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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)."
I still get my internet access at 1200 baud via Sputnik, tovarishi.
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> 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
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
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.
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.
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!
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, 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.
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.
...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