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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?
This looks just what you need for those broadband connections to the Congo or whatever but the cost is going to put it out of range for even the most technophile business users. Think about it, Inmarsat-M (9600 bps) costs about $4 a minute. Inmarsat-B (64K bps) costs about $10/min. I doubt that this is going to run at less that $40/min. After that even AOL looks good value :-)
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Does anybody here know if this type of equipment is harmful, in terms of radiation or exposure to the transmitted beam?
Something that small that can transmit at 2Mbits/sec must be quite powerful. What is the tranmission carrier? Microwave?
5 years ? Given that by then the 3G networks will be very entrenched and will be offering 2Mbps or more, why bother with a Sat ? Sure for the "very remote" but if you don't have the mass consumer market then those remote instances will still be very very expensive.
Another interesting gimmick to put alongside Iridium. Cellular technology makes a million times more sense in terms of cost, ease of use and availablity. Do you realy want to have a mobile network that only works if you can lob the suitcase outside ? Not very useful in an inner office or at the airport.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Sure these uplink boxes may be small in 5 years, but they won't be mainstream.
Generic hardware scales well. Invent something, make a million of them, costs plummet. But this also requires a sizable chunk of satellite bandwidth, and you can bet that not only can the current satellite infrastructure not handle more than a handful of these uplinks, but that that infrastructure will grow a whole hell of a lot more slowly than would be required for a cheap uplink box in 5 years.
More to the point, what company would pony up the dough to field a team of these satellites, with so unproven and nacent a market? I think we all remember Iridium...
Kevin Fox
3) Here is an idea , place one of these on every plane.. get it to instantly send back all "black box" information , plus a live video feed of the cockpit. Could have saved alot of lives on 9/11.
Won't work. Several reasons:
1. Not enough connectivity. There are a lot of airplanes in the air at any given moment.
2. Cameras can be disabled. Takes a pice of duct-tape, e.g.. About as hig-tech as the other equipment used on 9/11.
3. What does live information help if nobody is monitoring it? Cost is the keyword here.
4. If such a box goes down, what will you do? Shot down the plane, because you cannot be sure it is hijacked?
I am getting really tired of all these magic, foolprof ways that could have prevented 9/11.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
In fact, the primary use of this new satellite uplink system IS for video feeds.
I remember 11 years ago when CNN had to literally move a truckload of equipment from Jordan to Iraq in order to allow Peter Arnett to broadcast from Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm with broadcast-quality video, mostly because of the large size of the antenna needed to uplink to a satellite.
At 2 megabits/second uplink speed, this new system has enough bandwidth to have picture quality very close to that you get with a traditional uplink to satellite. This means high-quality picture just about anywhere in the world, and may spell the end of the videophone except in areas where extreme portability is a must.
Given that the whole setup is probably smaller than most checked luggage, expect within 18 months the likes of CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, the major American TV networks, BBC, ITV, etc. to use them on a large scale.
could be more powerful than a suitcase nuke.
(China for one... uncensored internet access...)