Satellite Internet Providers

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?"

Comments

Amazing

[mrbcs]

I can't believe you got voip to work at all. I had a satelite before.. ping times well over 1200ms. It was pretty much useless as far as I was concerned. 500 meg bandwidth cap a day so you couldn't even download an iso. Mine wasn't "shared", but it still sucked pretty bad.

Sorry about your luck, dial-up would probably be about the same though and a lot less money.

Re:Amazing

[anpe]

I had a satelite before.. ping times well over 1200ms.

Smells like something funny on the provider side. I assume the satellite was geostationnary (35786 km from earth). So given that the signal travels at the speed of light, a RTT between you and the provider hub should be:
35786 / c * 4 * 1000000 = 477ms
4 being the times the distance is travelled (modem->sat, sat->provider, hub->provider, sat->modem).
Of course the signal travels a bit less fast, and there's some processing at your providers but I've seen results around 600ms.

Weren't the 1,2 sec RTT you're talking about between two sat modems? That would explain such a huge delay.

Re:Amazing

[grcumb]

Smells like something funny on the provider side. I assume the satellite was geostationnary (35786 km from earth). So given that the signal travels at the speed of light, a RTT between you and the provider hub should be: 35786 / c * 4 * 1000000 = 477ms

I lived and worked in the Eastern Arctic between 1994-97, so my information is somewhat dated, but at that time, 1.2 seconds was an average round trip time, because in order to reach our Internet backbone in Yellowknife, we had a double satellite hop. For reasons that the Northwestel techs were never able to explain, traffic coming from Baffin Island landed in Northern Ontario, then got shot back onto a satellite in order to send it to Yellowknife.

Back when we created what was at the time one of the most remote commercial ISPs in the world, we paid the telco CAD 3000/month for the privilege of a 56Kb digital connection. I asked about T1 (or equivalent) and was quoted CAD 100,000/month.

Nonetheless, we managed to provide service to about 1000 customers, creating a few IRC junkies in the process. Believe me, any service at all was better than none out there.

More on topic: Jeff Phillipp and the guys at SSI Micro (based in Fort Providence, but with a presence in Yellowknife) are the best people in the region for Internet connectivity. They did pioneering work getting the diamond mines' communications systems up and running, and have since developed processes that have been used everywhere from the Arctic to Africa to the South Pacific. They know exactly how to squeeze value out of any Internet connection. I can't recommend them more highly.

Re:Amazing

[storkus]

One other thing both of you are missing is the elevation above the horizon and how that affects path loss. Remember that microwave frequencies are heavily absorbed by water and, at Ku-band, by oxygen. So not only are you further away as you move away from the equator, but you're also having to pass through more atmosphere as well, and since northern Canada tends to be rather wet, it's not hard to understand why this happens.

The standard answer is a bigger dish and a tougher mount to make sure it doesn't move because of the reduced beamwidth. But as you get REALLY far (above the Circles) you start seeing diminishing returns. I know this because I read an article a couple of months back, referenced here in /. , about an Antarctic research camp and how, despite a huge 10+ meter dish (I don't remember exactly how big but it reminds me of an old 10 meter dish that was once a cable headend and was used for a while by a PBS station I worked at in the early 90's), connectivity was very intermittent so they have to use Iridium much of the time (who's polar orbit works best at the poles, but has a very low available bandwidth).

If you can suffer high prices and lack of bandwidth, you may want to seriously consider Iridium: each channel is only 2400 bps, but my understanding is that it's fairly easy to bond them. The trouble is that the price is per minute, not per kilobyte.

If you need more than this, you'll have to wait until 2010-2012 when both Iridium and Globalstar will be launching new technology to replace their constellations. I have no idea if this will increase speeds. And while Globalstar is cheaper, it won't work well above the Circles and won't work at all above 70 degrees (the orbit inclinations are very different, more like GPS's). Just remember not to use Globalstar now since the birds don't work (discussed in /. and elsewhere extensively).

I hope this helps at least somewhat.

Mike

Re:Amazing

[had a lobotomy]

Your math is correct. Your engineering sucks. You cited "b" as the distance from the "center of the earth" to GEO. 35786 km is the distance from mean sea level (MSL) to GEO. To find "c" (distance from earth center to GEO) "b" must be 35786 + 6400 or 42186. I'll save everyone the math lesson, "c" = 36354. A little under 1.6%

Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[Scuzzm0nkey]

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.

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[BuckaBooBob]

He probably would be better off with Packet over Avian Carrier or Packet over Caribou..

Northern Canada is covered in forest and Just taking a guess.. depending on how far north he is.. he could be 6+ hours drive to the nearest point of civilization and what type of access it would have who knows.. maybe 56K dial-up could be considered high-speed new fangled technology there :)

I am shocked I haven't seen any comments about Igloo's yet.

   

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[ubercam]

Manitoba Hydro built, maintains and operates two microwave networks that run from Winnipeg to the north. They use them to control northern dams from the central control office in Winnipeg. I know someone who was involved in the implementation of remote switching of manually operated dams back in the 70's who was actively involved with the microwave system. He said the latency is VERY low. They can switch things almost instantly from Winnipeg, over 1000km away.

They have used it in the past (maybe still do) to send TV and radio signals to repeaters up north so the folks up there could watch live TV/hear live radio. They also use it for phones as well until quite recently (upgraded to fibre optics since). Which is why the phone company (MTS) helped pay for/build it too. Much cheaper than running thousands of kilometers of copper. The guy I know had a friend in the control office in Winnipeg who sent up various Winnipeg radio stations over the microwave on a subcarrier of the CBC TV signal. Apparently the CBC never even noticed hehe. I think they had to modify their radios, but there were all electronics specialists anyways working on the remote switching stuff, so it was peanuts for them.

I'm not sure where the poster is located or where his remote sites are, but perhaps there's a utility company that might have some spare capacity on an existing microwave network they'd be willing to sell?

The nature of the beast

[Bluefirebird]

That is the nature of the Internet satellite business. The quality-of-service is dependent of the traffic from other terminals, since it is a shared service.

The only solution to this problem is to try to secure some premium class traffic for sending VoIP and have the border gateway properly configured to mark VoIP packets accordingly. The rest of the traffic should be served as Best Effort, in order to save money.

Satellite contracts and providers

[esobofh]

Are you dealing with the satelitte provider directly? i.e. infosat, telsat, etc?

Directly they won't do much in the way of service level agreements that have financial penalties associated with them. However, if you were to purchase network services from a communications supplier that was working along with your satellite provider, you may find they have more weight in getting you the service levels you are paying for (and contracted).

I suggest you give TELUS a call, and compare prices/service levels for service in your area.

Feel your pain

[Anonymous Coward]

If a cellphone network is available for some of your locations then look into that.

I have wildblue, which could be similar to the system you are using (costs are similar). A couple of years ago it was a lot better but since it has been more loaded I am not always getting my bandwidth and the latency has gone up.

Two years ago VOIP was somewhat usable now I am very lucky if I can use it. Any SSL has always been painful.

My situation has changed since I provisioned the sat. I am now running a small business from my home and when I move I will probably go back on the grid. If I don't move I might try putting up an antenna and routing some of my data over a cellular network.

Teleco

[Anonymous Coward]

Depending on where you are, Enerconnex offers some kind of service to remote locations though its primary target is oil and gas in northern Alberta. I don't know if that particular company can help you. It is a division of Northwestel.

You might also want to contact Northwestel directly but seeing as it is a government-sanctioned monopoly with a government-sanctioned profit margin, I wouldn't expect much help. It's probably cheaper to blast your own satellite into orbit that to get service from it.

Also, Northwestel should read Bell as Bell wholly owns Northwestel.

Satellite is pretty much the only system that you can get from another company, at least in the Yukon. Northwest Territories and Nunavut may have different telecos that don't suck so hard. I'm strongly considering getting satellite for my own personal internet just because I loathe Northwestel and its business practices.

Move

[realmolo]

Satellite internet service has latency issues that will NEVER go away. It's the speed of light that is the limiting factor. I'm surprised you were able to use VoIP at all, honestly.

You simply aren't going to get good performance out of a satellite internet service. It might be acceptable for simply web-browsing and e-mail, but for a business? Forget it. It's strictly a "we have no other choice" option.

You're screwed, basically. If you want a good internet connection, you need something that is based on a good ol' cable, whether it be copper or fiber. If you don't have those available, then you need to build them. If you are really in the boondocks of Canada, then expect to pay millions to lay your own fiber.

Have you tried a Riverbed device?

[RichMeatyTaste]

WAN optimization, works rather well. We have several offices connected via VSAT links (shared bandwidth like yourself) and VOIP and everything works fine. The Riverbed averages about 90% compression across all traffic.
(a href="http://www.tredent.com/news/fhi-deploys-riverbed-steelhead-appliances-after-testing-cisco-packeteer-and-juniper/">Go here you want to read our "success" story.

Re:Have you tried a Riverbed device?

[QQ2]

Totally agree. Customer of mine owns a lot of Rigs in the sea. Sometimes the rigs are connected to pipelines and they run fiber through the pipes. However more often than not they use satellite connections. WAN optimizers, Riverbed or other totally rock. You can go for either the appliance version, which means you need to stick a device before and after your satellite connection to get a good boost. But the really good boots are in the software based versions. You have to install some client software and there is still a appliance on the other end but the performance totally rocks. Also it's a very competitive market so you can easily get a demo setup from any vendor to show just how awesome it works for your specific scenario.

Satellite? Screw that. Go radio

[Gunfighter]

Get with some of your local ham radio geeks. Those guys are amazing. Granted, their radio bands and equipment are not approved or licensed for commercial use, but they can probably at least point you in the right direction. Once they get the equipment (which is way less than $30k) and license, they can toss packets all over the place for free. I don't know what the bandwidth or latency is like on their systems, but I do know that when it comes to getting information from point A to point B, they get pretty creative. Certainly they can help you come up with something that will fit your needs (for a nominal fee). Worth a shot!

What is meant by "shared"?

[morgan_greywolf]

Mine wasn't "shared", but it still sucked pretty bad.

What is meant by 'shared'? How is any satellite system not a shared medium?

Perhaps I'm just not understanding some sat lingo here.

Re:What is meant by "shared"?

[vlm]

I have been distantly involved in this technology for a couple decades. Not directly involved but I had several co workers who did these type of projects.

Pay enough money and you too can get a dedicated T1 thru satellite, and run whatever you want over that T1 such as inet access. Obviously this is how the telcos used to provide satellite voice service.

I hear there are also gadgets that encapsulate ethernet frames into something that looks like an MPEG stream and can be multiplexed and demultiplexed with the TV signals off a tv transponder.

If you are just too rich to know what to do with yourself you can rent the entire transponder. You will be bankrolling a significant portion of the total cost of a satellite launch, but T3-ish speeds or perhaps a half dozen video channels are possible off the shelf.

Either way, the telecom style T1 or the TV network style MPEG stream is of course terrifyingly shockingly expensive. As in if you have to ask, you cannot afford it, so don't bother. Your employee's employees will take care of setting up the ground station, running waveguide, replacing TWT tubes (do they still use those or have they gone all solid state now?) maintaining positioners, keeping N2 pressure regulated in the waveguides, filing FCC licenses, etc. The 30 foot dish will be an attractive addition to the top of your skyscraper but will often get in the way of your heliport.

Carterphone!!!!!

[xtype2.5]

If voice is all you need try this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone

Get three providers

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I Had the same problem in the Caribbean. We ultimately just subscribed to the three different satellite services, and just had our network route the traffic accordingly. And yeah voip works fine over satellite. I don't know how it works so well, but it does work.

Re:All Satellite Internet Providers are Shared

[Hyppy]

A group of friends and I went in on dedicated satellite bandwidth in Asia for a few years. It cost us around 4k/month USD for a T1-bandwidth connection, but it was well worth it for a group of 15 guys.

Re:I'm no expert

[TheRaven64]

Actually, you can get a small satellite into orbit for about that much. Most launches have a small amount of space left over after the main payload is installed and you can buy it very cheaply. You may need to wait a while to find a launch going into an orbit you can use, however, and for Northern Canada you are likely to need a few, because I'm not sure a geostationary orbit would be visible that far north.

My experiences from Afghanistan

[Fallon]

I can't help you Canada, but can relay my experiences from Afghanistan.

512 down 128 up dedicated, 1.2 meter dish (I think, could easily be wrong on the dish), ended up running about $30,000 U.S. a year. About 2 people could fired up Vonage VOIP and get a decent connection, any more than than and things went bad. Ping times were 675-800ms when the link wasn't too saturated. We had upwards to 18 different people sharing the link, so it was often saturated, especially in the evenings.

We looked at several different companies, and found some 256 symmetric shared (duno where the sharing took place, ISP or satellite, or what) connections for a little cheaper, but when we tried those out, they were all but unusable.

Getting decent bandwidth and low latency to the ends of the earth isn't cheap, reliable, or effective. It wouldn't surprise me if the middle of nowhere northern Canada had an equally poor satellite footprint to Afghanistan.

Anonymous

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're paying $100/month for shared segment you are probably getting some crap service. I work with three different hubs (Telesat directly, a telesat reseller, and Hughes in the US) and even for a 64kbps symmetrical service I spend considerably more than $100. I generally see 600ms latency on these links. These are on iDirect iNFINITY 3000 series IDUs with 1.8M dishes. I believe 512kbps/512kbps service was something like $500/month (i'd have to dobule check).

Leasing space segment isn't worth it IMO unless you have a bunch of sites with very low bandwidth requirements. If you are doing VOIP and video conferencing this is not the case. Most providers can give you a CIR on a shared segment which will definitely help applications like VOIP and Video. But you get what you pay for. $100/month won't buy you much in the satellite world.

VSAT

[jkirby]

Although VOIP will not work reliably, VSAT is an excellent options when there are no others excpet dialup. I used www.starband.com for 6 years before moing to a location with broadband. Down speeds were awesome, up speeds OK, packet turnaround time sucks for VPN and any other packet-exchange protocol.

Starband uses a protocol accelerator (BST - Boosted Session Transport) that blasts loads of packets at once and then blasts the check sums. Allowing large data transfers to take advantage of the high speed burts that VSAT uses. I have, on occasion, had speeds up to 25 MB/S; I am not joking (that is MB/S not mb/S)! However, 1 to 4 megabits is normal.

Jamey

PASON Systems

[Anonymous Coward]

PASON is designed for rig sites and will work all over, I have used it in Northern AB and BC.

This isn't exactly what you are looking for but they do offer a satellite link with their services that can support VOIP. Not sure if you can use them for data only though and not the rest of the rig system

http://www.pason.com/WEB/html/products/idms.html

Netkaster/Xplornet

[ArcticBirdman]

I have been living in the Canadian North for 42 years now. We first had dialup with reduced rates to Yellowknife until Bell offered their DirecPC which piggybacked download on E1 then E2. After that, several organizations along with the Feds put together a 'broadband' wireless system in order to give each community better and cheaper service then dialup. As has already been commented, costs are considerably higher then you southern user. Telsat came up with their Ka system which operates around 20Ghz giving more bandwidth then earlier Ku. They put F2 into orbit about 3 years ago and started offering their service directly(Anikast),and through 2nd party ISP's, like Netkaster, Xplornet, etc. I have been installing both the Netkaster and Anikast systems for over 2 years now. Original systems were $500-750 complete with installation extra. Four packages are provided starting with 500 Kbps, 1 Mbps, 1.5 Mbps, and 2.0 Mpbs. Downloads are usually 1/4 upload speeds. Up until last May, 2007, the service was quite good. Unfortunately, Telesat decided to 'Improve' the service and it has sucked big time since then. From where I am, it looked like they took some of our bandwidth in order to satisfy their southern customers, figuring us Northern customer wouldn't notice. Sound familiar-Concast, Bell, etc. Of course they denied all of this but results and experiences says otherwise. Unfortunately, HughesNet, a Ku 2-way satellite service is not being offered on any satellites that we can use up here, so the Ka is it. VOIP does work but Skype works better. Costs are not bad considering what else is available. The 500 Kbps is going for $55-65 CDN up to $150-$200 for the 2Mbps service. For those requiring more bandwidth, they could use several units tied together with a Load Balancing router. As for outages, we have 4 beams covering the Canadian north with most going through Vancouver hub. It has been very reliable with far fewer outages then the other provider. It takes real heavy precipitation to kill satellite signal and even that it not for long. Equipment failure does happen but is so infrequent that I might have to fix 5-8 in a year of the 75-80 units now installed in my community. I saw that Japan launched their own BroadBand satellite that is capable of 50 Mbps, so the potential is there, but so is the higher cost. No free lunch up here, but at least we can surf the net anywhere you have a power source(approx 100watts), and depending on your location to the 4 beams, work as far north as 80 degrees(Eureka). Just my 2 cents worth, or maybe 5 cents worth due inflation.

VoIP aggregation over satellite - use Asterisk

[Anonymous Coward]

I've recently been talking to some folks about their satellite VoIP usage in N. Canada and they're using Asterisk to aggregate their VoIP traffic for savings. This of course doesn't improve latency, but it does allow you significant improvement on bandwidth efficiency.

A G.711 ULAW 10ms RTP stream (typical "toll-quality") is around 82-85kbps, about 16kbps of which is the IP headers surrounding each packet and around 64kbps is the "speech" part of the data. That's a lot of data, so typically calls are compressed using something like G.729, so that the "speech" part drops to ~9kbps. But the IP overhead for those more efficient streams is the same as with G.711: 16kbps. The total bandwidth of a G.729 stream is now ~24kbps, but two thirds of the traffic is IP header. This is Bad. Adding more simultaneous channels of speech over the same link just gums up the bandwidth with IP headers and relatively little is used for the speech (important) part of the transmissions.

If you've got an Asterisk system somewhere at each 'end' of a sat link, you can use IAX2 trunking to stuff multiple channels of "speech" parts into a single set of IP headers. You still use 16kbps of IP headers, but each incremental G.729 channel only takes up 9kbps more data on the pipe instead of 24kbps.

For a comparison of various codecs using IAX2 trunking, see the study I did a long time ago here:

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+bandwidth+iax2?view_comment_id=56165

John Todd
Asterisk Open Source Community Director
jtodd@digium.com
(who is too lazy to re-sign up for his /. account)

Re:VSAT

[battery111]

Yeah, we ended up using an UPS to try to alleviate the issue. It works alright, only problem being that the thing is a bit of a power hog. The entire system consists of the dish itself, the modem that it mounts onto, a NIPR box (regular non-secure internet), and the SIPR box (secure internet). Both the NIPR and SIPR boxes have their own routers, toughbooks, and various other electronic items. It all adds up to a healthy draw, so the issue we run into is when power is out for more than a few minutes, the UPS has trouble keeping up. While a bigger UPS would likely solve the problem, it was hard enough to get the government to buy the ones we got. We did find the running a seperate ground from the dish helps, which tells me that the generator likely is not grounded properly, but that's not my department.

Pitchblend VOIP over Satellite

[Stewart from Expand]

After 266 comments... There are satellite specific products that may help you. However you may want to consider adding WAN Optimization to your satellite communications. While several providers offer TCP acceleration, the combination of QOS and TCP Accel might help you straighten out your VOIP and reduce the cost (i.e. the amount of data that you are billed for going over the sat link) There are a number of WAN OPT solutions that may be able to help you with your VOIP over satellite. I work for one (natch). My company Expand Networks has had a reasonable amount of success at running VOIP over Satellite in many remote locations. However a lot depends on your Sat Modem, the specific mix of traffic, bandwidth etc. Here are a few links to some whitepapers. http://www.expand.com/Industries/Index.aspx?URL=/Industries/Government.aspx http://www.expand.com/Industries/Government/Index.aspx?URL=/Industries/Government/Mobile-Military-Communications.aspx The guy you want to talk to though at Expand is Eric Olson, he is head of the technical team there and would give you a straight answer on what to expect. He has placed over 9000 accelerators for the US Govt worldwide. Hit the Expand website and place a call. Another issue to be alert to since you mention that you are running VOIP to remote locations is whether the WAN OPT solution is running a diskless solution or a hard drive if you worry about running out to the far reaches of canada to replace a crashed hard drive. Let me know if I can help. Stewart