Japan to Deploy Massive Broadband Satellite

demachina writes "Japan has announced plans to deploy a massive broadband satellite operational in 2015. It will provide 100 Mbit/sec service to mountains, remote islands and bullet trains along with comm for disaster recovery. Its giant 66 ft. diameter dish is supposed to be able to receive even weak cell phones signals. Of course, the ping times wont be so good."

Comments

The US left behind again

[cleft4]

It is amazing to me that all the countries of Europe, Japan, and many others are going broadband at such a pace. Yet here in the states, it is still the rarity to see. I think this lack is a good indicator that our laws and the protectism it supplies simply isn't working.

In fact

[domipheus]

The article states
The satellite will be able to receive weak signals

Which I am led to believe means it will be able to send and receive data. Wouldnt be much use on the train otherwise if thye would still nead a wireless ground network to send.

Outdated by the time it starts working?

[My Iron Lung]

In 2015, ten years time, this might not be such a great speed? Although it's quite fast now, and will probably still be reasonably useful in the future, it might be about as popular as dialup is in my city (not very). Who knows what zany download speeds will be the norm in the future, across electrical wires or otherwise.

Latency

[Drew Curtis]

One thing that the news item left out of this wonderful product is that the average latency of about 800 ms for a satellite connection makes the product a poor supplier of interactive internet browsing. It will suffer the same problems that the Directway system does.

That doesn't mean it doesn't have a lot of uses. It just means that when the marketing types start hyping the product they conveniently overlook its limitations. And in comparing it to fiber optic without mentioning latency issues, they are doing just that.

Not for the masses

[stare_at_the_sun]

Use of this satellite will begin in about 2015, supporting a "maximum speed of 10 megabits per second" with cell phones. Right now there are about 82 million mobile phone subscribers in Japan (source pdf), 40% (and growing) of which are using 3G technology (source). 3G service is moving into the 3Mbit/s range right now.

Similar trends can be seen in the broadband internet market, with normal (non-fiber) broadband speeds of 40mbps becomming common.

At this rate, the down-to-earth infrastructure in Japan will have left this satellite in the dust long before 2015. About the only thing it will be good for is emergency communication in remote areas.