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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
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?
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.
That pesky speed of light is just too slow.
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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
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. "
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
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.
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.
How small will these be in 5 years?
Like every other gadget... small enough to lose in the couch.