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pitchblende writes "Our company works in remote locations in Northern Canada. We have been experiencing major communications problems with our current satellite service. We use satellite systems that go for about $1000 apiece, with $100/month in fees. The service is 'shared' rather than dedicated, and our VOIP, etc, has been getting worse by the day lately. From what I can tell, dedicated systems go for $30k and up.
I hope someone(s) out there has some suggestions, recommendations?"
In order to avoid satellite providers altogether, a number of areas in southern Alberta have made the switch to terrestrial wireless systems. These systems typically operate in the 900 MHz or 2.4 GHz band, and provide each client with a highly directional radio frequency line of sight (it works through trees and bush) to the provider tower, which can be several kilometers away. These systems are very reliable, and boast latency and bandwidth similar to modern cable networks. Most providers do have a bandwidth cap in place, but they are not nearly as absurd as satellite provider caps. Best of all, they cost a fraction of a satellite connection, and the equipment itself costs less than $100 at the client site.
With regards to specific technologies, check out the offerings of Motorola in their Canopy line of products. I'm sure there are many others, but I have experience with this one =)
I think what he means is dedicated bandwidth.
I work for a company that has 10+ satelite links and some are better than others. AFIK all satelite operators in Canada use Telesat's satelites, so it doesn't really matter if you switch providers, as you will still be talking to the same bird in the sky.
We use Infosat Communications for our satelite sites, and lately they have been having issues. Their uplink facility is in downtown Calgary and when a storm rolls through (which they have daily now for several weeks) there is a good chance that the uplink facility will lose connection to the bird, and ALL sites will go offline. Outages are usually breif, but a MAJOR pain in my ass.
Once service is restored, likely one of the sites will not come up correctly and I have to call the site and do some rebooting tickery to bring it back online, which SUCKS as most of the people up north can barely tie their shoelaces, let alone work satellite equipment.
We have two different types of satelite dishes. The more reliable of the two (by quite a large margin) is a dish mounted to a 4" pole sunk into concrete. That baby ain't `goin nowhere, and generally works pretty good (but HIGH latency). The other dishes we have are auto aiming, so that, in theory, you can drop the thing anywhere, press some buttons and away it goes. In reality, they can find the satelite in the sky quite well, but if for whatever reason, that connection gets lost, it will not reaquire. Someone has to go out to the site, and play with the equipment. Then when it doesn't come up, we call Infosat, and they get the person on site to play with the equipment, before finally sending a tech.
When one of my auto-aligning dishes goes down, I curse. Usually it takes DAYS to get it back online. I have to get someone on site, then get infosat on the phone...
Anyways, I feel the submitter's pain, as I live with it too. Unfortunately I think you are SOL and will have to live with it, as cellular data can be spotty too (and is unavailable pretty much everywhere north, except northern Alberta. We looked into cellular data and they couldn't/wouldn't give us a SLA so we are still on satelitte.
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We used NetKaster's commercial grade service at 75+degN. The farthest north it has been deployed according to their tech as of last summer. All satellite is shared, but we had good luck with VOIP and even some video conferencing when the weather cooperated. That far north you have to shoot through a lot of atmosphere to hit the bird. I would say if transport size is not an issue, go with two of their 1m dish systems and load balance. That should get you want you want.
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I can vouch for the Riverbed as well. We use it for our connection to the Philippines (from Ohio, USA), and it works great. At one point it had cut down 50GB of requests to 2GB of sent traffic. I really don't think there are any alternate connections unless any of the sites get cellular service or you lay your own cabling which would be godawful expensive. You could sample a few other providers maybe, but I think optimizing your current connection may be your best bet.
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I'm currently employed by a US-based VSAT provider and I'm the guy in charge of the IP sections and a good portion of the RF section too. Here's my advice and words of wisdom.
1) You'll get what you pay for. Satellite spectrum *is* expensive, so if you're only paying $100/mo for service, you're being oversubscribed to hell and back.
2) Consumer satellite providers mostly share bandwidth by TDM access. They have a large carrier from their earth station that runs all the time, but your transmitter bursts in a duty cycle set by the system controller at the earth station. Its great for downloads, but it sucks for VOIP.
3) The people who say "VOIP won't work over satellite" are dead wrong. It works just fine. We have many customers in the US and several in Europe that use VOIP just fine. However, they're on "dedicated bandwidth", so there's no TDMing. If they're buying 512kbps of bandwidth, they have 512kbps of bandwidth. But they also pay more for that.
4) I don't know exactly how much data and voice you need, but consider BGAN as a possible solution.
5) And, shameless plug, feel free to contact me and we can see what we can do for you.
Try and set up a chain of repeating 12' satellite dish broadcasters retrofitted for 802.11G like the one they set the distance record with. It got like 125 miles, so 10 or 15 of them ought to get out to the middle of nowhere. Latency would probably blow, but it's still better than satellite.
Building 10-15 125 mile links with 12' dishes is no trivial (or inexpensive) task when you consider the site acquisition and civil work to pull it off. The operational costs to maintain it in such a harsh environment aren't trivial either. And using 802.11G for this is a joke, and 10-15 125 mile links are going to have an availability that's horribly low, probably in the 70 or 80 percent range. FCC Part 101 (or whatever the equivalent is in Canada) licensed microwave is clearly the way go if they want any reasonable amount of bandwidth and availability, but the cost of this network will dwarf whatever monthly recurring they're paying now.
Pulling off an interesting wireless experiment with hacked and overextended hardware is a lot different than building a production network.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
WTF? God only knows how big the Earth is? The radius of the Earth is only ~6400 km. Which is small compared to the 35786 km distance to geostationary. The north pole is the farthest you could be from them on the Earth surface and so it's 36353 from geostationary orbit. So for all your smart assed "God only knows" bullshit, it's 1.5% farther if you aren't on the equator. Moron.
I am currently deployed to Iraq. Dues to the specialty of my job, my 3 man team rates our own VSAT uplink. The system we use is made by GCS and is their Cheetah model. Not 100% sure whose birds we use, but I believe Intelsat. This system in general works pretty good, auto acquire dish, integrated router, VOIP, etc. Since it is military, it also provides an uplink to SIPR, also with VOIP capability. The system works alright, but it has been known to be quite finicky, particularly with power sources. While the system is allegedly rated for a wide range, both AC and DC sources, in reality, it sometimes has a problem with generator AC power. Because of my remote location, generators are all there is for power, and anyone who has lived off of generators for an extended period of time can tell you that the power isn't always steady. In the past, power outages due to generator outages have killed the system, requiring one or more components to be replaced. Bandwidth is so so but it does do VOIP fine. Only other gripe I have with it is the management of it. Have to jump through a few hoops to connect to slashdot (something about non-work related . . .).
You sir, are the moron.
Pythagoras' theorem is used as follows:
c = sqrt(a^2 + b^2) (a=distance from centre of earth to north pole, b = distance from centre of earth to geo stationary sat.)
c = sqrt(6400^2 + (6400+35786)^2 )
c = 42668.707
That equates to almost 20% more at the north pole, not 1.5%.
You've never looked at a map of Northern Canada, have you?
People who are doing work there are usually there for a good (at least to them) reason, so saying someone should move if their location is more than 30km from a backbone connection is asinine.