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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?
The cost of this will be high. But this will mean
1) Real streaming video from anywhere in the world. No more of this videophone stuff on sky news.
2) Internet Cafe in the middle of no where. 2mb spead accross 20 computers still ain't half bad. Espically when you are 200 miles from the nearest fixed line.
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.
Anyway... like alot of things , it may be expensive for these now.. but give it 6 months or a year.
Cruise TT
This thing is neat!
2 Mbps is pretty sufficient bandwidth; does anyone know what typical latency is for a satellite link? If it's measured in seconds, that's pretty rough...
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?
This unit is a "unique, IP-based solution" with a pretty heavy duty upstream bandwidth of 2 Mbit/s.
Sweet...
One problem though...
I read the article top to bottom - TWICE, and as far as I can tell, the downstream bandwidth is 0 Mbit/s.
Well, maybe two problems. Not only does there seem to be ZERO downstream bandwidth, they avertize it as an "IP-based solution". Maybe I'm mistaken, but all IP based protocalls I'm familiar require an upstream SYN and a down stream SYN/ACK before you can send any data.
So, what happens? You send nothing but SYN packets at 2 Mbit/s? Sounds like the only thing the unit is good for is a pretty nasty mobile Denial_Of_Service attack station.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
This newly announced suitcase satellite xmtr does 2MBps upstream
Unfortunately, the downstream speed is only 300 baud. Oh well.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
How small will these be in 5 years?
That's not the question to ask. The question is really: how cheap will they be? 90% of the cool stuff like this never gets to mass-market because he price is prohibitively high. Of course, if they come down, I'm getting one, but that if is a big one.
I'm sick of seeing 16.0 kbps RealPlayer video clips from Afghanistan.
Thought wow 2 MBytes. That is a whole lot of bandwidth out of an item that small...It is 2 Mbit per second.
Oh well, tone down excitement. Bad editor, bad, bad editor, got me all excited.
Satellite transmitters have a higher power requirement than a notebook computer or cell phone. You will need some hefty batteries if you really want to go remote. The suitcase is for the power, not the electronics.
So when will batteries get smaller?
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Gee, and we thought clear-text was dangerous across land lines. In fact, following along the echelon/big brother lines, here in Virginia I have actually seen very large satellite be built, then seen a house nearby be taken over by Feds. The thought is they are sitting in the house pulling down all the transmissions directly from the satellite for mass monitoring.
The company
The Press Release
The SWE-DISH site (requires flash) Also has a PDF of the specs for this boxes.
From the specs:
Encodes live Windows MEdia, Mpeg 4, Real Media and Mpeg 2.
Also has e-mail, ftp, internet as well.
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
Ok, great. We can get 2Mb/s anywhere in the world. But the transmitter is as large as a suitcase. Too inconvienent, you say? Does anybody remember the first cellular phones? Those things were about the size of a small backpack, and you could only use them in a car. Not do mention the cost. Those things were damned expensive. But now, you can go anywhere that sells wireless phones, and pick up one that fits in the palm of your hand, and pay less than $200 for the privliage.
It's the same with the first "laptop" computers, they were about the size of a minitower desktop, and you could only use them if you had a power source to plug into. If you had less than $5000 to spend on a computer, forget about it! But now, you can go to any computer store, and pick up a palm pilot (which has more processing power than the machine my family paid $3000 for back in 1987 had), for a cool $199.98.
I guess the point i'm trying to make is, wait a few years. Given time, technology will shrink and grow less expensive, and thus more avaliable to the common geek.
I see people talking about how incredibly expensive this must be, as well as saying things like "Now we can get internet in the congo".
Let me enlighten you a bit.
You can already get internet just about anywhere via satellite. Yes, it will require a fixed installation and a hefty dish, but it's commercially available, NOT rediculously expensive (comparable to landline), and works quite well, all things considered.
Yes, the latency is high, thanks to the laws of the universe and all that... but if your choice is no internet, or 2Mbps with a 450ms latency tacked on off the bat, the 2Mbps will do fine. (it only really sucks for gaming anyway.. websurfing is fine)
The benefits of this portable, small unit are just that. It's portable, and it's small. It's not a breakthrough in satellite communications, only in portability.
This doesn't look to be an ISP delivering service either, like people mentioning inmarsat, etc... It's simply a satellite rig that can be used with a multitude of birds. There are a number of ISPs out there that have sattellite capability.
It's a definite issue, but they are a bit misleading as well.
If you consider the satellite communications from a raw radio perspective, you ahve to take this stuff into account... what am I trying to send, how am I going to encode it, etc.
The thing is, as long as the satellite layer has error correction of it's own, TCP will deal with it. (because TCP won't see the errors)
And satellite is no different than any other form of RF communication. It doesn't present any other challenges, other than having a higher latency than other connectins. The distance - signal - noise garbage is the same for any transmitter. You can't just say 'it's far, so it's hard'. It also depends on your transmitter, receiver, output power, etc.
You get the exact same issues trying to engineer a radio linke 20 miles long using microwave gear.
...that Disney[?] movie with Tim Allen?
First thing he does when he gets to the island is set up his laptop and start trading coffee beans [which is funny that he is trading in NY when the coffee is harvested only miles to the south].
This sort of thing would help a lot if let's say, you were the president of Enron and you wanted to be out of the country when you bail on the stock. You don't want to play Quake over this, but trading stock would be nice. Pick a few quotes, and just have those streamed. Then you've got that huge uplink to make sure your purchases get sent.
Don't say that 300 baud [d/l] isn't fast enough to get quotes. My ***** has an old computer he _has_ to use to get quotes for work and the modem is 300 baud. Slow enough to make a present calculator able to break the encryption in real time.
I guess it would also be nice if you are hosting warez and want to stay on the run. Are we going to start seeing mobile pr0n sites from the jungle?
Get your Unix fortune now!
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
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.
Good luck getting that suitcase through airport security.
My sigs always suck.
No, the suitcase is for the antenna and electronics. Power is external. 24VDC is one of the options. Sounds like if you want to run it away from the mains, you'd better have either a generator, a tap into one of the big trucks with 24V batteries, or a van set up for the job.
Since it has 2MHz upload and 300 Hz download, it's not for internet surfing, but rather for a mobile TV camera crew.
could be more powerful than a suitcase nuke.
(China for one... uncensored internet access...)
"Anyway... like alot of things , it may be expensive for these now.. but give it 6 months or a year."
I doubt it. This is the type of thing that the military would really find interesting, and as long as it's interesting to the Gov't, the price will stay up. It's an interesing concept though. Imagine a command tank that has one of these guys in it sending/receiving that much data. Then it relays the connection to nearby soldiers wirelessly (like 802.11 only secure?) so they can get information to their HMD's.
And then the army commanders can move their soldiers around point and click just like Command and Conquer!
"Derp de derp."
"I am getting really tired of all these magic, foolprof ways that could have prevented 9/11"
I agree with you that every SINGLE solution doesn't seem like a likely candidate to avoid that particular tragedy. I think one of the big concerns people have is the lack of information on what really happened. I'm really curious about what happened to the plane that went down when the people took out the hijackers. A 2 megabit two-way connection on an airplane can transmit a heck of a lot of data, at least when it's compressed.
It is widely believed that the people on board that plane got wind of what happened in NYC and DC and that's why they decided to pay the ultimate price to stop it. Now lets say that this information made it to the plane that hit the second tower. Could the people on board that plane prevented it from hitting the tower? It's alot easier to prevent 300+ people from using a phone on a plane than it is to prevent them from typing/reading a text message.
This is probably irrelevent now because I believe that anybody who hijacks a plane today is likely to get overwhelmed by the passengers, even if they don't intend to take out a building with it. I do believe, though, that having the blackbox actually transmit what is going on is vitally important. Remember that plane that crashed in NYC shortly after takeoff? It was impossible to tell for at least a day or two if that was a terrorist related attack. The reason for the delay was it took that long to find the black box.
If the black box were transmitting somewhere, even in a lossy data format, at least we'd have a clue as to whether or not it was an accident. What difference does a day make? A day is an eternity for somebody to disappear.
Getting back on topic, would this device work on an airplane? I don't think so. Im looking at the picture of the device and it shows a dish. My understanding is that the dish would need to be pointing at a satellite. I'm not sure an airplane would be able to track it. Even if it could, mounting the dish on the plane would be an aerodynamics problem, at least the way its designed now.
Is it possible to modify this device for air travel though? My knowledge of satellite technology is really limited, if somebody could educate me on this topic I'd really appreciate it.
"Derp de derp."
How small will these be in 5 years?
Like every other gadget... small enough to lose in the couch.
Of course it's geographically limited. The point of this was that you need an ISP that has satellite capabilities. Fixed access, or semi-fixed.
I didn't understand it to be for real roaming, where you could set it up instantly, anywhere, and get net access...
Did it not say that the ISP was above and beyond this?
I am getting really tired of all these magic, foolprof ways that could have prevented 9/11.
Gee, that's too bad, because they're going to keep coming until one (or more likely more) of them work. You can often solve problems by generating lots of mostly silly ideas as step one.
Maybe there isn't enough connectivity yet, but that will gradually change as all aircraft, ships at sea, buoys, mountaintops, satellites, etc. become nodes. This might be one incentive to create it.
Cameras can be disabled with duct tape, true, so why are there still so many security cameras out there? Why do so many criminals get caught on camera?
Just put an arbitrarily large number of small CCD cameras on board and you'll solve the duct tape problem. Imagine a strip of one-way glass (smoky, mirrored, whatever) running the length of the aircraft ceiling, with who knows how many cameras behind it.
Nobody monitoring live info? That would change the instant any camera went dark, or whited out, or whatever. All remaining cameras would immediately get live viewers, and the previous N minutes of recorded video from all the cameras would be retransmitted ASAP to the nearest listener.
What do you do if a box goes down, shoot down the plane? No, you escort it down and only shoot if it violates the escort.
I'm not saying that these solutions don't suggest their own problems. I'm also skeptical of live video transmissions in the near term. I'm just saying that if you want to solve a problem, you don't immediately dismiss all solutions that appear to have some sort of flaw. There may be something of value in some of them.
Keep the suggestions coming.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
I'd be more worried about terrorists doing things like blowing up dams, or sabotaging a bunch of power plants simultaneously . . . :(
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Yes, it is dangerous. It's also unidirectional and pointed up, more or less. Don't get in the way of the dish when it's on. People who can manage to avoid putting their hands in switched-on blenders or putting their heads in fireplaces should have little trouble with the concept.