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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."
Of course, the ping times wont be so good.
Good job they've announced it so early then.
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.
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.
I thought Space was owned by America? I can't see George standing for this, he'll use his death star to shoot it out the sky.
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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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?
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Made big?
They are the reason I keep loosing my mobile phone and mp3 player, everything is made smaller there!
Is that 100Mb shared among everyone? In that case it will suck.
If the 100Mb is for each person, what's the limit to the number of people that can use it?
TFA is short on actual details.
With a 67 ft diameter rocket.... duh!
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.
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.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
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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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.
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.
Same way they do current satellites: by folding all the sticky-outy crap, including the dish, so it fits inside the rocket fairing.
no.. i mean what actual rocket or shuttle? or more to the point, how they going to get any satellites up in the near future? Did they not all go up on the shuttles and older rockets?
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?
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
A geosynchronous satellite orbits at a height of approximately 38,500,000m. Light travels at a speed of approximately 300,000,000m/s. It therefore takes light approximately 250ms to make a round trip. This might be sub-optimal for gaming, but its about the ping time I remember from a modem. You might run into some problems with TCP rate limiting though - it's probably best to run some non-TCP protocol over the satellite link.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Also in the news today:
Arianespace has launched the heaviest comsat to date, also aimed at providing bradband services to the Asian market....
Japan apparently has their own satellite launching infrastructure. Otherwise I think NASA and ESA both help with launching commercial satellites, it doesn't seem to be a big deal anymore.
Low orbit satellites will be out of range of Japan most of the time, hence idle, hence you will need a lot of them, hence expensive. And since low-orbit geostationary satellites will not work unless Japan moves to the equator and earth spinning doubles, I guess (autonomous) balloons or gliders are the most viable alternative for low-ping sollutions.
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.
"I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" -Jesus (John 14:6)
to deploy a massive broadband satellite
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
The beam width is dependant on a lot of things. You can adjust the focus of the transmitter to turn the beam into a big fuzzy spot.
The usual ping time from base station -> satellite -> home user is ~250ms. That is not counting all the other hops to the actual servers.
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 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.
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With dialup ppp over an 28800 modem to my ISP, the ping lattency stays at 190ms.
Now my old white Sportster 28800 now serve for my emergency connexion in case DSL goes down.
As 190ms was not an issue for Q3 gaming or web browsing in 1996, I wouldn't say so today.
Web pages tend to incorporate much more linked object thant it used to lately in 1996. And the number of HTTP requests needed to load a page is a pain to load whith a high lattency link. Much more a problem than limited bandwith after all.
FPS gaming on 190ms dialup is no more an option when you compeet with onserver, lan or low lattency cable/dsl remote players.
Léa Gris
The average customer can live with extended ping times. How many "interactive" websites are really worth your time anyway? Obviously, if you're into on-line gaming, the delays will be noticeable. But this would certainly be acceptable for normal browsing, VoIP, etc. For some reason, I doubt those living in remote areas will be whining about "ping times" when they will just be glad to be connected to the rest of the world.
We can be such spoiled brats sometimes...
Every consumer oriented satellite system has, so far, failed (such as the one touted by BT here in the UK before ADSL became more wide spread) because of the inherent problems like latency induced lack of syncronisation, 'hidden stations' and the resultant exponential decline in throughput with added users.
These are made much worse by the fact that there is a large latency which tends to affect the more efficient packet protocols more (eg slotted aloha).
The only advantage this system has is that at least it starts at 100Mbits raw speed. But since theory suggests that, without some serious cleverness, you will only be able to utilise about 18% of that. In the limit, how much use will that be in 2015?
In fact several. The infrastructure in Japan is not conducive to having high speed rural internet access, especially on some of the outlying islands. Japan may be "compact" compared to the US, but remember that 90% of the population lives on 10% of the land. In fact, if you look at it in terms of Okinawa to Hokkaido, it's a huge AREA, much of which is inaccesible except by long tunnels or valleys leading up to mountains, or because of long stretches of ocean. In the US you can mostly just run a landline or throw up a satelite dish at the exchange. In Japan they have to zigzag the cables across insanely steep ravines because the country is so mountainous. I remember, there was a valley near where I lived, that was so remote that they only had 4 hours of full daylight in the SUMMER. Getting ANY internet access there better than crappy dialup would be wonderful. This satelite is for people way out in the sticks more than anything else, say, the 12.5 million who live outside major urban centers. Add to that: urban broadband in the cities ALREADY blows this satelite's bandwidth away. I'm talking 40-100mbps connectivity to your HOME in a few select areas. 26mbps even in some semi-rural areas.
I think the /. crowd is looking at the purpose of this satellite in terms of how they themselves would make use it. (games, pron, ping contests...)
:-)
I imagine the main reasons for this venture are:
1)Replace old satellite(s) that will be going offline soon. (N-stars?)
2)Backup coverage in case of other non-satellite system failures. (mentioned in article)
3)Increased coverage and throughput over current satellite system. (mentioned in article)
Analogy, it appears that our neighbor is simply replacing his 'everyday car', and we are all talking like he's buying a 'racecar'.
Well I bet Ping is gonna be pissed that his country is spending that much on a satellite that's so slow for him.
4*166=664
It's called a calculator. See? Try it and you'll find you don't have to estimate numbers using your toes anymore.
Withan H-2a rocket built by the Japanese NASDA, from their dedicated launch facility....
1 213.html
i es_e.html
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/japan_h2a_02
for one example of the japanese launching an australian sat back in '02....
or http://www.nasda.go.jp/lib/nasda-news/1997/02/ser
this series for a history of NASDA rocket development.
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
That's no satellite, it's a giant flying BattleMech (hey, they're Japanese).
I don't need a signature.
reach Monster Island? I hear Godzilla is a big pron freak.
I suspect the term "dish" and any impression it is parabolic is an artifact of the reporting. I worked on a satellite system like this... It is geostationary and it has a gigantic antenna system composed of two umbrella-like devices. The "umbrella" was designed to create 140 "spotbeams" on the earth, for a total coverage of most of southeast Asia. Each spotbeam is the equivalent of a giant (300 Km diameter) cell in terrestrial networks. The system is called ACeS (Asia Cellular Satellite System) http://www.acesinternational.com/corporate/index.p hp?fuseaction=System.satellite
The satellite antenna pattern can be divided into a number of "spot beams", similar to cells in a terrestrial cell phone system. Basically, it's SDM (space division multiplexing), in addition to time, frequency, and code multiplexing. So each spotbeam can have frequency reuse and the aggregate bandwidth across all spot beams can be increased. ACeS (Asia Cellular Satellite) has 140 spot beams: http://www.acesinternational.com/corporate/index.p hp?fuseaction=System.satellite
An advice to our Japanese friends:
RUN LIKE HELL if the ping times get exceptionally better!!!
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.
Boy, I'm sure a sattelite that large and powerful wouldn't be used for any types of electronic recon... right?
Semi-OT but something I was curious about. What's the approximate latency on intercontinental connections via the trunk cables? I'm not quite sure on the distances but I'd imagine that they're enough to through a bit of skew into a connection between, N. America and Japan (or for fun distances, Canada and Australi)
n ternal Routing-->Destination (and then back again).
In that case I'd imagine an international connection would suck royally for somebody viewing a N. American website/game as the latency would involve:
User-->Satellite-->Japan-->Trunk-to-N.America-->I
Anyone have some approx numbers on that?
This kind of a service is already available in the US http://www.infosat.com/services/hsi/index.html#
Some other interesting thoughts here.
-FL
Placing a huge satellite in geosynchronous orbit is going to be hugely expensive. It is only going to provide a niche solution due to the second-scale ping times. I think most people want a solution that is responsive! SSH sessions will be almost unusable over this system.
Placing so-called "stratellites" in the upper atmosphere makes so much more sense. Just a handful would be required to cover all of the Japan. And the great thing is that you can replace/repair/upgrade them if you need to. The geo-sync satellite is a one-shot deal. With deployment 10 years away, this looks terribly shortsighted!
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
It's not a perfect parabola - it's like a car headlight compound reflector.
If you look at the footprint for the Astra 2 satellite cluster, that provides the UK and EU with digital satellite TV and radio, you will see that it is far from a round spot...
Where can I see a picture of this 66ft satelite? or atleast an artists impression/3d graphic etc? wow!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Actually, you're hoping for Sanswire Networks http://www.sanswire.com/home.htm to succeed with their "Stratellite" technology. This would put a network of high-altitude (13 mile) airships above the country, capable of carrying literally tons of communications equipment. It'll give you the ping times you need, at a fraction of the launch cost that a satellite requires, and includes the ability to bring down the node for yearly maintenance/upgrades. I'm bullish on the concept.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there's a big difference.
Satellite origami!
The French launch a Thai satelite
h tml?185224
Thaicom-4 with the Ariane launcher.
With "high speed" internet NOW
for 2$ a month in rural asia.
http://www.lefigaro.fr/sciences/20050811.FIG0245.
In french , bien sur!
The heaviest satellite in geostationary orbit.
When they first came out, the phones were the size of a cinder block and cost a few dollars per minute when the celular industry was already at small form-factor and 20 cents/minute rate and going towards semi-flat rate plans that we see today. Of course they went belly-up about a year after launch, even at the rise of the dot-com frenzy.
Wildblue is back in business and is 1.5 down 256k up at the highest $80/mo tier. It is 2-way on the sat. They block Voip though - boo!
Offtopic - why would they say SSL VPNs might work faster than IpSec VPNS because of latency?
http://www.wildblue.com/aboutWildblue/qaa.jsp#5_5
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Because anything having to do with any sort of multiplayer game is very adversely affected by latency.
Even the normal web surfing is a lot slower - not because of the transfer rate, but because of the response to request rate.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
One thing I wonder is how will they manage to get such a massive satelite in GEO as it's weight most likely will exceed the payload of the the HII launch vehical. I know a sat like this can be launch in sections but you need to do a few manned space walks to assemble the parts. So far all in space assembley has required a manned presence and usually a spacecraft similiar to the US shuttle as well. Another option I wonder if they'll do it is to buy a heavy booster from the US lunar program the heavy SDV could launch such a huge satilite and it's booster need to place it in GEO. Also the concept reminds of of an old nasa plan to give everyone in the US low cost satilite phone access. This was a very large satilite that was to be assembled in LEO by the shuttle and then was to fly to geostationary orbit once assembled using ion rockets.
Yah they'll need the ESA and nasa's help esp nasa in the really big launchers they'll have by 2015.Though if they go with an ion rocket upper stage something in the delta IV heavy's class might do the job so maybe a three core version of the H2a could pull it off then.
A shuttle derived launch vehical might be the only thing that can get a bird that big in orbit since were talking something 4 or 5 times larger then previous communications satelites. Though some of boeing's delta IV variants they have in planning also are quite powerful and might also fit the bill. The most likely booster they'll end up using will be some heavy version of the EELVs as this sat could have a GLOW of 35 to 40+ tons.
User--(120ms)-->Satellite Satellite--(120ms)-->ISP ISP--(??)-->Destination Destination--(??)-->ISP ISP--(120ms)-->Satellite Satellite--(120ms)-->User.