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US Air Force Building Space Router
Saint Aardvark writes "From the ISTS daily news comes a story on the US Air Force seeking to build a space router. From TFA: "Northrop Grumman and Caspian Networks are collaborating to develop an Internet Protocol router that can withstand the constant barrage of solar radiation in orbit. The space-hardened IP router will be part of the Air Force's Transformational Satellite Communications System, which will provide IP-based communications to warfighters." I wonder what the ping times would be like..."
They could tell you, but then they'd have to kill you.
News to Look Forward To:
Air Force Get Signal - 'CATS: AYBABTU' Spend $$$,$$$,$$$'s researching origin
TSAT 0wn3d
Alan Ralsky sentenced to Abu Ghraib for routing spam through TSAT
TSAT loses orbit, crushes Tom Cruise on eve of War Of The Worlds opening
Mischevious Glac-Elves use TSAT to spread Irata Worm
Air Force officer notices TSAT looks canoe-shaped before realizing contract made with wrong Grumman
Warfighters welcome their new Space Routing Overlord
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
first po
NO CARRIER
Gonna need a hell of a long patch cable...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I wonder what the ping times would be like...
(nb: I worked on some satellite internet stuff a few years ago.) If this unit is in geosynchronous orbit (so a fixed dish can always hit it), it's sitting almost 36,000 Km over the equator. Assuming your dish is at the equator a round trip is ~72,000 Km / 300,000 Km/sec (the speed of light) means the signal travels about a quarter second earth->earth not including any processing time at the satellite midway point or either end.
Trolling is a art,
Wrap it in tinfoil?
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So is a router in sky gonna help access internet from MOON too?Just Wondering.
& hats the life of the satellite in sky ?
Why does yahoo do this
Okay this wasn't exactly the use that I had thought of an IP based communications grid and I for sure am not the most knowlegeable on the subject of radio communication arrays used by NASA et al but isn't it time that we have a formalized "cell" network in space to best aquire signals from microsats and such? reduce the cost of individual launchs by already having everything up there that you need to communicate with and then just move forwards with less communication equipment and more mission core equipment?
can someone who knows more about this tell me why this hasn't been done?!?
... but it sounds like they are putting a wood shop in orbit. I guess the need pretty bevels or something.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
They figured out how to route space! Does this route time too?
My network closet router only routes closets.
So, how are they going to keep ET from patching in to the internet for free? Did they think of that? Eh?
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
...Sucks.
I have direcway, it was either that or dial-up because I live in the boonies of the tehachapi mountains in California. The lags are terrible, on the order to 2 seconds or more. Plus, when it snows, I have to clear the dish of snow to get online. Download rates are OK, but uploads are on the order of a 56k modem.
Every satelite up there has to withstand "the constant barrage of solar radiation in orbit". If the communications, or video or whatever got scrambled, then they wouldn't be a whole lot of use.
So what's so special about a router?
In space, noone can hear you ping.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Maybe this is a sign of things to come. As we send spacecrafts to Mars and other planets (and someday planets beyond our solar system), the InterPlanetary Internet will need such routers. A router satellite followed by routers in space and on other planets would create a nice little backbone to base our communications on. There would be one hell of a delay, but we could send our spacecrafts farther and farther away without losing the ability to communicate.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
I sort of got the sense form the article that the "Flow-Based" IP might be some form of pseudo-IP protocol. This might help the ping time of stream based data.
This is a boring sig
Maybe when the Hubble gets retired they can use it for one hell of a cantenna...
It would be around 270ms for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. It would be a bit more for a router on the moon. :)
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Sounds cool. Combines my two worlds of IT and satellites.
this is clear proof that the US Air Force continues to suport and cooperate with the space devil
Solid Splash design
UFOs are war flyers looking to see if earth has an open node yet.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
You are also assuming that there will only be one router up there, on one longitude. With the US' military budget, I think they can afford to launch multiple ones.
stuff
communications to warfighters
I knew it, the military has developed deadly bots to hunt down and kill warchalkers.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
http://ipinspace.gsfc.nasa.gov
Actually this is old news. In the rare event anyone here wants detailed information you can find it here: http://ipinspace.gsfc.nasa.gov/documents/NRO.pdf
Ping times can be found on page 82 of the pdf
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Am I the only one who has this image of a bog standard Belkin router encased in a biscuit tin?
w.. o.. r.. r.. y.... a.. b..o..u..t....p..i.. n.. g....t.. i.. m.. e.. s....?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
is it going to use aethernet?
You misunderstood. They are developing a router which drops everything but whitespace characters.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Can somebody explain why I have never seen anyone enraged by this word's existance? Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough, but I have never seen anyone proclaim that "warfighter" is a blatant example of Newspeak or a shameless parody of L. Ron Hubbard's knack for descriptive writing.
Has this word been around for a while? I can't recall hearing it before the advent of warblogging. If anything, it seems like a step in the wrong direction, for being a euphemism, and all (if at all).
http://www.razordigitalent.com/
Or did the contract already go to M$?
Peace
and one ping only.
comment directly in my journal
(Phone Rings)
Boss: The router went down, we need you to fix it...now.
You: Fuck.
So what happens to dropped packets? Do they burn up on re-entry or go into an orbit?
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Currently almost all military satellite communications are point-to-point in nature. most of the time this is done by converting IP traffic to serial data before sending over the modems and satellite. this causes ip traffic to be routed back to a core facility before heading on to its final destination. being able to route IP in the sky would provide better mobile-to-mobile communications with less overhead and more dynamic in nature... both reducing delay and bandwidth.
... or the Matrix...
"Caspian has already developed a "flow state router," which is able to work with entire messages rather than individual data packets."
I wonder if they are equating "entire messages" with the bundling concept?
See Disruption Telerant Networking at www.dtnrg.org
I know it says Delay, not Disruption, but the webmaster hasn't got the message (or should I say, bundle), yet!
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
Sometimes I let slashdot fool me into thinking all the people who read/post stories/replies here are all the same kinds of geeks, like me.
It's people like you who remind me how wholly different I am from, for example, someone as shit-brained as you.
ZERO
Not insightful.
Direcway satellite. I'm in MD hitting a geosync satellite for my Internet. Average ping time is ~750ms to most sites. Nowhere near "3.75-4 seconds"
Note this is bi-directional... It's not cheating by sending a land signal out and getting returns by satellite.
And yes if you're interested, World of Warcraft runs just fine...
Now don't forget guys: Make sure to use WEP encryption keys and turn on your MAC filtering and change the default IP and password. And for god's sake, change the SSID from linksys to something else.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
How does that work? In the worst case the satellite appears on the horizon, which adds one Earth radius to the range. The total distance changes to about 84000 km (from 72000km in the parent post), which still leaves the propagation time at under 1/3 second.
Less is more.
The TDRS satellites have served this function for the last 20 years for NASA. Traditional communications satellites also transmit IP routinely. Technically, they are not wireless routers, they are transponders. But one of their uses is to transmit IP streams.
The Iridium and Globalstar constellations also operate as cell networks in space.
an ill wind that blows no good
I'm not sure that it does.
Is IP really the protocol to use under these conditions? Is there something better?
Thoughts, comments welcome
They mentioned that they are using a router that handles whole messages instead of individual packets, but doesn't having packets help the router to know that it lost a couple do to the nummering in the packet header and thus request a resend? If you are sending whole messages, isn't the potential for total message lost more likely?
Statistically, there has to be life on other planets somewhere. There is also probability that this life evolved to the point of having computers. There is a slim chance (ok maybe not a snowballs chance in hell) that they created IP networks like us. But, I promise you, if there is even a single iota of a chance that they did. My godd--ned corporate network will find a way to incorporate some Altairian ISPs slowest router as an entry in my OSPF tables. Resulting in 7 year latency. Furthermore, my users and there stupid click anywhere attitude will probably trigger an interstellar war.
You didn't catch that current technology doesn't do the routing IN space, it does it at a single point on the ground. This allows several uplinks to be used more effectively. As an example, if you make use of these vsat IP providers to connect between two remote sites, the communications would be ground->sat->ground (hub)->sat->ground, meaning the packets have to traverse twice as far as they otherwise would if routed in space.
It would just be vulnerable to space snort.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Screw kludges like wifi and 3G wireless.
How about some nice IP via satellite, a la satellite based phones? Potentially much more throughput, and if the routers in the bird itself, ping times wouldn't be an issue (I'd guess around 100ms or so).
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Pole to GEO is 42635.
.2842333323... seconds. 284 ms is not great for a ping, but not too bad.
Pole to pole through GEO is 85270.
Using 300,000km/sec as the speed of light, we get...
"And yes if you're interested, World of Warcraft runs just fine..."
Of course it is.. The games compensating for your horrible lag. Since its on your end, everything seems fine, but all the other player are pausing to wait for you and their game is jumpy and horrible.
Way to ruin a game, satellite man
To put nice rounded edges on space cabinetry?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The Router
Here's an ISS status report that mentions it.
/sig
2 seconds? Since a TCP handshake requires 3 packets (although you can start right after you send the third packet), with a 2 second delay, that would mean 4 seconds minimum to initialize a TCP connection. Definitely not trivial.
SSL would be a bigger delay - 2 seconds for the client's settings packet to arrive at the server, 2 seconds for the server's settings and certificate to arrive at the client, 2 seconds for the master secret to get sent to the server, then (assuming that the client's confirmation isn't the holdup) 2 seconds for the server's confirmation that it will be now be using the encrypted connection, and then lastly 2 seconds for the first bit of client data to make it to the server. 10 seconds total - ouch!
Jesus: "Son of a
it's only a matter of time before we see spacedriving ;-)
Enjoy an e-piphany
A Dynamic DNS client so you can host spacerouter.kicks-ass.net out of your secret bunker.
It's stackable, so that you can puts your Space Access Point and Space Cable Modem on top of it.
AOL Parental Filters and Zone Alarm integration, to keep out terrorists and keep troops safe from porn.
Web Based Administration, just point your command and control laptop to http://192.168.1.1
WEP is used as the super strong security protocol protecting data too and from your computers.
In a few months Linux hackers will find a way to flash the memory and load their own firmware so they can use it as an iTunes server.
My az/el spreadsheet is at home, but the slant range for an elevation of 0deg for an antenna on the equator is about 42000km.
42000km / 300000000m/sec = 140msec
So the time of flight for an antenna pointing at the horizon is 280msec.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
*Lines such as OMG t3h LAGGG SUX0RZ!!!1!1!one and similar were omitted for clarity.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I wonder what the ping times would be like...
I'd like to see the traceroute hops.
Does that mean all the hackers will have to send their malicious code written in this?
It would be around 270ms for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. It would be a bit more for a router on the moon. :)
That's a one-way trip. Meaning that traffic only goes to the satellite and back to earth once. That's great if you've got some sort of instrumented satellite up there and you're trying to query it for data, or if you're broadcasting (one way). But because this thing's a router, that implies that traffic will be two-way.
This means you're going to have that minimum 270ms lag on the outbound leg, but you've got to take into account the return trip, which doubles the minimum latency to 540ms (that's a half-second to you and me). If there's even typical latency on the terrestrial side (at both ends), you're probably talking another 50-60ms, so a typical ping time will most likely be 600ms or more.
Of course, this assumes that the space router satellite will be placed in geosynchronous orbit., but there's nothing in TFA to indicate that's how it'll be used. It might be placed in a lower orbit, as part of a constellation of satellites, the way Teledesic had planned to do, in which case, the latency would be much lower.
DSL on one end, Internet 2-->fiber-->cat5e on the other for 3 hops and I've seen 10+ seconds to get an SSH connection established.
This would still be very viable for communications. I don't think the fighter pilots will be interested in fragging some noobs in RTCW, so 500 ms should get them done.
Any word on the bandwith?
-=fshalor
In other news, many l33t hax0rs will start turning their satellite dishes around hoping to sniff the admin password of the space router. God bless the telnet.
(and the password will be cisco/space)
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
Of course, you're assuming that they are using current commercial technology for the project. The delay could be overcome using some tangled quantum pairs. But, then again, if they were using those why would they need a sattelite?
What would the SSID be for that bad boy?
Hmmm....redifines War Driving!
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
What? Not one mention of how nice it would be to have a beowulf cluster of those in orbit? You people are slipping...
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
The regional governors now have direct control over territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I'm not sure what the grandparent was talking about, but in the case where the sat appears on the horizon, you might not be able to get a good enough signal through that much atmosphere. Worst case, you might need to relay through a satellite that appears in (guess here) the 90 degrees of sky directly above you. This being the case, you might then take substantially longer than 1/3 of a second to get from point A to point B.
;-)
Where your original distance was a function of 2R, you're now travelling distances that are a function of 2*pi*R+2R... the other inputs are the distance between the earth's surface and the sat (X), as well as the distance between sats in radians (Y). The final formula, if you are directly below the first sat, and your target is directly below the second, 2X+YRsat (keeping in mind here that Rsat is the Rearth plus X), and that grows a bit if your sat is not, or you are relaying through a sat that is not directly above your target, of course.
Ok, that's enough of that
Of course alien networks work just like ours. Haven't you seen Independence Day?
Agreed. I was approaching it from a purely geometrical point of view. In my past life working on GPS receiver stuff, we'd typically acquire satellites very close to the horizon, but not get good signal to noise until they were at least 5 degrees above the horizon. As an offhand guess I think that would only knock about 1000km off the round-trip distance on a direct linkup. Once you start adding in space based relays, you can get some significant delays.
Less is more.
that's where the Intelsat went... Finders Keepers!
Is that why the Internet works?
IPv4 simply routes data. Its not supposed to be secure, at least until IPSec. Usually for electromagnetic waves the layer 2 protocol provides the encryption, and everything above it works as normal. Thats the simplest and most reliable implementation. Trying to encapsulate routed packets, setting up routing rules to work with it etc gets more complex than defining one layer 2 channel, encrypting it, and letting all layer3 packets route themselves over it.
Thats Why IPSec isnt used much, except in VPNs.
Just encrypt the EM waves, like the military has since WWII. The digital data in the waves can also be encrypted as a part of the layer 2, above of which everything becomes normally routable without much configuration and the device(s) used in such communication can easily be deployed everywhere without fat manuals explaining tunnelling, IP headers, routing rules and the likes.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I prefer old Star Trek: where all aliens speak English, and alien chicks are always hot and ready to go!
Jim Kirk didn't need some fancy Space Router to get an intergalactic connection... if you know what I mean... *wink*
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
A. All the better to ping Uranus with.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Why not just use pigeons in spacesuits?
--
$tar -xvf
I don't think the fighter pilots will be interested in fragging some noobs in RTCW
Nah, they probably prefer Desert Combat...
Well, if it's in orbit, the ping time will be around 750ms minimum, as it takes about that long for a satellite internet connection to return a ping. About 600ms to go from terrestrial to orbit and back again, + processing time and such.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
After all there are no laws in space
Router = (n)Dollars
Space = Infinite
SpaceRouter = Infinite(n)Dollars
Login: Admin PW: Admin
Isn't this what TRDS already does?
Be a man and don't hide behind Anonymous Coward. You sir are ignorant and a smuck.
To really understanding this debate it is extremely useful to read Steven Pinker's Book (former MIT guy now at Harvard) the "Blank Slate". In brief his arguements as they apply to this are that there is a lot of data to show many XX beings (women) (but not all) have specific genes related to not so much the ability to do math and science but simply the desire to do it. Seems many (though not all women (many is equal to about 70%) women would rather interact with people rather than "ideas". The science behind this is pretty good and for me compelling. Pinker has a website and answers email so maybe this would make a good slashdot interview.
How do I know when the data have arrived?
~Idarubicin
Firefox has the priviliage of saying it's used on all 7 continents (thanks to an Antartic researcher).
Perhaps now we will be able to say Firefox goes into space?
That's OK. The Altarian fleet, after a several thousand year journey will arrive on Earth. Only to be swallowed by a small dog.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Does it come with nuclear missile launchers to search and destroy DoS attackers as standard? Don't ping flood this motherfucker.
750ms is actually worse than I would have expected.
The contributing factors that I see are:
And yes if you're interested, World of Warcraft runs just fine...
But not Counterstrike, I'm sure. The nearly half-second delay geosync satellites must add makes them completely useless for some things. And makes people want to reduce the number of trips. It sounds like this Air Force project is designed to ensure each packet goes source->satellite->destination rather than source->satellite->ground router->satellite->destination.
"Hi, I'm from the IT department. I need to reset the router. Where is it located?"
stripShow - Where WordPress meets webcomics
Will it be fast enough to play xtank online?...
NetRange: 67.142.0.0 - 67.143.255.255
CIDR: 67.142.0.0/15
NetName: DIRECPC-1BLK
64 bytes from 67.143.xx.xx: icmp_seq=2 ttl=48 time=795.935 ms
64 bytes from 67.143.xx.xx: icmp_seq=3 ttl=48 time=787.073 ms
traceroute:
13 dpc6682016222.direcpc.com (66.82.16.222) 47 ms
14 67.143.xx.xx 780ms
Let's not all suck at the same time please
%ping elvis
elvis is
is
is
alive
%
That's why most modern satellite IP links don't use TCP but XTP.
Let's not all suck at the same time please
to clarify, this is about reducing latency by processing the packets as IP in space, as opposed to as bits on a communication channel. In today's solutions, you have to transmit to a base station, that routes, and would have to transmit the data AGAIN to the satellite to reach another point on the satellite network. Some math may clear up the difference:
today: Point A wants to talk to point B over a satellite network. Point A transmits a bit to sattelite, it is sent to point C (base station), routed to point B's communications channel, then transmited again to the sattelite, then to point B. Assuming 1/8 of a second for each leg, this means it takes 1/2 second for the bit to go from point A to point B. A round trip will take 1 second.
with router in space: Point A transmits bit to satellite. Satellite determines bit needs to go to point B, and routes it, and transmits directly to point B. Total time for bit to go from A to B: 1/4 of a second, or half the time. The satellite's bandwidth for IP communications is now effectively doubled as well for such communications.
Make sense?
isn't starband a sat router? I mean they are routing IP packets via satellite are they not? It is 2-way sat broadband
Can you say I.P.-based pilots? "...192.168.0.123, you're a bit high and off slope..."
Will they get their own class B net? What about the Intergalactic Federation?
.space registrations?
And will ICANN be in chage of
The router will support Gopher as it's main protocol.
Why are all things the US government does always so far behind comercial development?
Oh well , it's just the way it is.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I suppose the Ethernet cable for the uplink could serve as a space elevator as well.
"I wonder what the ping times would be like..."
Astronomical!
[...cricket...]
Aw, c'mon, "space-hardened IP router"...astronomical? Eh, fine, you make a better joke.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I'm sure their router will be faster, but my interest has been piqued and I want to see how much faster so I can mail Starband en masse in attempt to get my bandwith increased :)
Physics makes the world go 'round.
Of course it just means "soldier", but that is un-PC because it reminds you that there is a real person there that might die.
Warfighter just sounds like a robot.
Double hop routing is already solved... Here's an example. Notice the text about "...can support star, mesh or hybrid network topologies..."? Any site can "talk" directly to any other.
While I'm not the original poster, I'm still at a loss as for what advantage this development gives.
Maybe they'll fly higher... In an attempt to get better wireless signal! hah!
wonder what the ping times would be like...
I'm guessing oh, say the speed of light times twice the distance to the satellite, with a few microseconds added on for processing delays. Just a guess. The Air Force still can't overcome physics. The Marines, on the other hand...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Is essential because thats a hell of a long way to go to pull the plug out and put it back in when your ADSL stops working...
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything" -- Josef Stalin
My dad used to work on communication satellites for Lockheed Martin aerospace. They used to radiation harden integrated circuits by designing them on GaAs (Gallium Arsenide) material instead of plain old silicon.
My guess is these guys will be re-designing standard routers with GaAs ICs.
-ted
Just when IPv6 seems to be getting going - we're going need more address bits. Do you know how BIG space is?
Oh shoot! Sig block again.
Quantum Entanglement isn't science fiction.
http://www.setileague.org/editor/darcy.htm
It's real, duplicatable, and apparently gonna be well funded. The idea of a nearly lag-free global Internet, owned and operated by the US Airforce, just makes me all warm and tingly inside.
Any takers on the recent space pictures getting transmitted back real time? Proof of concept works, ask for funding boys!
Only tyrants and oppressors need fear a well armed populace.
I remember some old jokes when we were working on a really high latency experimental network (ip over fidonet) and we were talking about ping pong times. We would ping a distant server and start playing ping pong. The sum of our scores when we got an icmp reply was our "ping pong time." At that time I would have never thought that such a high latency will eventually be one of the most serious problems in the 21st century, but the sad thing is that when we have people on Mars, a simple irc chat or a phone call will be impossible, not becasue of our technology like back in my days, but because of the speed of light itself. It's funny that we don't have flying cars but we face problems caused by the slow speed of light...
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
SkyCorp planned to launch PowerMacs into orbit as web servers. Then again, nothing has been heard from them since the announcement...
I would suspect, a USA military tactical sub-orbital communications platform, which most terrorist or developing nations with shoulder/ground launch missiles could not destroy or cause service interruptions to be in the works.
/.'ers and myself mentioned this stuff (including MilTransport) 5+ years ago before DoD/USAF looked. About the time CargoLifter AG cranked up in EU-Germany on 1996/09/01.
r craft/skycat.htmh eck out: http://www.aerospace-technology.com/projects/cargo lifter
... in a heavily populated area ..., I still hope one day to get Internet/phone service above narrowband (65Kb/s+) to (2Mb/s) wideband ... (5Mb/s) ultra-wideband, and (2M-3Gb/s) broadband is just a Telco BS marketing term that in reality most USA citizens may not see for another 5 to 10 years, and will continue to pay way to much for considering the "QUALITY".
... WiMax ... to get to the home of all USA citizens in the future. I look forward to gaming (no satellite delay) online at 60yo+ if the Telcos remain in control of the FCC and Congress. It is like (years ago) when the tobacco companies' CEOs told Congressional and Senate members that cigarettes are not addictive and do not cause cancer according to their research.
Other
Check out: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ai
Check out: http://www.worldskycat.com/
Check out: http://www.worldskycat.com/markets/skycom.html
C
I live 40mi South of NYC, USA
High-Altitude sub-orbital communications platforms may be the (last mile) way for WLL/FSW
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I pinged through a satellite daily when in the military. Very noticable lag.
that almost invariably takes the data through at least one satellite somewhere
Negative. Satellite bandwidth is several orders of magnitude more expensive than wired bandwidth. Unless you're communicating with someone in an exceptionally remote area where satellite transmission is the only means of communication with the outside world-- Antarctica, other isolated research stations, ships more than 50km offshore, or *extremely* remote areas in 3rd world countries... well, you're talking over wires and fiber.
That said, pingtime to LEO isn't bad at all. Unfortunately, pingtime to higher orbits gets progressively worse... geosynch is more than a sixth of a light second out from Earth, and it makes sense to have communications satellites up at GEO because they don't move and avoid a lot of the space-junk in the crowded lower orbits.
Here are some rough estimates of what a satellite hop would add to your pingtimes.
Digital LEO satellite relay: +20ms
Analog LEO satellite relay: +80ms
Digital GEO satellite relay: +380ms
Analog GEO satellite relay: +440ms
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
A typical Space router's store-n-forward protocols to choose from:
1. ZMODEM over LLC
2. TTCP over X.28
3. ATM over Psuedo-space-wire
4. Novell over IPX
Never underestimate the bandwidth power of a space shuttle carrying 20,000 DVD-Rs.
from what I gather, the "star" topology is about setting up discrete communication channels that can then communicate. This would assume that you know the destination beforehand. The new solution would allow a single communciations channel to be setup and used to route to several locations in an optimal fashion, so that it reduces overhead and management issues.
I was always under the impression that a star topology is one where you have a central hub connecting a bunch of outlying points. To get from one outlying site to another, you have a double hop: once to get from the originating site to the hub, and another to get from the hub to the destination.
With a mesh, all sites are directly connected, giving you a single hop (originating site to destination site).
The linkway product allows a mesh network. As I read the article, that's all this "space router" will do as well. *shrug*
Hi. I ran across another post of yours here and was wondering if you are still using an SSH tunnel to download your TV listings. If not, what is the new solution? I am installing now, and just realized I can't download the TV listings. Thinking about modding the code to loop "wget -c" into a temp file (seems to fix timeouts with wget for me).
Please email me at @gmail.com and let me know. I'd appreciate it.
Tom
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.