Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Japan to Deploy Massive Broadband Satellite

Posted by samzenpus on from the connect-anywhere dept.

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."

2 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. Outdated by the time it starts working? by My+Iron+Lung · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Latency by Drew+Curtis · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.