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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.