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

Laser beams

[TristanBrotherton]

I wonder if it has big lasers on it too... I wish someone would just get on with makeing good cost effective global satelite internet access. One account, no roaming charges. Then i could get on with being a true digital nomad.

Receive Traffic?

[rimu guy]

The only satellite based internet access I'm aware of is where the satellite brodcasts (i.e. you download from it) and your connection uploads via your phone line (typically via a slow line since if you had an adsl capable line then you would probably be the cheaper and faster ADSL connection/cable provider).

So when they report that a cell phone can communicate with the satellite at 10Mbps, surely they are meaning the cellphone can download at that rate. And presumably it'll be doing that rate with the local cell tower acting as the satellite proxy. Either that or satellite phones are more common place over in nihon than I'd imagined.

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VPS Hosting using good old fashioned wires for connectivity

Re:Receive Traffic?

[Jugalator]

Over here in Sweden, we have for a rather long time now had satellite ISP's for the more remote areas where people can't get DSL and want something better than modem speed. However, it was always very costly and totally not worth the money when put against any other common broadband technology, and I doubt this new Japanese satellite will have very low subscription costs.

Beam width?

[carndearg]

Its giant 66 ft. diameter dish is supposed to be able to receive even weak cell phones signals.

Unfortunately the article has no picture of the satellite so we cant see the antenna in question. But surely a the purpose of a dish antenna of that sort of size is to increase the gain by narrowing the beam width, isnt it? Presumably there's a small field near Osaka with an AWESOME signal!

If this is to cover the whole of Japan then I'm guessing they'll have multiple footprints overlapping each other from multiple feeds to this dish. Any readers who know their antenna theory care to elaborate?

What on Earth are you talking about?

[interactive_civilian]

guruevi inaccurately stated:

Sure have big plans. Everything there is "made" big.

Ummm...Have you actually been paying attention to Japanese technology at all? Take a look at the size of mobile phones. Historically, they have been smaller than phones from the US, and they get smaller every year. Or how about Japanese cars? While Americans drive around in their gigantic, fuel-guzzling SUVs, Japanese drive VERY compact cars needed to navigate roads that are sometimes only 2.5-3 meters wide.

Have you ever even been to Japan or seen pictures? Everything is so densely packed here that there is no space to own things that are big. TVs, stereos, phones, cars, air-conditioners, refrigerators, laundry machines, etc. Everything is made to be small and efficient over here.

Sheesh.

Re:What on Earth are you talking about?

[stuckinarut]

Some of the car taxes in Japan are based on the weight of the vehicle so having a smaller car saves money on this as well as on fuel.

Re:What on Earth are you talking about?

[Ironsides]

Have you actually been paying attention to Japanese technology at all? Take a look at the size of mobile phones. Historically, they have been smaller than phones from the US, and they get smaller every year.

I remember seeing two phones that I'm not sure could get much smaller.

1) A watch phone just like dick tracy/inspector gadget had. The antenna went on the thumb (along with the earpiece) and you talked into your pinky. The watch contained the dialpad.

2) (This one belongs to friend of mine in Connecticut) It is about 1.25" by 0.5" by 2.5"-3". I'm not sure how much smaller they can get without losing them too easily.

Or how about Japanese cars? While Americans drive around in their gigantic, fuel-guzzling SUVs, Japanese drive VERY compact cars needed to navigate roads that are sometimes only 2.5-3 meters wide.

Where does this myth come from that everyone in the US drives an SUV? Most of us in the US drive sedans. I personally drive a Honda Accord (Hint, the car is Japanese). So where does this thing about everyone in the US driving a 3 meter wide SUV come from?

Second, on road width. 2.5-3 meters is 8.2 to 9.84 feet. I just drove down a street getting to work that had lanes 8 feet wide. We have just as narrow streets in the US. The "wide lanes" are on the interstates with speeds over 100km/h that have a 3 meter lane width.

Japan has unique opportunity

[nokilli]

Being that it's a relatively compact island, I wonder if any consideration was given to a series of satellites in low-Earth orbit.

Many satellites, all in one orbit that takes each satellite across the nation along the long axis (i.e., north-to-south) should provide continuous coverage with very low latency.

Given the importance of VoIP it would seem that latency isn't something you can so easily get rid of.
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Why didn't you know?

Satellite ping time myth or fact?

[burnttoy]

I've had this argument before and we never came to a sensible conclusion. Personally I still think that high bandwidth satellite data transfer has much merit as long as you can get the satellites up there cheaply enough.

A geostationary orbit is about 35,000km up. lets call that 50,000km as we might not be right underneath it. Light travels at 300,000km/s so the travel time for a message is ~166ms. multiply by 4 (a->sat, sat->b, b->sat, sat->a) gives ~666ms, the latency of the beast ;-).

OK, not the greatest but pinging slashdot gives me an average of 349ms from London,UK so it's not as good but then not terrible either.

I wouldn't want to carry out interactive surgery or try and play a concert with remote players (latency kills live music!) but for just getting hold of and/or disseminating info it's not too bad.

If the satellite were to be placed in a far lower orbit then latency numbers will drop. I believe this requires spin stabilisers and some sort of engine to keep the satellite from plummeting to Earth though.

I can't say I'm an expert in satellite orbits and I can't find any more details on the proposed orbit of this project. Anyone care to help me out?

Coincidence?

[Rxke]

Also in the news today:
Arianespace has launched the heaviest comsat to date, also aimed at providing bradband services to the Asian market....

old technologies

[freeduke]

If they are going to launch a single satellite, it will be geostationary. This means that latency will be awfull (around 1/4 of a second for a single paquet to reach its destination). So according to this, users will have to define huge TCP windows to be able to reach the maximum throughpup.

The most interesting technology about satellite communications is based on low orbit satellites networks, but cernaly not on geostationary satellites!

It must be only an attempt to capture all the radio traffic in Japan from a single dish and use credits dedicated to Research for 'national security'.

Anyway, this technology is already experimented in the Thalys train, linking Paris to Brussels http://www.thalys.com/be/en/wi-fi/overview

I wonder if a stratellite could do it?

[bigwayne]

I wonder if the same equipment would fit on one of these . Perhaps an array of smaller devices?

I wish this would catch on. Assuming they work out the obvious problems with super-high flying aircraft, this might be a neat lower cost alternative to things like this, also something you could take down to make changes to (like upping the capabilities of the hardware, maybe?).

Either way, great concepts on both parts.

Re:Japanese in space?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems people regard this as funny, though the Rebuilding America's Defenses paper from the PNAC, which is now partly being enforced by the current US .gov, does state a phrase 'the ability to deny others the use of space'. Things might be worse than they appear..

Satellite Internet Not that Uncommon

[ZPO]

Satellite Internet is already available and not that uncommon. Take a look at http://www.satsig.net/. We use satellite Internet here in Iraq and it works rather well once you adjust your systems to deal with the latency. I've got VoIP running quite well with it.

The article is more than a little short on salient information. I'd take a guess that they will focus a very high gain spotbeam on the Japanese home islands and provide a few wide coverage transponders as well. That will give them the power density to use small earth terminals within Japan.

Pricing is going to be the likely downfall of such a consumer oriented system. Relative to terrestrial broadband networks, satellite Internet is very expensive. For my current service, I pay ~$700/mo for 1M down and 256K up. Thats at a 10:1 contention ratio on a Linkstar (DVB-RCS MF-TDMA) system. Other plans are cheaper, but as the contention ratio goes up, the service delivered is only really suitable for very bursty non-realtime traffic.

Re:RUN if ping times get exceptionally better!!!

[TeknoHog]

Actually, if the satellite started to fall, it would not go straight towards the center of Earth (and in any case, it would crash on the equator, not Japan). Conservation of angular momentum ensures that its motion around Earth would speed up, so it would start drifting towards the Americas, and maybe go around the world a couple of times before hitting ground.

-- TeknoHog, spoiling the fun with technical remarks since 1978.