2MBps Bandwidth Anywhere Via Suitcase Transmitter

mysticbob writes: "This newly announced suitcase satellite xmtr does 2MBps upstream, anywhere in the world, and sounds easy to use. Could be useful (someday) for lots of remote users. Of course, it does require your ISP have a satellite NAP ... " This looks similar to (but sleeker than) another satellite video connection box we featured a little while ago, but without a built-in monitor. How small will these be in 5 years?

Comments

Re:The Latency?

[Molina the Bofh]

There is a very interesting article about TCP that has more details on this. It's worth reading the whole article.

For those who don't have time/patience to read the full article, here's the most relevant part:

"Satellite-based services pose a set of unique issues to the network designer. Most notably, these issues include delay, bit errors, and bandwidth.

When using a satellite path, there is an inherent delay in the delivery of a packet due to signal propagation times related to the altitude of communications satellites. Geo-stationary orbit spacecraft are located at an altitude of some 36,000 km, and the propagation time for a signal to pass from an earth station directly below the satellite to the satellite and back is 239.6 ms. If the earth station is located at the edge of the satellite view area, this propagation time extends to 279.0 ms. In terms of a round trip that uses the satellite path in both directions, the RTT of a satellite hop is between 480 and 560 ms.

The strength of a radio signal falls in proportion to the square of the distance traveled. For a satellite link, the signal propagation distance is large, so the signal becomes weak before reaching its destination, resulting in a poor signal-to-noise ratio. Typical BERs for a satellite link today are on the order of 1 error per 10 million bits (1 ¥ 10-7). Forward error correction (FEC) coding can be added to satellite services to reduce this error rate, at the cost of some reduction in available bandwidth and an increase in latency due to the coding delay. "