Slashdot Mirror
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
$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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
Cheers!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
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)
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.
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.
Well, daahhh!!!! For the signal to get from Earth-Satellite-ISP-InternetSite-ISP-Satellite-Ear th will be about a second.
To be in geostationary orbit, you need to get to 36,000km above the earth. Since lightspeed is 300,000km/s and you need to travel the Satellite-Earch route 4 times (you to internet and then internet to you), that means the total distance is at least ~144,000km. So that's about 0.5s right there.
The rest of the delay is in preperation and organization of huge packets you want to send to the satellite. Thus the net delay has to be at least 500ms (to ISP) and probably arround 750mb-1000ms. You cannot go faster than 500ms!
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.
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.
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.
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
Regretfully true, for that thing... Anyone know why they chose Ariane to launch this, as opposed to Titan or Proton? Cheapest option, maybe? - because it can't have been the reliability record.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
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
Well, they could hardly use the shuttle could they? Now there's a pretty useless piece of junk.
...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
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
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
Ariane launchers are not reusable. So the name sticks to a design rather than a specific launcher. More info on the ariane family.
Definitely mass. Ariane 5 is the only working and available rocket that lifts 6 metric tons into orbit.