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

Good job

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, the ping times wont be so good.

Good job they've announced it so early then.

Re:Good job

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not really important anyway. Normal users don't use the ping command or even heard of it.

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.

Japanese in space?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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?

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.

Re:Receive Traffic?

[malchus842]

DirecWay (from DirecTV) offers satellite return service - no phone line necessary. I used it for about 6 months some time ago (when this area was total broadband hell, as opposed to only being partial broadband hell). It does work, but some major caveats:

• When it rains hard, forget about using it until the storm passes
• When it snows, you have to clear the dish regularly (or use a cover)
• Latency is tremendous - basically forget online gaming and VoIP

But, if it's your only option, it's great. Seriously - in the same situation, I'd use it again

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.

Re:The US left behind again

[aussie_a]

Don't worry, America's going to the moon in 2015! So they'll be light-years ahead of everyone else....

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.
--
Why didn't you know?

Re:Japan has unique opportunity

[hcdejong]

In LEO, one orbit takes about 90 minutes and gives ~9 minutes of coverage at any given point (numbers pulled from memory, so give or take 20%), so you'd need 10 satellites. Would that be worth it to eliminate the 0.2 s latency?

Re:Japan has unique opportunity

[ceeam]

Actually it's several islands and it's not that "compact". Its area is close to California and a tad larger than Germany. Unlike California though it does not have large forest/desert areas and unlike Germany it is more stretched (North to South). I don't think low-orbit satelites would work.

Re:Japan has unique opportunity

[halftrack]

I think you'll need more sattelites than that. Remember that the earth spins inside their orbits so when the tenth satellite passes over Japan the first will be on the same latitude as Japan, but on a rather different longitude. Thus you'll need more satellites to cover Japan 24/7.

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.

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.

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.

Re:The US left behind again

[NBarnes]

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/08/president-and -intelligent-design.html

Don't confuse us Amerikuns with facts, we ain't too smert here and we like it dat wey! Praise Jeebus and pass the Chinese-manufactured, Indian-designed, Japanese-researched cel phoon so I cun call in to Russ Limbaw.

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?

Re:Satellite ping time myth or fact?

[Arker]

You would still have all the normal routing delays, so this would probably jack your ping time to slashdot up around 1000ms. It's the same sort of issue DirecWay systems have in that regard. That kind of latency is instant death if you're playing counterstrike or the like, of course, but for downloading email, web pages, even doing ftp or whatever it's still really not a big deal. It's probably enough to make VOIP annoying, but not unusable.

There are some alternatives with lower ping, but they all have problems. You could use an array of 10-12 low earth orbit satellites, for instance, so that you have have one in range at all times. I'm not sure how that would compare on expenses - the satellites would certainly be cheaper, as they wouldn't need the extra-powerful antennas, but probably the whole array would add up to be considerably more expensive. Launching costs would pose the same sort of pattern - cheaper launches perhaps, but probably not by a factor of 10-12. So it would be more expensive. You'd have much better latency, but you might also introduce a lot more complexity in targetting the moving objects with your signals.

In the end, it's probably not worth it. The intention here is clearly to give service to those in rural areas that don't have alternatives, and to provide emergency communication channels that are immune to terrestrial disasters, and this should do that admirably. Not being able to play counterstrike on it probably doesn't really affect it's core utility.

Re:Satellite ping time myth or fact?

[Ironsides]

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.

There is one additional source of delay that you are failing to take into account. When encoding and decoding the bitstream into RF, there is some delay. The transmitting end has less than the receiving end. On the receiving end, the RF signal has to be digitized, run through some form of Fast Fourier Transform and decoded to get the bitstream. This will add some time to the pings.

On a different note, I'm currious as to how they are going to get 100mbit out there. On a 36Mhz ku band transponder, the maximum throughput is probably close to 200mbit using DVB-S2 (the latest and greatest satelite transmission codes). They are going to need a lot of transponders/bandwidth to provide satelite broadband to the boonies.

One thing on the ping times though. For regular downloading of webpages, What if they set up on the ISPs end a cache manager that would take your request for a web page, cache all content on that web page (and a few surrounding links) and then forward you the web page along with all associated images all at once so you weren't requesting everything a packet at a time?

Large ping?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Large ping?

[FrostedWheat]

You also have the round trip of reply packet to consider, so double that to 500ms. Then you have to add the normal internet latency, so say on average the lag will be about 550ms to 650ms. Not horrible but worse than dialup.

Re:Large ping?

[Chaotic Spyder]

hrmm you forgot to double it once again...
you->Sat Sat->Target (There)
Magical Internet Lag
Target->sat Sat->you (back)


each trip adding about 250 you say...

useing your math ur looking at about 1000+the Internet

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....

Re:erm?

[marx]

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.

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.

Nope.

[Gordonjcp]

A large dish catches a large amount of signal. Think about how much rain will be caught in an empty swimming pool in 10 minutes, compared to how much rain will be caught in an empty wineglass.

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.

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:The US left behind again

[Overzeetop]

Actually, it has been determined by one of the largest consumer data providers that satellite broadband is not economically viable. Hughes, the owner of DirecTV, had planned a massive rollout of this technology, due this year. After they had designed and (mostly) built the satellites, the numbers didn't look too rosy. Instead, they re-tasked the satellites for the new HD/MPEG4 DirecTV market. It is the classic case of a company spinning a failed product into a "fantasic innovation" (if you believe the new ads).

So, no, the US hasn't been left behind. The market forces have decided that there aren't enough dollars to support a venture and make lots of cash. This sucks for those in rural america, as the landline folks have also decided that you won't make them money. Our democracy and capitalism fails us in insideous ways. This is one example.

It could possibly be even faster....

[stupid_is]

....with this nifty invention.

Spotbeams

[rbrewer123]

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

Re:The US left behind again

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but you are flat wrong and ignorant on this one. I work at Hughes and have first-hand experience with the broadband offerings. DirecTV is no longer owned by Hughes, it is part of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch's company. Hughes is now HNS, LLC.

The re-tasking of the sats had less to do with broadband viability and MUCH MORE to do with Rupert Murdoch wanting to control DirecTV and make it competitive with other TV offerings like cable. At best you might say that NewsCorp/Murdoch didn't see broadband via sat. as viable but even that is pure supposition. By buying HNS, Murdoch got DTV and 2 satellite assets (including the orbit slots) that could be quickly converted to provide HD programming. From a business perspective this was a very smart move to give DTV a competitive offering now instead of in another couple years once they built their own satellites. Let me be clear though that to say Hughes gave up on broadband by satellite is an ignorant statement to make.

The current offering from Hughes, DIRECWAY, has over 250,000 broadband customers. They are getting new customers with home users as well as businesses (think chain stores with 1,000s of outlets, many of them out of reach of other broadband solutions). Our European division was recently signed to provide broadband for a leading credit company. All of this information is available at www.hns.com.

Also, the planned Spaceway offering, even with delays, will still be available well before this Japanese offering. Good luck to them getting all of the pieces together by 2015.

Obviously, I am being careful about what I say since I don't want to get in trouble with our corporate folks while trying to defend my company. The truth is that everything I know and see indicates a committment to satellite broadband by HNS.

RUN if ping times get exceptionally better!!!

[simos]

An advice to our Japanese friends:

RUN LIKE HELL if the ping times get exceptionally better!!!

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.

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.

The US already has this

[CheezWizFire]

This kind of a service is already available in the US http://www.infosat.com/services/hsi/index.html#