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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 The big news is that based on this 'new evidence' the FCC has rescinded their revocation of Echostar's license.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?"
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.
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.