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Iridium Offers Data service - IRC From Anywhere!
quadra writes: "Iridium is now offering satellite data services. For the first time, dial-up and direct internet applications are available anywhere on the planet. Using a data kit attached to an Iridium phone you can either dial up a modem, or use direct internet connectivity. Speeds are rather modest (9600bps) but there's plenty of applications where that'd suffice." OK. I would happily pay $300 / month even for 9.6kbps, if it was unmetered -- I could ride my BikeE the world around with a headmounted display, a twiddler, and a solar-charged laptop in the cargo bin. But prices are hard to find on the Iridium website, which means I can't afford it.
In an RPG game I play, the Dwarves often say "If you have to ask, you can't afford it," whenever asked about extravagant items. "But prices are hard to find on the Iridium website, which means I can't afford it," reminded me a lot of that. Does this mean Iridium is run by a bunch of dwarves?
It says that the it is 'upto' 10Kb/s dependant upon the content.
I.E. if it's highly compressible text, it may be 10 Kb/s otherwise it's less..
Activation: $50
Monthly just-because fee: $19.99 to $289 (0 - 250 minutes included)
Per-minute
Per "data transmission" $1.09
anyway, one provider isn't afraid to quote prices online. You sort it out:
http://www.rentexpress.com/iridium/iridium_us_in.h tml
What the hell happened that they can offer low (very low!) speed internet access now?
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"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?"
Well, each transmission has to go up to a satellite, be retransmitted (on a shared antenna with all of the other phones) to the satellite currently over the switch you're using, send down to the switch, modulated into a PPP connection that is sent to the ISP near the downlink, sent over the internet and then back again. Considering how all satellite transmissions are shared and how you have to bounce between satellites your packets end up sitting in queues quite a bit.
Those Geo solutions you are looking at require MUCH more transmit power and MUCH larger antennas. 40Mbps is going to require a directional antenna if you want to use it for uplink. Downlink is much easier, but you better belive you are going to pay through the nose for that bandwidth (unless it is part of some broadcast service like DirectTV that you don't actually have control over).
One more thing, Iridium is global, many other geo satellite services only offer coverage in North America and Europe. Omnitracs for instance has no coverage in Africa (Omnitracs was designed to track vehicle movement, FexEx uses it to keep track of it's trucks, and I think they may use it to send updates to the order tracking system since I've receved FedEx packages before and checked the website 3 minutes later to discover my package was already marked delivered).
By the way, there are very few cybercafes in the middle of the ocean, or in the Sahara, or even in the more desolate parts of Africa (Read: anything that is not a major city or anybody who is still fighting a blood feud with their neighbor after 100 years).
Hmm I'm not very good at reading Italian, just how much uplink bandwidth do you get with this free service? Who paid to put the satellite up there? It looks like one of those DSS style systems, which makes me think you might have to buy Satellite TV (not a bad deal actually) to use this thing. Of course it's another example of broadcast technologies that can be cheaper because of economies of scale, and most likely because they offer up the bandwidth the aren't using (yet) for free, so the more channels they add the crappier your service gets.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
I believe B is the correct answer. Iridium was sold to another company that also happened to call itself Iridium I think. The whole situtation got a bit messy there for awhile, and everybody got tired of reading: Iridium is dead! Iridium is back! Iridium is dead! Iridium is back! Apparently somewhere along the way someone who actually knew what they were doing bought the satellites and infastructure and decided to try to make it work.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
The article is wrong, Iridium DID offer some data services (they were pretty much still in development when the company went bankrupt though) that were quite unimpressive. Basically, it was a small dongle that attached to the bottom of the phone with an RS232 port on it that you could hook to a laptop. The phone emulated a fairly bare bones 2400bps modem. Unfortunatly the connection was basically just sending data over the same channel it normally sent digitized voice traffic (which is why people used to sound so tinny on those phones, their voice was being encoded at 2400bps!) which left you with rather high latency (~1 second round trip ping times for instance). Because the handoff wasn't perfected yet with the data traffic (sound worked a lot better) you would frequntly be disconnected after 8-15 minutes or so. Honestly, it wasn't fast or reliable enough to run pine over, although it was OK for ftping a mail spool file and opening it locally. Any sort of realtime interactive game is out of the question, and really anything online other than quick email or light web browsing (we had a little program that would proxy the web for us and compress the pages down for transmission over the satellite).
There is some good news though. The service is a lot better if you get out of the city (driving down 81 I was able to keep the connection running for nearly 20 minutes once) and it does work EVERYWHERE. Finally, you do get better data rates with this than many (most) other commerically avilable satellite services (ComTech (~24 bytes a second, several second latency), OmniTracs (~7-8 bytes a second, several minute latency), and others).
Next time you need to check your email in the middle of Africa, you will thank your lucky stars that Iridium exists though, since your choices are the cheap-by-satellite-comms standards Iridium, or a much heavier much bulkier much much more expensive satellite solution.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Iridium service is available at the poles.
Ah, but the current incarnation of Iridium wrote off the development and construction costs, so they need only charge for the operations costs plus profit. I am guessing still not inexpensive, but it doesn't have to be the $5/minute of the earlier attempt.
sPh
I'll buy it as soon as someone tells me what a "holographic Display" is which is listed as one of the features of the Motorola 9505.. asp?productid=446)
(It's the 10th bullet of the "Features" column on the right at http://www.iridium.com/product/iri_product-detail
Based on what I see on their web site, I think that just pointing the aerial straight up is sufficient. Perhaps this is is only true in marketing land.
Anyway, does Iridium not support call hand-off?
Read the Iridium service details carefully. The 'data service' (data calls to anywhere, presumably converted to standard modem protocols at the PSTN gateway) 'offers a data rate of up to 2.4 Kbps', which is the figure I recall from previously reading about Iridium.
The 'Internet data service' (which appears to mean using Iridium as your ISP) 'utilizes transparent compression, resulting in a data rate of up to 10 Kbps, depending on content' (my emphasis). So no, Iridium didn't suddenly get faster or start supporting channel bonding. I suspect that the standard data service probably includes such compression too, but the marketing department just forgot to include this misleading statement in its description. This does not turn a 2400 bps connection through Iridium into a 10 kbps connection any more than MNP5 (included in any ordinary modem) turns your 50 kbps connection through the PSTN into a 200 kbps connection.
Although I agree with you, I suspect that, in saying "the only reason there is a copyright at all is to promote more production of art through compensation", you have unwittingly supported the current system. Inaccessibility of discontinued work promotes increased production by creating an artificially inflated demand for new work. Compensation even ties into this - if an author is no longer paid for books that are out of print, he has to write new stuff if he wants to continue receiving checks.
most places do not have phone lines. try getting a lan line on top of a mountain, or on a cruise ship. you can't. the coverage of the phone system is quite small when you realize that there are people that are on boats, mountains, and other continents where power and phone lines are a luxury.
a friend of mine went mountain climbing, and he had access to a wireless solution that was $11/minute. he used it, but i bet he was sweating bullets the whole time.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
OK. I would happily pay $300 / month even for 9.6kbps, if it was unmetered -- I could ride my BikeE the world around with a headmounted display, a twiddler, and a solar-charged laptop in the cargo bin.
<montypython>You're a loony.</montypython>
Silliness aside, cyclers have a hard enough time obeying basic traffic guidelines
(riding on the right side of the road, signaling, etc) WITHOUT computers or cell phones.
I'd hate to have to watch out for even more traffic stupidity from this crowd.
C-X C-S
and the fact that I can't find Alone in the Dark
And I guess it's hard to search for. I can only wonder what interesting sites you might find if you searched for "I want to play Alone in the Dark"
Maybe there's a palm version?
"I want to play alone in the dark with my palm" ?
Nah. That probably wouldn't help...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Based on what I see on their web site, I think that just pointing the aerial straight up is sufficient. Perhaps this is is only true in marketing land.
Well, pointing it in the general direction of a satellite and not having anything in the line of sight, like a building or heavy cloud cover.
WE've had mixed results, but if you stand in one spot with a globalstar phone and don't move your head once connected it tends to work okay.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Oh, yeah, duh -- I wasn't thinking of the fact that these are LEOs, so without a tracker they'd be pretty useless for data calls more than a minute or 3.
That said, they don't really "whiz" by, except in a relative sense. We find that the antenna has to be pointed AT a satellite to work, and it stays in relatively the same place unless you wait 20 minutes or so, when you may need to shift the phone a bit to get a good connection again.
Maybe as the constellations get more filled out the directional and hand-off issues will get more user-friendly.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
This is by far not the first commercial satellite data access, by any criteria.
It may wind up being less expensive (as the initial costs were all lost), but you can do 9600 on a Globalstar (they're talking about a 30k+, not sure if thats working now or later) and 64k/channel on InMarsat (has been working for years).
InMarsat can mux together multiple 64k channels to give 128k+ IP access from anywhere on earth. it's not the cheapest way to check your email (at $30+ per minute for a 128k connection) but for remote field work there's not a lot of alternatives.
We haven't used any Iridium services, but if the Globalstar phones are any indication (and they should be, as its a pretty similar system) the biggest difficulty is keeping the antenna on a satellite. You can lose a connection very easily, and with data just getting extra noise or interference is a lot more of a pain than having the audio from a call drop out for a half-second.
Once you add dishes to the equation (to get around losing calls from moving the phone) you're basically back to using a larger (but still portable) InMarSat system. If they can come up with a decent dish setup that runs off of batteries for more than 20 minutes of connect time, Iridium would have something novel to offer.
As it stands, the only thing Iridium is bringing to the table is the potential for lower costs through competition (I'm not complaining -- that's plenty for me!)
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Get yourself a PDA - e.g. Pilot or Cassiopeia (color display is nice for maps) - along with a handlebar mount (not sure how well that'll work on the BikeE, I have a Vision R-45 "real" recumbent myself.) Hook the PDA up to a GPS unit - there are a few of them that will do the trick, including Magellan - any one with an NMEA interface, which is most of them, is theoretically hook-uppable, but you don't need one with any fancy user interface features. Then use mapping software like Street Atlas USA (Solus is the name of their PDA app, which you can buy in a bundle with a GPS). Now you have something much more flexible, you can dock with your PC to set up routes instead of dealing with a brain-dead consumer GPS unit, you can easily upload the records of where you went into Street Atlas on your PC, etc., and in general the geek factor will be an order of magnitude higher!
Right.
Who said this was rs232? They don't mention all the protocols involved and you never know exactly what layer they are speaking of.
is it the radio MAC speed? Average throughput? Exact serial bits?
uess. :)
According to this page, you have to contact one of their service providers to find out if there's an additional charge. Being that their prices in general are pretty f'ing high, I wouldn't be surprised it doubled the cost per month. Just a g
With AOL's well known idea of speed and thier new pricing plan, you can!
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Help us build a better map!
Ugh. One of the reasons I enjoy biking (mountain biking) as much as I do is that it gets me as far away from computers as possible. I've considered getting a bike computer to keep track of mileage etc, but if I didn't break the damn thing in a crash I know I'd end up just riding *against* the computer and all the wonderful statistics it could provide. I'd rather *not* know how far or fast I've gone.
The sentiment of getting geeks into biking is good, though. In a way, I see biking as an extremely addictive videogame that's also good for you! A good technical trail is like a puzzle that is asking to be solved, and we all know us geeks love our puzzles...
"Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done".
It's only software!
Not quite. Iridium satellites orbit between (roughly) between both polar circles. Iridium service is not available near the poles.
-- Colin
Actually, this is becoming a more and more annoying problem. Not just with games, but with music and books (im starting to get really really annoyed that some books I _want_ are out of print) and what have you. It goes out of print, replaced with the mindboggling overproduction of entertainment today, and disappears for long before copyright can even expire.
In my opinion it's time to add a clause to copyright stating that if, at any time, production and sale of the product ceases in such a way that the product becomes unavailable for those who wish to obtain or purchase it, the copyright lapses and anyone should be allowed to copy or publish it. After all, the only reason there is a copyright at all is to promote more production of art through compensation, which means that if nobody is selling it anymore, there is no reason to allow the holder to retain that copyright.
The problem with satellite services is that they have a hard time competing. Everyone in any city or village larger than a few thousand people will have cheaper and faster connections through cable or DSL. And for reasonable roaming the cell networks will do it cheaper and faster. So the satellite services are left with trying to get the few interested subscribers in the boondocks and on antarctica to pay for a worldwide satellite communications network.
The ground based ways cant ever compete with the coverage of a sat network, but they can take almost every potential profitable customer there is. And the day that one in five penguins want Internet, you can be sure there will be a ground based provider opening up on the south pole too.
Now Indiana Jones, Laura Croft, or that couple from the Mummy won't have to chase after the bad guys, because the only map was stolen. Now they just have to wait for the meter to 100% after stalling 95%. Think of the movies it would be great!
The calculations are sound, which I applaud.
However, I couldn't imagine anybody seriously considering playing Quake over a satellite phone.
Why is it that just about every technology presented here is discussed in relation to Quake? Is it really necessary? Do people honestly think that Quake players will keep these technologies alive?
I'm more interested in ping times for it's impact on distributed computing and the development of real applications, especially those employing XMLRPC and SOAP. How quickly can I get search results from an LDAP server? Most importantly, how real-time is my telemetry data? Telemetry is the *real* killer app for technologies like this...
Basically, it's what remote weather stations, Mars rovers, satellites, etc. do. Want to monitor stats for a fleet of trucks? Want real-time geological or meteorological data from airplanes? Remote GPS tracking? Even web cams are considered telemetry devices.
The biggest problem in telemetry is the cost of doing satellite communications. Iridium will hopefully bring that cost down for terrestrial applications.
Couldn't you forget playing quake in antarctica since it's a 9.6k link? I think the bandwith is more of a concern there than ping time.
I wouldn't mind it, and I've seen a few choices under a grand (including used) which have been tempting. However, the BikeE was $500 (demo unit) and available, and served me well as a commuter bike for a while. Right now the gears are a little locked up and the brakes less than perfect, but soon I will seek out a bike shop to fix those things;)
... I'd like to ride across the country one day, and really I wouldn't object to the Bike E for that. In the meantime, I'll test-ride a few others and save up my money;)
A nice Vision would be the next step probably, but I do like certain trikes
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
You probably know about Steve Roberts and his various tricked-out vehicles, but they're always worth a mention :)
:)
:) I'm leaving now to get my GPS receiver, which I have determined will be a magellan GPS315, for better or worse. $150 at local walmart.*
... really, it's reasonable access that's missing. Merlin sucks (sorry, Verizon -- YOU SUCK, your coverage map is a transparent lie, and your customer service reps aren't paid enough to pretend to care), ricochet is spotty if speedy, and the 2-way satellite links require stock-stillness. When there is affordable, ubiquitous, unmetered wireless access (hey, I'd settle for North America, even a nice broad swatch of it!), *then* I could bike to work, and just keep biking ...
that's at http://www.microship.com/ (microship.com) and sheesh, this guy deserves even more than the ample attention he gets
I like my lo-end bikeE though, only wish it was more of a true recumbent, which I have not yet had a chance to ride. But they certainly look even more comfortable than mine
I have the twiddler, and something like a vaio picturebook would add little to the weight of the bike
timothy
*I know some people hate walmart, and they have their reasons. I happen to rather like the place, especially to watch how formerly esoteric technology trickles into widely accessable retail stores.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Low Earth Orbit: 320 000 to 800 000 meters
Speed of electromagnetic radiation: 299792458 meters/second
Ping times: 0.002 to 0.005 milliseconds (2-way)
Add another x milliseconds for turnaround, double that number for a worst-case scenario and you still have some pretty good ping times.
~ Give me 101 plastic soldiers, and I will conquer the world.
Have a look at the WizWheelz TerraTrike (www.wizwheelz.com). About a grand less than the Windcheetah and in some ways better laid out, IMHO (never been real fond of the Windcheetah's crotch joystick, for example).
(And no, I'm not affiliated in any way...I just think they make a really nice trike for the money.)
I can't believe how many people use telemetry.. I mean.. seriously.. does anyone really know what it means? (Yes, I'm sarcastically asking what telemetry is.)
©o,,o©©o,,o©©©o,
Technically, they should be able to do much better than that. While for geostationary satellites (with bidirectional comms), it's hard to get down latency to less than half a second, due to 4 times distance divided by speed of light, Iridiums low-orbiting LEO satellites should be able to give you much better ping times, considering they are so much closer. It's a pity that they're squandering thisnatural advantage of low-orbit by using cheap ground-equipment.
And 2400 kbps is nothing to phone home about either. Many geostationary systems can give you up to 40 Mbps bandwidth.
And it's probably much more expensive than most geostationary solutions either. Case in point: Italy's Netsystem is even free of charge, for Chrissakes!
So which advantage stays? Availability from anywhere in the world? Hey, just walk into a damn cybercafé if you want check your mail during a holiday. Btw, cybercafes are much easyer to find in Third World countires that in Europe or the US, because few locals have a computer at home, and thus cybercafes do have a market other than tourists.
you can run syndicate under win9x.. just run main, not synd.bat. I run it under vmware under linux so I should think you should be able to run it natively.
How we know is more important than what we know.
nah.. just force em at gun point to sign over the copyright.
How we know is more important than what we know.
why not just go to a second hand gamestore? oh wait.
How we know is more important than what we know.
why not? That is the point of granting monopoly control to copyright holders: once they've sold it to everyone who wants to buy it the work is supposed to pass into the public domain. That is why copyright is granted for limited times. That is the intent and 50 years after the death of the author is just rediculous for computer games.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I thought that the Navy's bailout of Iridium meant that they bought *all* of its capacity. I'm glad to hear that it's still available to civilians.
Anyone know what the latency is like?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Imagine being an archaeologist, geologist, paleontologist or land surveyor. Now you can instantly file field reports with your colleagues at home or even archive them into one's own home or office database for safekeeping and later retrieval. It think this will be invaluable to many. The revolution continues.
I researched this 9600 bps option for Cambodian community infrastructure.. but even with two of the Iridium investors being close to the leader of this project we still didn't buy into it.
They've been saying the same thing about how this fills a need for a long time, but other companies have also provided satellite data services for a long time.
You need a purchase case for a mobile phone or terminal. Doesn't compute unless maybe you're in the military.. or they have dropped prices from orbit.
Where do you get this? 9.6Kb / 8 = 1200 bytes/sec.
"That is the intent and 50 years after the death of the author is just rediculous for computer games."
;-)
Solution: Kill all the game developers now, so all the games will be free in 50 years!
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
If you surf over to their site... check out the video of the jet powered 'bent. OMFG. Gimme.
Now I just need to talk myself into spending the cash on a Wind Cheetah trike.
Can't people access the internet from anywhere using a big satellite dish? Sure, it's not portable, but how likely is it that you're going to be travelling somewhere that doesn't have a phone line (I suspect that the charges for this are going to wind up being more per minute than an international call . . .)?
And before you flame me, I ride my mountainbike several times a week.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Modern l337 implementations require bandwidth that is at least comparable to home-grade DSL. Case in point: I am posting this via a 28.8 modem. So while I am clearly able to be condescending (as in, "ha, ha! you misspelled condescending!"), this post's lack of positive moderation demonstrates a lack of l337 capabilities. And I am very l337, I assure you; the same post sent via T3 would have been personally modded to "+63, Homosexual Attraction" by Hemos upon being posted. If you aren't the newbie your UID implies, you would know that Hemos has performed similar "alterations" in the past.
Note the further use of condescension.
Anyhoo, I've wasted enough of reader time, good night.
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I like to watch.
I'd be happy to pay 300/month to have the freedom from the Internet and actually enjoy life and old dos games that won't run on my fucking computer, such as syndicate which keeps saying I dont have enough XMI memory, or take for instance Star Control II, which runs great but locks up sporadically. . . and the fact that I can't find Alone in the Dark on ANY warez site. . . it's depressing, and. . . I'm done for now.
Why would you need Irridium for this? You could do this with an ordinary cell phone with a data port. Believe it or not, most dense urban areas have good cell phone coverage.
The Economics of Website Security
Here's a link to an iridium service provider.
Summary: after all the initialization fees it costs $1.50/minute ($0.50/minute before Nov. 2001) or $0.99/minute if calling another iridium subscriber.
Who's With Me?
Geezus, Timothy, I think Taco may be paying you too much.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Cruise around wherever you want, if you cause enough trouble, some keystrokes from them and no matter where you are, no more service. Just like that.
All they need is your number. And that isn't too hard to get nowadays.
They've got to be able to cut off people who don't pay those astronomical bills y'know.
But at least we haven't got to the "Repent Harlequin said the Tick Tock Man" stage (by Harlan "Mr. Long Book Titles" Ellison)...
Cheerio,
Link.
I thought the whole Iridium horse was dead and buried. It looks like someone found a way to flog it for a few more months. Is anyone taking bets on how long it takes for this latest incarnation to go under? (You are more likely to make money that way than you would by investing in this boondoggle)
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Iridium is in LEO (Low earth orbit). This is why they need a constellation of 24+ birds for global coverage as opposed to the 3 or 4 that would be required with Geosynchronous satellites. There are some sattellite-based broadband services (1.5Mbit and faster data rates) that use a fixed, professionally-installed 1-meter dish. Supposedly it's pretty decent service if you don't care about having ~1 sec latency. They are able to reduce this with spiffy cacheing and prefetch strategies, but it is still sucks for any application that needs low ping times. It's much better suited for businesses than it is for consumers.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
About time, now all we need is a phone based on something like a Casiopeia handheld for the features (crisp colors, multimedia video/audio (mp3)) add some mpeg4 codec for video, a mini camera built-in or with some sort of holder for the device would make a sweet video phone on the desk :) ), a ibm 1GB microdrive, and off you go, TRUE pocket multimedia power, not only a buzzword, all the gadgets a geek will ever dream (mp3, phone, agenda, video, yadi yada), It's getting so close to me, I can feel it! (well at least dream it :) )
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Dude, if anyone is stuck playing quake from antartica, he should get fragged for real to be put out of his misery. And besides, a ticket to USA will probably cost less than a month playing quake from there :)
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So in the very best case, the ping time will be *at least* half a second, and I suspect probably closer to a second in reality. Forget playing Quake in Antartica
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Whould it be possable to make a nokia pci(mcia) card that could be used in a lappy? It would be easy to string some antena wire through the display casing and plug it into the card. Then we could have 9.6k connections with out haveing to load around any extra gizmo's other than the solar pannel.
Ascii artist &
m/25/the amazon jungle
And that's totally ignoring the fact that if you are traveling to a place remote enough that you would need to connect to the internet via satellite, any overwhelming urge to play Quake ought to be countered with an equally overwhelming urge to paint the walls with one's own brains. Sheesh, get a life.
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< )
( \
X
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
[Insert Tongue in Cheek]
You would likely need a text mode version of quake. And play only other people on polar expeditions.
wireless text mode quake vs the russians.
could possibly compete with WAP mode Quake.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
No, they're considerably lower than geosynchronous orbit. Remember, they cover the globe with small, low-power transmitters. If they *were* in the Clarke belt, they'd miss Antarctica completely.
I forget what height they orbit at, I daresay someone will tell me....
Great, now I have to worry when the guy driving in front of me realizes that his post on /. just got modded down...
wonderful
(define the-question (or (* 2 b) (not (* 2 b))))
Can't touch my Litespeed Team Issue with Dura Ace. Cycling geeks rule!
Ah, the French company Mavic has made these for years. I see guys with them every now and then. Apparently the early ones had some problems, but v2.0 is supposedly pretty nice.
I haven't tried them, but they make other nice stuff... wheels, brakes, cranks. Check it out.
Not in an fps! You need a minimal bandwidth, but if you had a low ping time you could string 3 or 4 of these together to get up to 28k. I'd prefer to play on a 50ms 64k ISDN line then a 300ms T1!
Of course, ping time is minimal, infact less then the ping time from one side of america to the other via fibre with no stops on route (these satelites are only a few hundered miles up - maybe 1000 round trip)
So in the very best case, the ping time will be *at least* half a second, and I suspect probably closer to a second in reality. Forget playing Quake in Antartica ...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Iridium's best service will access the Internet at a pedestrian 10 kilobytes per second. Most home computer telephone modems connect five times faster.
note that it specificaly says kiloBYTES
the question here is, is this a typo, or is it really kilobytes and the writer, Jim Wolf, just doesn't have a clue that "56k" is 56kilobits and not kilobytes...?
Heh, it's nice to see that some geeks are riding bikes. I know but a few people with that funny urge to travel around the world on a bike, with a wireless 'net connection!
Anyways, I hope that more bikers get into puters, and vice versa. Maybe then, I'll get a chance to have a microchip-controlled rear derailleur (and don't recommend the shimano crap)
Hey, this sounds kinda cool. But how useful is it now that so much is graphic based. This would be awesome to have if more webpages were viewable with lynx and gopher was still as popular as it once was. Plus, with lower cell phone rates, national plans, free nights and weekends, and other options like the faster, although slower to expand, ricochet service, is this really worth it for the speed they give you? Still cool I guess. I was surprised to see that Iridium is trying to make a comeback... Maybe there new business plan will be more successful..
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
You mean I can be 1337 and condecending anytime and anywhere I want?
end communication
Nope. Iridium was delayed becuase one of the ground stations was in Canada and the Feds wanted to be able to tap it. I think they made arrangements for remote access.
Also, the Chinese government has control of the airwaves in China. If Iridium doesn't have a license, they can't operate there. They must make concessions to make the government happy. I believe that Iridium blocks access from countries that haven't issued licenses. That's also why satellite communications prices are so high--- to satisfy countries with state-owned telecom monopolies.
Better start signing up for CTY positions :-)
If you want unlimited data and don't care about the satellite access but need more coverage than Ricochet, Bell South's Mobitex network has unlimited plans around $50/month. You can use a radio modem, or like me, use a RIM 2-way pager. It's popular for trucks and other embedded systems. IIRC, its about 9.6 Kb/s
If you need satellite access Orbcomm had the first LEO satellite constellation. I think in some areas, satellites store the messages until they are in sight of a ground station, so its not completely real time, but works just fine for trucking and remote sensing apps. In fact, some oil fields are controlled via the network.
The Iridium sats are in Low Earth Orbit so that they can get sufficient signal strength for a handheld device to connect. This means that the arctic regions are covered, and also that the network needs a lot of satellites -- which it has. Ping time is probably not good compared to landlinks but is nowhere near the delay you'd expect from geosynchronous.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Since there's no "investor relations" link on the Iridium page, I'll just ask the question here:
Is this Iridium:
a) the same Iridium in which I bought shares a couple years ago, or
b) a different Iridium with the same name and all the same assets but none of the debts, and now mysteriously owned by somebody else?
Yes, "someone who knew what they were doing" does indeed appear to have bought the satellites and infrastructure, but I wonder who they bought it from? The part of Iridium satellites and infrastructure I used to own (by buying stock in the normal way) has now become someone else's, through a mysterious process that did not involve actual payment to me. That must be what they mean by a "free" market.
This post is filled with logical fallacies. To wit...
How exactly, or what makes you so sure, are the next owners of the Iridium network going to be able to increase data throughput? I doubt a cut-rate satphone venture is going to be able to afford to launch a second-generation constellation.
Even if your pirate broadcast scheme were technically feasible, I think the pirates are probably a lot safer now in their unmarked van. My $200 GPS receiver is accurate to some 30 feet. Let's be conservative and say that the FCC can only narrow down the broadcast to a 60-foot circle. Well, gee, guess what, know who's broadcasting? The guy with the cell phone, mic, and two cd decks strapped to his back. Even in NYC -- hell, even in New Dehli -- it wouldn't be so hard to find that jackass.
I'm impressed that you managed to get modded up, but yours is one of the number posts I've read lately.
Huh, never mind, I originally thought your UID was in the mid-40k's. Guess that means IHBT. Good one.
Hi, I'm a pretentious cock who will make some gay comment about ignoring AC posts here.
strom, you're a dirty old man. and it was a good one nonetheless. however, I think your post could have been improved had you inserted a fake "Read the rest of this comment..." link to the nefarious site of your choice. But that's just my uninformed opinion.
Hi, I'm a pretentious cock who will make some gay comment about ignoring AC posts here.
Iridium LLC suffered from the original pricing problems with handsets and service costs. I'm yet to see any figures that addresses these problems for data. A lot of comapnies that bought into the revamped Iridium get value, as they don't have to wear the huge infrastructure costs as the original did.
GreyPoopon
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GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
You can already IRC from almost anywhere if your phone/pager has an email or SMS client. It's not perfect, but it works and it's free. Too bad my provider(rhymes with horizon)'s email service is so poor.
The F.C.C. always has a hard-on to catch these guys.
Not really. In my area, three pirate stations were raided all on the same day a few years ago. One operated from a very well-known location and got a lot of publicity. Heck, that station even had it's own remote truck, complete with the hydraulic mast. They were rumored to be cutting into the listener base of a local rock station. The FCC doesn't have the resources or desire to chase down every AM/FM pirate, especially ones that don't generate a lot of complaints.
I have heard of pirate radio stations that operate like this: A van loaded with a transmitter and other broadcasting equipment drives around a small area, say a few square miles. The F.C.C. always has a hard-on to catch these guys.
When the current incarnation of Iridium declares bankruptcy and threatens a satellite storm and is bailed out by the government and sold for pennies on the dollar, the new owners will be able to implement significantly higher transmission rates and sell the service at a bargain. People who pirate tunez, warez, or pr0n could locate themselves in a dense urban area, say NYC, and cruise around on a bike or on foot, broadcasting anything. The F.C.C. guys would be able to get GPS coordinates for the location, but if you factor in the error and the population density, it would be practically impossible to locate the perpetrator.
People tend to think technology will be used to enslave us, but here is a case of technology increasing liberty.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
at princeton university: http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/ 06/04/stifgnusa01007.html
Please excuse the shameless self-promotion -- but it is on topic and will answer many questions posted.
My company, Global Synergies (GS) is introducing a Satellite Email System (the GS200) that utilizes a real-time packet data network that enables Global Synergies to offer Satellite Email and Instant Messaging (IRC) at a fraction of the cost of traditional satellite systems, without per minute airtime charges.
For example, the cost of sending or receiving 1 page of email (approximately 2400 characters) via traditional satellite systems will cost between $15 to $25 compared to $1.20 on the Global Synergies network.
As I mentioned, we charge for the quantity of data transmitted instead of the time it takes to transmit. Our speed is the same blazing pace of other satellite companies but we provide a SatCom Client that basically turns your computer into a local server. When email arrives on the GS server it is automatically downloaded to your computer so the speed of transmission is transparent to the user and since you are not paying for the time it takes to transmit who cares how long it takes.
The latency of the IRC is on par with that of a dial-up modem. Logging on to the server can take a couple of minutes but once connected, messages are transmitted within a few seconds.
The GS network provides coverage for most of North America (Nome is out of luck but Anchorage will probably have coverage). All of Central America, the Caribbean, and the Northern part of South America also have coverage.
Price -$30 per month buys you 15 KB of data. If you use 16KB then you are charged $2.00/KB, if you use 100 KB then the rate drops down to $1.20. There are no plans to sign up for -- except for the $30 minimum, you pay for what you use and if you happen to use more in a month then you automatically take advantage of volume discounts.
Iridium charges $1.50 per minute with a 1-minute minimum and $20 per month service fee. Phone will run you $895 and additional bells and whistles required to send email, from a boat for example, will run an additional $1800. This compares to $1984 for the GS200.
Our website is up and running but it is only a 1st draft to get the phone number online. Check the site in a couple of weeks for a new version.
As I said, please excuse the shameless self-promotion but we rely on questions, comments and criticism to improve our service.
Regards,
Bob