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Ariane Launches A New Way To Get Online
pdaoust007 writes "According to the BBC, 'Europe's Ariane 5 rocket has lifted off after three earlier delays, carrying the world's largest commercial telecoms satellite.' There is also coverage from the CBC and some video here." What's really interesting is what's on board that satellite, though: "Telesat Canada, a subsidiary of BCE, has commercialized the Ka-band technology to allow universal high-speed access to internet service. Apparently, this should make high speed access available anywhere in North America. Gear will be $500 and service $60/month ($CDN)."
How much bandwidth do they have? It seems like eventually they'll oversubscribe and people will simply be better off with dialup.
I still get my internet access at 1200 baud via Sputnik, tovarishi.
Get your own free personal location tracker
It seems that you don't even need dial-up for uploading things. That was the biggest problem for sattelite internet until now, great that it has been solved!
$60 Canadian is about $46 US Dollars, in case anyone wanted to know. If the latency is good (which it likely won't be), this might not be a bad broadband option.
Send/track messages to 100K people: www.xPressAlert.com
> the Ka-band technology
As a side effect, all radar detectors in North America will spontaneously go off and keep doing so until thrown away.
It's as if millions of speeders suddenly cried out in rage, then were suddenly silenced.
Well, unless you account for the global warming. Servers don't work well in a puddle of water.
Yup, as we all know, US=world and North America equals the Universe.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
... And to add to the list of goodies, a natural place for penguins to dwell!
I just felt a distubance in the force. Like a million canada jokes, all shouted out loud,and were suddenly silenced...
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
High speed download access , but DSL (at best) upload access. So yeah it's cool, good for people in remote places without DSL/Cable access ..but I wonder who will pay the alleged $500 upfront cost in rural areas .....
Oh wait, Porn ! Ahhh if only research against cancer was half as popular.
Depends whether you class high-speed as only meaning high bandwidth, as I'd expect ping times to be slow on such a service.
Similar to the current offering from DIRECTWAY and DIRECTV?a tionwide-satellite.html
http://www.high-speed-internet-access-guide.com/n
...is there a link out there to any info about the broadband service?
I am seriously interested.
Can I get the earth station gear in PCMCIA format?
If so, will there be an OSX/Linux/*BSD/Solaris driver?
If this service is accessible while mobile, I am getting rid of my voice line and DSL link.
At $60/month for wireless broadband, that's a hell of a lot cheaper than what telus mobility was offering last time I checked.
Admittedly it would be latent as hell... but I can live with that...
"Prime Linux Location" :P
Cable in Canada runs about $45.00/mo. The modem can be bought for about $60.00 bundled with the service.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Depends on the satellite system. Thaicom has iPSTAR, which provides 4 Mb/s down, 2 Mb/s up. That's not bad.
But, you have to be in their service area.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
$60/month probably isn't that bad, considering how Canadian dollars are comparable to monopoly money down here. But I'm glad that the dot-com fizzle didn't stop interest in telecommuting. I've never understood how you could successfully run a WAN with one big router floating around in outer space, but if it works, swell. Ka band satellites I guess are a little out of the ordinary. Normally C, X, and maybe K bands are popular, yes?
Did you even read the summary of the fucking article? 500 Canadian for the dish. Not 1000. 50/mo for service, not 100.
Echostar, DirectWay, and StarBand (http://www.starband.com/ all have two way broadband available in the US. Echostar charges $500 for equipment and $65/mo. They use compression and a modified ip stack to get you ~1Mbit down and ~64Kbit up for HTTP and FTP protocols. Bypassing their ip stack gets you ~56Kbit down and ~128Kbit up.
These systems are widely used by Gas Stations (Chevron), and retailers for inventory/accounting/etc to the central office.
I was forced do go with the Echostar solution until my area got CableModem service. If its the only thing available, then its better than dial-up.
I have serious doubts about the success of this project. Does anybody remember Iridium? Their satellites are still in orbit, and pretty much all they do now is reflect sunlight.
The Iridium project was started with a similar goal in mind: to give cellular phone access to anywhere around the globe. Given the cost of launching the satellites (and the phones themselves, which were about 10 times larger than regular cellular phones), Iridium lost a lot of customers who realized that worldwide cellular access simply wasn't worth the price and the equipment size. Except for a few truly adventurous types, nobody signed up.
This project has a noble goal, but I think that it has the same destiny as Iridium. $60/month is more than anyone currently pays for DSL, and save for those few people who really need high speed access in rural areas (I suspect there aren't a lot of people there that can't survive off of dialup), there really is no market for their product/service.
Another problem, Ka band has high losses in rain. May work for Phoenix, may not work for Portland.
Penguins are in the Southern Hemisphere, out of range I'm afraid. We could import 'em.
"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces." --Aldo Leopold (Paraphrased)
Is this another reason for our revnue-ehancement troops (highway patrol) to continue their move to lidar speed traps rather than the standard KA band radar?
This guy is way out there
Barring sudden improvements on the speed of light, any geosync satellite is going to suck mud through a straw from a latency perspective. There is just no way around that 75,000 km round trip.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
Oh well, Canada again pioneering the way of the *non-military* satellites (first commercial geostationary communication satellite was by Telesat Canada as well :)
For cities, like Toronto, this will do absolutely nothing since they already have a few MBps though DSL/Cable.
Her name comes from the French spelling of Ariadne - an old goddess of fertility form Crete and Mistress of the Labyrinth. In later Greek mythology, Ariadne's divine origins were submerged and she became known as the daughter of King Minos of Crete, who conquered Athens after his son was murdered there.
SHE does throw dice.
Sorry. Further down the page is the Enterprise version, which gives 8 Mb/s down, 4 Mb/s up.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
there are a lot of places in N. America where your options for internet service are either nothing or nothing. With a service like this, one could go camping at Big Bend, Yellowstone, or Canyonlands National Park, and check email in the heat of the day :)
For a house, sure, it's not ideal when cable / DSL is available and cheap, but for mobility, this would be great. (At least, and I'm hoping-guessing, if it doesn't take ultra-finicky setup like current sat. options do.)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
No, because the CRIA has started equivalent actions in Canada.
Knowing nothing about Ka-band I ran a search. According to a Jan 03 article this year will see the first implementations of ka-band with North America leading the way. from the article: "Nour said it is expected that first implementations will be seen in 2004. For example, SpaceWay, owned by Hughes Networks Systems, based in Germantown, Md., a division of Hughes Electronics Corp, plans to launch Ka-band that year. And WildBlue, based in Greenwood Village, Co., plans to jump into the industry at the same time."
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Having just finished a stint working with a rock and roll concert tour in which nearly every waking moment was spent in a venue and nearly every non-waking moment on a travelling bus, AND, having been ill-prepared for the connectivity issues I would encounter while on this tour (it's easy to get 'net in a hotel while on the road, but what if you're never in hotels?!), I can honestly say that I'd be very interested in any technology that was a) mobile (PCMCIA or CF format?!) and b) available anywhere in North America for c) a flat monthly fee.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I have worked closely with Telesat in Canada and have been testing hardware such as this over the past few years for my company and dealerships. It is true that satellite Internet has horrible ping times and as such is not suitable for Internet gaming where latency is important.
However for "normal" web surfing it is quite usiable. Over the past few years, caching techniques for satellite have improved. There are multi levels of caching available depending on what unit you have installed at your home or office.
For example, web pages can of course be cached on your own PC, but they are also cached on the installed hardware at your house (there is a hard drive built in) then it is cached again at Telesat's satellite HUB before it actually reaches the Internet.
Telesat also implements advanced caching techniques such as IP spoofing to speed up your connection. This prevents some packets from actually having to travel all the way over the satellite link and the Internet to the destination server.
I don't recall what the bandwidth is, but it seems quite comparable to a low grade DSL line and is differently better then ISDN for DIAL-UP access.
Europe's Ariane 5 rocket has lifted off
That's an acomplishment by itself...
--I-- do not hate America. But I disrecpect inept people like you. Go vote for Bush in elections, if it is your choice. But do not spam technical blog, please.
While satellite Internet sounds attractive on the surface, the speed of light mocks you and your attempt at moving data with any reasonable respect for latency.
.. Your data has to get there and back, meaning 240ms minimum to your gateway. Include the reality of equipment inefficiencies and the average latency of actually accessing something across the Internet and you're reaching 400ms before you know it. A decent modem/PPP connection can get you to 80-120ms.
120ms for a one-way trip (@ ~36,000km orbit)
However, if the _bandwidth_ is high enough (say, that of a semi-truck or 747 packed with DVDs) and we had a decent (and easy to use) QoS system available, this could make a nice addition to your existing DSL/cable connection.
Use DSL/cable to start a transfer, system recognizes that it's one gigantic file transfer and moves it over to the satellite network.
Seems like all of North America is already covered with data service resold through vendors such as Star Band, the satellite is geo-synchronis, so the packet round trip would exceed 700 ms, this amount of latency is a big problem for gaming, VOIP etc., I don't reaaly see how this new satellite brings any new type of service since you can already get internet and data via geo satellites almost everywhere in the northern hemisphere. Mark
I wonder if the satelite runs Linux! >I mean if it had something like a Squid cache that will benefit users from only having latency to the sat and not to the sat and back to earth.
Otherwise it doens't make a great deal of economic sense.
WildBlue promises similar service (1.5Mbps down, 256Kbps up) for 2005, but it looks like Telesat/Viasat might beat them to the punch.
Don't confuse Ka-band (Kurtz-above band) with Ku-band (Kurtz-under band). Ku-band has already been in use for satellite Internet for some time now through (awful) services like StarBand and DIRECWAY, and is also widely used for digital TV broadcasts. Amazingly, even C-band Internet service is available. C-band service requires a much bigger dish, but in some areas this is the best (or only) broadband option. Ka-band service may change that for certain regions of Canada.
I wonder if owners of big dishes will be able to modify them to handle Ka-band Internet. It would probably be inconvenient to share if you want TV as well, but merely adding the decoding module would be trivial if they released a kit. It's already relatively simple to add support for new kinds of services, such as 4DTV.
rural USA still has diddly squat nothing in the terms of any broadband either. That's millions and millions of people, who every day are having to deal with more bloated and more busy so-called websites that require broadband almost to even view them. It's like "so what?", you can get a better computer, but if the web page you are looking at still takes a minute to finish downloading-not a second, a minute, than what's the point? any old machine can still render that fast. And you can't even get 1/2 the web masters out there to even provide alt text tag links, as simple as that is. How lazy can you get? I tried surfing with images off for a long time to try and speed things up, even then it's getting worse. Turn images off completely and go surfing around, sheesh it's dismal, page after page of vague blank colored boxes with nothing to indicate what is there.
So, it's gonna be something like this satellite (prices are cheaper than dish networks I see,, 750 versus the new lower price of 500$ install, and 70+$ a month instead of this claimed 60$), or the FCC gets real with wifi and allows more power and more spectrum, or something. I'm paying right at 80$/month for a landline phone and dialup connection,and if it wasn't for the big install cost-which I ain't got- I'd jump on satellite, even with it's faults. I use cell phone for voice, I only use the landline for inet connction, that's it. My dialup connection goes out whenever some squirrel jumps on the line or a rain cloud passes over, so that's no big deal anyway with occassional outtages, it's expected.
With this quarter profits corporate strategies, no one will ever put in any sort of hard wired solutions beyond intermittent and flaky alleged "broadband" telco monopoly dsl in some areas that really are just suburban, not rural.
So I say GO SATELLITE. Or something else. First guy to offer me an affordable *real* broadband deal close to what I am paying for a 28.8 connection, including install price, will get my loot. Until then, dialup, that's it, and I'm greatful to the local mom and pop ISP for even having that.
Some provinces have some laws against using radar detectors while driving... I believe Alberta and Ontario.
In BC, and others, you are free to use radar detectors to your heart's content.
Civil War 2, by Thomas Chittum. I have a copy, one of the best treatments on the subject you mentioned I have seen. I think his over all analysis in it is very well thought out and presented. What he talks about is coming true, you can see it daily. Read the reviews to see what other folks think about it.
Um, ever used satellite internet? How's 128K down and 64k up sound to you? After you purchase your $1000 bi-directional dish and have it installed, and pay $100/mo for service, it would be cheaper to have an ISDN or Frame relay ran to your home or business. I'll pass.
:)
Couple points:
Advertised rates are 750k down, 128k up. Yes, slightly over $100/mo is what that costs. Are any frame-relay or ISDN services much less than that?
The worst part is there's no way around the time it takes the signal to travel the 88,000 miles to and from the satellite TWICE to get a packet to the internet and back. Right around 500ms latency, minimum.
So, if it's "cheaper to have ISDN or Frame relay" then by all means... but it is NOT cheaper in many, many areas of the US. In some more rural areas, you just can't get any high-speed services at all. The rural telco will just laugh at you, or offer you $1000/month prices. (To their defense, if you're many many miles from the nearest CO, building a T1 out to you costs BIG BUCKS for them)
It all depends where you live.
Cool thing: Starband is offering a self-pointing dish system for mobile homes etc. Try getting frame-relay to a moving target!
What I'm looking forward to is more constellation-based low-orbit satellite systems with higher bandwidth. Latency is much less of a problem, with orbits of 300 miles instead of 22000. But the economics of such a system just doesn't quite work yet. (Think of the problems Iridium has had)
- Peter
INsigNIFICANT
Chown doesn't accept a file list from stdin.
You probably meant:
find / -name *mybase* |xargs chown you
or
find / -name *mybase* -exec chown you '{}' \;
I'm not sure if it's the reason in this case, but Ariane can lift the heaviest satellites of any rocket currently in use.
On the Telesat website.
I am sick of all the taxpayers $$$s going into funding all this astrological nonsense. If man was meant to go into space, God would have enabled him to breathe in a vacuum. As it is, this is just another example of American taxpayers dollars going to waste. Jesus we need to get some priorities here...
This satellite is going to bring internet to everyone, including those spending the summer at the cottage (could be 100s of km from other people and phone lines)
Most of your points stand, but this one is overly romantic sounding and very rarely true. If you're "spending your summer at the cottage", you will almost certainly not be "100s of km from other people and phone lines". 10km? 25km? Okay, 50km? Maybe. Even most Canadians' comfort levels (these are summer cottagers, afterall!) don't allow for "100s of km" of distance from other people or phones.
I'm sure there's someone who cottages 100s of km from the nearest person or phone, but there's not a significant number of Canadians who do that.
Radar detectors are deliberately stone deaf; they only purpose is to detect high-powered pulses mere kilometers away. Another Ka-band satellite won't make any difference.
I currently have 800Kbps up, 3000Kbps down with NO server restrictions, a static IP, and no random disconnecting for $28.25 CDN monthly ($21.59 USD currently).
This includes stuff like NNTP, www homesite, and webmail access, although I never use the latter two features since I run my own http and smtp servers.
I'm in Toronto. If I were in some Inuit village somewhere in the Yukon, I wouldn't have a problem with $60CDN though, since most everything there costs twice as much as in Toronto anyway. The gas for running the generator would probably be the bigger cost.
Btw it is pppoe, but so what? The overhead is teensy.
Iridium is dead. Bankrupt. Kaput.
New satellites are launched all the time. Is it because it's an internet-only communications satellite? Eutelsat already launched one: e-BIRD at 33 deg. E.
The satellite companies usually say that you need a clear view to the south. They don't make the information easy to get to, but if you look into it, you discover that the exact direction varies depending on your longitude and the longitude of the point on the earth that the geostationary satellite is hovering over. The last I looked into it, there were for my location, satellites available in a south to southwest range of directions (which I do not have a view of). If one becomes available in the southeast I might be able to get service.
...rude. Folks want to live rural but want broadband and that's somewhow wrong? let's turn it around, why don't YOU just manufacture your water in your suburban home,and can't you just replicate your food over your fast dsl connection? I mean, you have everything you need right? You cannot conceive of any necessity or desire for people to live rural?
No, for me, after 15 years living in a big metro area, I give up, it's not worth it, too much crime, noise, filth, too expensive, too artificial, packed in like termites. Yeech. Ya, having a deli close by was nice, being able to have a pick of movies to go to was OK, having a lot of cleat TV channels was ok, being able to go to tthe store closeby was ok, but ya know what? I willingly trade all that for what I have now. Not for this boy, just don't like it back to the city, and ya'all can just stay there, too, thankee kindly.
My "commute" is outside the door, we only go to town once a week and I could just as easily make that once a month, we burn little gas in that regard. Step outside, and I'm at work. A traffic jam to me is someones beefer gets out and is standing in the road. And I have no desire to live in the half and half zone of suburbia either, where you have *neither* advantage that urban or rural living really has to offer. I tried that too, you still had to go drive everyplace to do anything, you had little privacy, prices were almost as bad as the city, and I don't think endless streams of quickstores and the same sqwuare houses in constitutes "culture" of any note.
I have *many* reasons to prefer living rural, just as many as folks who enjoy more urban amenities like theirs. I'll put up with dialup and be greatful for it, like I said, I really am greatful for it.. It doesn't stop me from wanting a good net connection. If it takes waiting for satellite or better quality wifi, so be it. If I couldn't get dialup I would definetly get satellite some way or another, but right now I can struggle by with dialup, I'm just gonna complain about it and give encouragement to any companies out there who might want my money and have me as a customer, to tell them that they have a good potential niche market of millions of people for broadband once they can pull it off, so I'm encouraging those efforts. I think that is *reasonable*. I've given up on any wired solutions though, that has a dismal to "no" chance of occurring any time soon, but wireless somehow just might work. Eventually. Soon maybe, I just don't know.
And as to work, yep, my income is based on poultry production once you follow it two steps from what I do *exactly*. I do the outside maintenance on a really large complex that includes big farms, businesses and residential areas but it's the farms that make the money,although the government seems to be doing everythibng it can to destroy that as well. You tell me why that might be happening, but it's as big a problem as IT outsourcing is, just on slashdot we just aren't going to be talking about it any time soon, beyond the occassional sentence someone like me may make, because of the demographics here. We rural folks *know* we are in a tiny minority here.
I think you might have a distorted view of life in rural USA, we are still "humans" out here, we noticed it is the 21st century. And yes, we actually "use" technology and enjoy it and profit from it. I was a geek growing up, my dad was a mainframe guy, and I inherited the interst in geeky things. I just like living in the sticks, that's all. You use rural geekiness too, just maybe you don't see it or don't really know where your food and water and energy comes from. Big hint, it starts in the rural areas and it takes humans to get that stuff -> to you in the burbs and in the urban areas, and all we want is a little notice and to be treated with a modicum of dignity and respect, same as you want I think. It's not a majority here on slashdot, but there's a decent minority of rural dwellers here, and we are ALL geeks and like a lot of the same stuff. So of c
It's even worse than you think :) My roundtrip ping time runs 1.2 to 1.3 seconds through a Tachyon satellite link. On the other hand, satellite was the only option here other than dial-up, and for web browsing or downloads it works just fine.
You don't seem to understand the idea of TCP ACK windowing - you DON'T ack each packet.
.ISO image, for example) the latency is a non-issue.
Instead, the sender starts sending packets, and will send some number N packets before requiring an ACK. The receiver will NOT ack each and every packet, but rather it acks groups of packets.
For example, the sender might start with a window of 100 packets - it will send 100 packets before pausing for an ack. The receiver might ack the first packet, then ack packet 10 (implicitly acking packets 2-9), then packet 50, then packet 100. Upon receiving the ack for packet 10, the sender might increase its window size to 1000 packets.
Thus, unless the delay*bandwidth product is HUGE, the data will keep streaming until either a) there is a NACK due to corruption of a packet or b) the job is done.
So for non-interactive moving of freight like BIG FTP transfers (downloading an
However, interactive operations like browsing suck because you pay the startup penalty for each HTTP request. However, modern browsers have HTTP pipelining, wherein the broswer can open the connection, request the main document, then, as the document comes in and is parsed, send additional requests (for images, etc.) without closing the connection and before the main document has been fully retrieved, thus burying the cost of the startup in the transfer.
However, this is less effective with everybody and their dog's website putting images on a seperate server, thus requiring a second channel to be opened.
www.eFax.com are spammers
ariane also launched a satellite (NSS-6) over singapore servicing south-east asia, australia and oceania which was up and working earlier this year (via newsat ). although their pricing is prohibitively expensive for anything but commercial/government/community use, they were offering 64Mbit down services and iirc 1.5Mbit up. as previously stated, due to latency issues useless for voip/videoconferencing or whatever (althought interestingly, they advertise these features on their site), but a massive connection nonetheless... very useful for outback communities, island communities etc., also for boats and mobile connections where no services (such as grid electricity, mobile phone access) are available...
It exists ESA-space.
It exists Russian-space.
It exists Chinese-space.
It exists Japanese-space.
But, does it exist EADS-space?
But, does it exist Ariane-space?
Mainly, what is more authoritative? ESA-space or Ariane-space?
ESA-space != Ariane-space? or equal?
open4free ©
Since the satellite is necessarily in a geostationary orbit, that means it is directly above the equator (longitude=111.1 degrees). So why are they not covering the Southern hemisphere as well? I suppose the reason is that the antennas are directional, and pointed up North.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
This is a lot like the first Ka-band satellite licensed: Norstar. That satellite was licensed in 1992 and had spot-beams for frequency reuse, two-way digital communications, etc. Due to some funding problems with the business, it was never launched but it did have basically all the attributes of the Milstar satellite (and the upcoming ACT satellite which NASA launched on the Space Shuttle in contravention to the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 requiring them to use commercial launch services wherever possible as an incentive for commercialization of launch services).
Seastead this.
There is not time to do a STOP to the car in less than 480 ms!!!
The car has knocked down the people (killing them) along (69.44m/s x 0.480s =) 33.33 meters!!!
If there are 1'000'000'000 cars GPS-based or Galileo-based then they can kill a lot of lifes!!!
open4free ©
Please check out http://www.wildblue.com . This is the company that is offering the Ka Satellite broadband service. There's a FAQ on the webpage. Commercial launch is scheduled for spring of next year.
The problem, as I understand it, is that encryption protocols tend to be very "chatty", sending keys back and forth, and that this forces them to be high latency.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
There is an error in your calculation -- the data has to get from you to the satellite (120ms), then from the satellite to the remote server (120ms), then from the remote server to the satellite (120ms), then from the satellite to you (120ms). It comes to a total of 480ms, theoretical minimum. Realistically, over 800ms.
and maybe "checking email" wasn't the keenest example to pick out by itself.
... it would have been much more pleasant to be able to camp there overnight, work part of that time, but then do some exploring (and some use out of my Nat'l Parks Passport ;)). Since I'm on my way from El Paso to Seattle at the moment, there are a lot of places I wish I could have stopped and enjoyed the scenery, but didn't have time to, this round.
But though it obviously can cut both ways, I like the idea of (when it's possible) being able to decouple internet access from location.
Right now, I'm in Utah, and parked at a Flying J truckstop, posting to Slashdot and (yes) checking email. $5 for a daypass, $25 for a month. WiFi is getting widespread enough that (with planning) it's an OK way to work from the road by hopping between such sites, but the reason I mentioned The Canyonlands
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
True, many people can't get other forms of internet connectivity. However, for a business satellite is typically not worth the expense.
The info I used was based on personal experience in setting up a satellite internet solution for a client about 3 years ago. I can't remember the name the service was through, but I know it was using Hughes satellites.
I set up one site and found that the connection was sporadic at best. After some discussion, we decided not to install the other 2 sites that the client had purchased $2000+ hardware for. This was based on factoring in the cost of my time and the installers time to troubleshoot problems, after which ISDN turned out to be cheaper monthly, and cheap hardware was easy to find on eBay.
In the end, the client felt better knowing that packets only had to travel 5 miles or so to the local CO rather than thousands. And I could tell them with a straight face that there connection would could be relied upon.
With your abuse of stats are you a GOPer trying to ban porn/sex or a DEM trying to ban guns? ;->
ok so the sat phones not cheap but for some people roaming charges can really add up . I f I take my Canadian phone south across the largest free trade border in the world I can pay $1.00 - $2.50 per minute compared with sat phone prepaid (valid for one year) at .55c per minute ! Plus Data rates are on your airtime instead of by the MB as with GSM etc.
one more price & size drop on sat phones and Ill be chucking my cell phone.
{ Pillar candles great for when the power fails and you cant see the keyboard..
One of the things to remember though, is if you are say, driving to somewhere in the east from BC, some provinces allow radar detectors, according to the parent some allow ownership but not use, and I believe some don't even allow use. Provincial laws bary, somewhat like how legal age for drinking is 19 in BC, and 18 in Alberta.
That being said, if you're planning on taking the trip to another province, perhaps you should look up if your radar detector is legal at your destination and any points between as well.
I was just wondering.
Thank You for your support. When I first read about thist satellite they really spoke about sparsely populated areas.
I know a few people who live in different parts of Kanata (cited as an example in the CBC link), and they all have broadband cable.
That guy and the 600 other broadbandless residents must be living at the very edge of the city limits or something.
They should've used a better example for places without broadband in Canada... like Iqaluit.
Ive used a sat service down here in New Zealand, which for US folks aint exactly on the equator. I paid $NZ 60 bucks a month ( $US 30 approx ) and paid 400 $NZ up front for a 1m dish etc. This got me a 6 Mega bit download speed and i had 56 k modem upload ( who uploads huge files anyway, just leech of u suckers with fat pipes :D ) The ping on this was 400 ms or less usually around 350. Like u say crap for gaming but was fine for all else.
Needles to say am currently on adsl for gaming, as i dont download jack these days
Here in a rural part of England a local company is setting up wireless broadband for the local areas. When they first set it up 2 years ago they had a 20mbps optical link over 60miles away feeding the network. Now I expect they have a much more and prices seem to have gone down a lot.
In this area you can get 1mbps downlink (maybe 128k uplink) for as little as £15 a month, much cheaper than ADSL will be when it arrives next year. This is also unlimited, no download limits like a lot of ADSL providers.
This also has the advantage of not too high latency and not needing line of sight of a certain place as in sattelite access. New relay transmitters can be put up for a very low cost if a certain area cannot get a good enough signal (for example there is a big hill in the way) so there is no problem there.
The best advantage has to be that the company only needs about 10 - 15 subscribers in a certain area once they have made it broadband ready. I doubt they will be going bust any time soon...
At the moment I am still stuck with 56k because there is a big hill in the middle of my village so this half can get the signal (arrgg) but within a few weeks I will be speedy and happy.
Oh man, I HEAR ya. that would be schweet! fun too! but alas alack and alorn, I'm stuck on a pretty good one right now, a maple that got cut down a long time ago, then re grew huge as a lot of smaller trunks. $^&**^%$% It's too steep to get a backhoe in their safely,well, I ain't gonna try it, put it that way, so I can dig or dig it out. I'm at about 6 hours now on just that one stump, I go over every morning when it's cool and workout on it till I get tuckered out, then just go do some other chores. the dogs come sit in the shade and watch me, I KNOW they are thinking "monkey boy is sure a lamer, ain't he?" HAHAHAHA!
Most of the smaller ones I got out already, just a few whoppers to go on that particular hill. Chores you never run out of,so I just rotate around. There's no giant rush, it's just in the way where I like to be able to mow with a 4wd machine, that's all, I make stuff "pretty" as I work. I'm gradually turning the place into more of a park than a jungle. This place got neglected about 15 years so there's a few miles of fenceline to re-clear, various road frontage, etc, I got plenty of areas to work on.. I'm down past the third layer of roots on that maple and I have REALLY though about a diesel and fertiliser solution, but I think I'd get the heat come down on me quickly if there was a huge KABOOM and chunks 0 maple went all over this side of the county. If it was much further out in the sticks and no neighbors right there, I would do it,maybe, but the hill is directly across the road from the local neighborhood busybody.
It is a thought though. Coulda done it at night on the fourth and blamed it on "rambunctious vandalising youths" or something "why them kids came and done blowed that stump clean outta the durn ground! The nerve of 'em!"........ heh heh heh