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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)."
...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...
Two things:
1) Radar detectors are illegal in Canada. I don't think our CRTC (Canadian FCC equivalent) recognises the frequency wavelength as commerically viable in that capactiy. (i'm guessing here).
2) For a country that covers such a large landmass, satellite based internet access is HUGE. Something like 80% of Canada's population is spread across a 100km deep band bordering the US. DSL, Cable, T1/3s etc are readily accessible to these people. However, for the rest of Canada, internet access is a biatch. In many circumstances, some communities will be getting high-speed internet access before a phone line. (e.g. Nunavut)
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
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.
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.
Cheers!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
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?
Radar detectors are illegal in Canada.
This is misleading. Radar detectors are completely legal in BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan. Only Manitoba and Ontario ban them outright.
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.
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.
Ironically enough these have been out for a few years now. My 2 year old radar detector detects X, Ka, K bands as well as laser and VG2. VG2 is what cops use to tell if you are using a radar detector or not. Around Columbus OH, some of the police radars actually include VG2 detection even though radar detectors are perfectly legal here. My radar detector automatically shuts it self off for a couple of minutes if it detects VG2.
...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
As the previous poster noted, Iridium is still in business. The original owner, Iridium LLC, went kaput after spending about $5B, but the constellation was picked up for about a penny on the dollar by "Iridium Satelitte", a different company, and they're keeping it going quite nicely. Uncle Sam uses it a lot.
But Iridium's bandwidth is very low -- about 2400 bps. Low-earth-orbit satellites have less latency, of course, but the cost of bandwidth turns out to be a problem. Especially if you have to pay full price for them, vs. getting them as bankruptcy assets. Geostationary satellite turns out to be cheaper.
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.
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