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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)."
$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.
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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
Two-way satellite internet access has been around for a while now. The biggest problem for satellite internet has been (and will always be) the high latency.
Another problem, Ka band has high losses in rain. May work for Phoenix, may not work for Portland.
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.
This is to service people in the Canadian north where DSL and Cable are not possibilities. They have been waiting for High speed for a very long time!
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.
The killer for satellite network access is latency. A typical DSL line has about a 20ms round trip (time for a packet to go from your network to the ISP network and back). If you lived on the equator directly under the satellite (and assuming the satellite adds no latency), you've just added 480ms to the round trip time. Move off the equator and to a different longitude, and latency gets even higher. This kills anything interactive (gaming, VOIP, telnet/SSH) and causes trouble for anything using TCP (window scaling wasn't expected to handle half second round trips).
What is done in some cases is to use special hardware on each end that adjusts TCP to better handle the latency. Also, I've heard some talk about putting caching servers on the satellites (so web access that hits the cache doesn't have to go up and down twice), but I don't know if anyone is doing that.
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;-)
Yes, someone is probably working on a radar detector detector detector...
Well, you're speaking of geostationary satellites which require such a high orbit.
But if you have a system of non-stationary satellites (like the 'Iridium' project), only a few msec will be added by satellite access.
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
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.
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