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Really Remote Internet Access
RexDart writes "The BBC Online has profiled Duane DeFreitas, an adventurer and guide living in Guyana. He's three hours away from the nearest town (in the dry season; three days away when it's raining), yet has full internet access via satellite. His latest project: setting up Skype for phone service, as soon as he can import a microphone and speakers. Yet more proof that the internet is truly everywhere. Mind the jaguar."
were he really fast, he could use one half of a set of headphones for listening, and the other half as a microphone, if they were small enough. Earbuds work really well for this purpose, he just needs to split a jack and add another stereo jack. A little wire-rigging and he'd be set for less than 5 bucks.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
the audio to text is not there yet. even the best dictation softwares out there are only about 80-90% and leave you to proof the transcript before you give it the thumbs up.
working for a VoIP company I've tested these products, but they do not claim to be 100%. my step father is a director over at chevron and they have many (200+) that use similar software and it does save them time, but bottom line, I don't think Skype would be able to offer him (or anyone) audio to text anytime soon.
do you have shinyfeet?
Got news for ya, For some people in MS, they've got two way satellite net access.. thogh it still sucks, because after you hit 150 megs of bandwidth used, you get capped to 56k speed.
You just need two boxes hooked up to the satellite to send and receive. The lag's still horrible, though. DirecWay offers it in Como, Mississippi.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Not really a good solution. The listening party would have to listen to a computer generated voice which isn't as good as a human voice yet. There's also more lag in a typed conversation so combine that with the satellite lag and I don't think it would work.
Bidirectional satellite connections have been available for consumer use for a little over 3 years now (that I am aware of).
I use DirecWay. The Fair Access Policy sucks, you only get a measured amount of bandwidth to use per time slot. Mine is 500 meg per 4 hours. The speed of the transmission is nice. Download speeds can get upto 2000bps and upload varies based on how much money you parley. Mine is 120bps (pitifull I know).
The latency is born from the signal having to leave your satellite dish, upto the geosychronise orbiting satellite, back down to the Network of Operations, out to the Internet, back from the Internet to the NOC, back up to the Geo sat, and finally back down to your satellite dish. All told, the best time for round trip transmission is 0.7 seconds.
All network traffic handshaking is hampered by this high amount of latency. If whatever protocol requires pretty rapid back & forth to be responsive, then it's pretty much guarenteed it will suck with satellite internet service.
-FlynnMP3
Err, 480ms rather. I cant do math. Damnit, there goes my whole post.
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The days of being amazed by remote connectivity are over. For several years it has been feasible to setup VSAT powered by generator or solar. You can get up and running for less than $5,000 and a couple of hundred dollars / month.
The Regional-BGAN has been operational for a couple of years, but has been very expensive and a max speed of 144kbps and a foot print that only covers middle east, europe and northern africa. $700 up front and $10 / mb.
In the next couple of months, Inmarsat will be bringing their new I-4 satellite online to be used with BGANs. This will provide speeds of almost 500kbps (depending on how you like to calculate your overhead) in a unit the size of a laptop. Coverage initially extends from Europe to southern africa and central australia.
By the end of '06 the network will be almost global - including the amazon.
Just for the record, I've done Skype and other VoIP over the RBGAN. It works ok with a similar delay to any other satellite phone. But the cost is still quite high due to the cost / mb.
Turn the globe up a bit and rotate it just right and you can get it so you can see nothing but blue. Those are the south seas of the Pacific. There's no reason to go there at all unless you're whaling. . .or in the 'Round the World single hand race.
It's nasty "country" where the wind has thousands of miles of scope to build up waves. Some years ago one of the competitors in the race capsized in those seas. She got an emergency signal out to the orginizers, but with no shipping lanes within a thousand miles or so the only one around to attempt a rescue was one of the other competitors, who, as it happened, was sleeping at the time.
How did they get in touch with him to alert him to the situation?
They emailed him.
KFG
...in IEEE's magazine Spectrum..
Bill Woodcock of Packet House travelling the world and setting up Internet connections in remote locations.
Not sure about his application, but I am currently using a satellite connection from a rig site where we pay $700 per day for the computer systems and satellite access. It works quite well and you can have one web cam going without too much latency. ch latency.
Antarctic Culture - The Seasons
Yes you can. It's not particularly reliable, as it's affected greatly by the state of the ionosphere. B/w stinks, as it's about 2400bits/sec over shortwave.
Jacques Richer (n1zzh)
There are many LEO satellites (notably, Iridium sats in polar orbits and GlobalStar sats in various inclined orbits) that provide internet access for non-equatorial regions.* Granted, speeds are 1200bps to 9600bps and it will be horrendously expensive (around $1.60 per minute last I checked), but it can be done and often is done on oceangoing ships large and small for sending GPS telemetry back home and also so the crew can email their landlubber friends.
Now, for *broadband* satellite internet, AFIAK you are limited to geostationary satellites around the equator. Bill Gates' Teledesic broadband internet-via-satellite venture, which would have been LEO, fell flat on it's face and I am not aware of any alternatives. I suppose you could buy four or eight Iridum phones (at $1,000 a pop) and gang them together into some kind of Frankenstein dialup-speed connection. I hope you are rich or you'll soon be decalaring bankruptcy!!
* Granted, GlobalStar does not cover the poles very well. IIRC there is also Inmarsat, but I'm not sure if they do data?
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
I live on Niuatoputapu, Tonga. 1-3 months to the next town (whenever the boat comes). I often have to clean the sparkplug in my generator before booting.
My net connection is 14.4 dialup that cuts out every five minutes... long enough to load Slashdot and POP email.
The distance and latency problem is indeed the main issue. I've only worked with Starband systems so i can't talk for the other providers out there but....
typically i saw a ping time of about 600-800 ms. Working with ssh over a connection such as this is a bit hard but if you know your keyboard shortcuts you can do alright. You just have to think about what your going to do before hand and not be addicted to the backspace command. Another option is to edit files using emacs or vim's ssh remote access method.
Starband's 480 line of modems now has the "TCP acceleration" software built in which helps out quite a bit. I suspect what happens is some sort of UDP encapsulation but please don't quote me on that one, i'm not sure of the internals. However, in practice it's quite nice. Once you use their built in http proxy loading a web page acts just like a typical broadband connection. large file-transfers in the downstream direction works very nice as well with speeds of about 100k/sec or so.
Upstream is a different matter. If I understand how the bird is working they use a round robin arraignment for receiving the uplinks from the client ground stations. This means that you have to wait your turn before you can x-mit data up to the bird. Latency kicks in again and upload speeds slow down quite a bit. As of right now i've got a server uploading data files at about 11k/sec. Better than nothing though, and rather cheap and easy to setup.
So, if you get 5 * +1 Funny and 5 -1 Troll, you lose 5 points, even though, logically, you should come out even. Get too many Funny mods and you can actually get banned ...
So what mods are doing to compensate for the defective slashmath is modding funny stuff as informative instead ...