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Another Stab At Internet Access By Satellite
dpilgrim writes "As someone who probably won't live long enough to see DSL or cable Internet reach my rural neighborhood, I follow the 'Satellite Wars' pretty closely. Looks like Echostar is claiming once again they have a viable high-speed Internet access satellite under construction. Really. They do. According to this AP story, they have pictures and all. The big news is that based on this 'new evidence' the FCC has rescinded their revocation of Echostar's license. Yes, this submission came to you 44,000 miles over Starband's satellite link, and Starband is an Echostar partner. Wonder how long that relationship will last?"
I had to do a few homework assignments about satalite networks in college and the physics seem to make this a waste of time. It takes too long for the signal to get up and down and back. Customers will likely just stick with the fast and reliable land based lines.
While on the subject, can anyone comment on what their experience is with satellite based internet connections? How fast, what sort of latencies, downtime, weather impact etc.
I'm interested to get a DirecWay system, but one of the things that worries me is that it requires special software (supposedly).
You wonder why there are so few hits from African countries? Because the only reliable link is over satellite, which usually connects to a European ISP. Yes indeed, this message is brought to you over PanAmSat connect to the Irish Web-Sat ISP from the oil-rich country of Nigeria.
My upstream is 64kbytes/sec, downstream is 2Mbits. Unless it rains a tropical storm, in which case the connection ceases to exist.
For the interested, check out http://www.directonpc.com.
Down in Antarctica, the only internet access available is by satellite -- and it's so impossibly slow that when that woman down there got breast cancer, they barely could get the doctor's recommendations and instructions for a biopsy over the satellite, since it only worked every few hours at best and the transfer rate was something akin (no exaggeration!) to 300Bps.
In fact, it's so bad that some groups are actually considering running a digital fiber line all the way to the south pole.
Sounds like your setup is improperly crosspoled.
I work with a guy that has satellite 'net access and the only issue he's had with it is the upstream latency, which is why they do not suggest it for real-time gaming. Other than that he's pleased with it, but I've never actually sat in front of his machine.
As for my own personal satellite experience, I worked with a business that used satellite internet access and it was horribly slow. The only thing I could figure out was that the provider sucked and it's not a usual satellite internet issue seeing as how my friend and others are happy with it.
Round trip ping times are extreme and completely unusable for online gaming
I was under the impression, by calculating the distances using the speed of light in a vacuum, that LEO (low earth orbit, eg. iridium) satellites had ping times in the 20 ms range, whereas GEO (geosynchronous earth orbit) satellites were in the 500 ms range.
Which is fine and dandy for LEO, but is this solution a GEO one? If GEO, then the ping time is a problem. But if it is a LEO solution, not so much. In fact, I get longer ping times to my cable provider from my telco.
The LEO 20 ms would be round trip airwave; presumably the sat. provider would put the hubs on the backbones. Or be backbones themselves.
I have one word for you rural people...Wireless. I too was without cable/DSL due to our mountaintop home, then as I was picking up the phone to order a satellite link I accidently heard of a wireless service that had just popped up. Works like a charm even though we're miles away from the transmitter. Look for this stuff to pop up in your neighborhood. It's 802.11a technology. Latency? I think a whopping 50ms.
Because I have satellite internet here... it's full duplex 1.5Mbps. Yes, the latency is high, 420ms for the satellite hop, but other than that, and the occasional solar outage, which is entirely predictable, it works just fine. Realtime gaming is out, of course, but surfing is fine. You do notice the latency, but it's not enough to annoy you.
And you totally missed the point.. satellite internet is always going to have high latency, yes, but the coverage is excellent.. it's ideal for places that don't have land based lines.
Obviously if a high speed landline is available, you won't choose satellite.
Completely forgetting about telnet is not a bad idea. But SSH? Even over satellite, it's really quite reliable.
I work for a company that provides internet access to REALLY rural schools. Bush Alaska. It's hard to get more rural than that.
I oversee the maintenance of over 140 servers across the state (at least one per site) and have to both use SSH and a web interface on a regular basis. Not just to monitor the server status, but also to UPDATE the damn things (software packages of over 20 MB on occasion).
Unless the weather at the site is crap (or has been, and has knocked the dish off axis a bit) I hardly ever have trouble with keeping a reliable SSH connection. Waiting for the web interface to load takes a bit more time over the satellite link is a noticible delay, but it doesn't render my job impossible. Not even unenjoyable. We used to use NT 4 and PC Anywhere. That was unenjoyable, but not impossible.
Yeah, we use a proxy (Squid) at the sites to make browsing a bit more responsive (it is a noticeable difference), but that doesn't affect messengers (MSN, Yahoo, AIM) or video conferencing (distance learning, or one teacher at one site teaching classes at several sites, WITH INTERACTION).
Sure, satellite sucks in comparison to terrestrial bandwidth delivery, but it's not the tar pit that so many people here claim it to be.
In Europe (Astra coverage) there is also Europe Online (www.europeonline.com) which provides 1 way satellite access + multicast services. FileFetch is great, request any file from the internet and you can get it (about a day) later over the satellite - you do not have to be online at the time. Pretty cheap too, especially if you manage to find one of the cheap DVB cards with teh service bundled.