignore this problem. But hey... they have encryption.
The higher the frequency allocated for the service, the tighter the spot beams with a given dish diameter, which means you can end up with the geographic equivalent of a dynamically distributed cellular communication system deployed via a single satellite with the main drawback being that you are sharing a single point of failure as well as a bandwidth bottleneck. However, at these high frequencies satellites can be parked much closer to each other in the same orbital so the bottleneck and failure vulnerability can be minimized by requiring a bit more complicated ground station to allow a fixed dish to rapidly switch between co-located satellites.
The rain problem is serious, but can be minimized, at least on the downward leg, by increasing the energy storage capacity of the satellite to power through the weather. IIRC the upward leg has a bit more of a problem with heavy weather because, although power is quite available on the ground, the scattering occurs far from the satellite (clouds are only a few miles in altitude whereas the satellites are about 20 thousand miles away). On the upward leg it is a bit more problematic due to the fact that arc very tightly which further increases the density of communication via demultiplexed (parallel) communication channels.
The delay time introduced by going up and back is less than typical human reaction time (about a quarter second) so its just fine for most practical uses -- even interactive ones other than games where people are pushing human reaction times to the sub 100ms ranges.
Starband is probably in these high frequency ranges since they do have a bit of difficulty with heavy weather, although I haven't been able to locate their FCC filing online to see exactly how high the frequency actually is.
Seastead this.
While the article doesn't come out and say it, I'm guessing there will be serious total bandwidth limitations- since there are no tracking antennas, and since this is referred to as part of a satellite TV service, it must be from (and probably to) a satellite in geosync orbit. All traffic is probably going to just one satellite. Once a lot of people sign up for this- popularity will kill it- since I'm sure that they can sign people up to long term contracts faster than they can put more transponders up.
Plus there is the fact that anything beamed to you is probably also being beamed to everyone in a multiple state area around you. I sure hope they have some *strong* encryption built in. They ought to be doing something better than DES, no?
I hate to say it, but the microsoft backed Teledesic system is a much better system (many satellites in low earth orbit- kinda like a cellular system) the satellites are closer and cover smaller areas, so the amount of bandwidth/satellite is much smaller.
Hardly anyone wants to sell you a simple net connection anymore. What's with all the useless addons? ISPs are always trying to be their own portal when they can't top Yahoo. Best Buy tries to get you on MSN when you buy a refrigerator.
Now to get satellite net access you have to buy a whole new PC, and it's still $60 a month?
Dammit, give me some hardware and tell me what I should set the IP and DNS to, and charge me less!
but a ping latency of about 400ms so gamers are out of the question.
:).
.118 (approx) seconds now multiply by 2, we have to go both ways. we have .236 seconds (approx).
I rember when i thought light (186,000 miles/second) was fast haha. Now 400ms a second isn't round trip time for light from nowheresville -> Satellite -> Backbone router but the handicap makes up for a damn sizeable chunk
Let's investigate.
For example, if the mission requires a geostationary orbit, which can be achieved only at a distance of about 35,000 km (22,000 mi) above Earth.
I got this from MSN Encarta. MSN... like their operating systems, probably can't be trusted
Lets do some calculations(my favorite). For light to get to the satellite it takes
Now a handicap of 236ms before you get on the net leaves a little to be desired. Like, Damn I wish light were faster.
Time is Change