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

Down

[courteaudotbiz]

Come back down to lower Canada...

Re:Down

[Spritzer]

Or contact the experts.

http://viasat.com/broadband-satellite-networks

I'm a little biased, but I truly believe that for a broadband satellite solution specializing in IP over satellite this is your best bet.

Re:Down

[Harry Balzack]

...where men are men, and seals are nervous!

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

[mongoose(!no)]

There you go: Get a lot of phone lines and dial-up connections. Or just use regular telephone instead of VoIP if it's that important.

Re:Amazing

[bondjamesbond]

Right. Who made the decision to implement VoIP through a satellite connection? ouch.

Re:Amazing

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Residential internet is shared. With satellite, it's the same transmitter for a lot of people. With cable, your neighborhood is on the same cable. With DSL, you may have a dedicated line to the CO, but you're sharing bandwidth at the link the CO has with the rest of the world. Sharing bandwidth is actually a good compromise as it reduces the cost of making sure they have provisions for bandwidth that most people aren't using anyway.

Re:Amazing

[oldspewey]

This:

remote locations in Northern Canada

Almost certainly negates this:

Get a lot of phone lines and dial-up connections

Re:Amazing

[mweather]

Or even better, use satellite phones instead of rigging up a more expensive and less reliable facsimile of satellite phones.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, they're geostationary over the equator. That place with palm trees and eternal tropical weather. God only knows how much extra distance it adds to go all the way up to northern Canada.

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.

Re:Amazing

[kyouteki]

I used to install VSATs, and we routinely installed several VoIP lines on them. Yeah, ping is slow, but that's what ACK spoofing is for.

Re:Amazing

[Sandbags]

VoIP over sattelite? 2-3 second ping round trips? Real time anything over a sattelite is simply not a good idea... The travel distance from ground base to ground base is simply too far to use with direct signals, and we don't yet have the technology to use laser light for long distance communication.

Get some fiber run out to your location. Likely, it will be less than 30K, especially if some others nearby can chip in on a shared GBps link. (I'm assuming you're not more than 30KM from somewhere that DOES have a hard line to the backbone. If not, MOVE.

Re:Amazing

[PPH]

Not significantly more distance overall. But the satellites lie lower over the horizon, making the path length through the atmosphere (and signal attenuation) greater.

Re:Amazing

[exi1ed0ne]

I have sat inet at home (wildblue) and routinely see 1200-1800ms ping times.

Re:Amazing

[dgatwood]

You're assuming that the routers at both ends know how to handle high latency upstream connections and don't clog the pipe with retransmits when they haven't received an ACK for so long. It's easy to envision a factor of 3 multiplier.... :-D

Re:Amazing

[rahmrh]

The provider he is probably talking about has some traffic shaping software on it, before the traffic shaping was introduces the ping times were around 600-800ms. About in range for speed of light delay, after the traffic shaping/modem firmware upgrade pings were now 1200, with once in a while pings dropping to the old range

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

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%.

Re:Amazing

[Fjandr]

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.

Re:Amazing

[element-o.p.]

I guess not all satellite services are created equal. I work for a company that uses satellite to connect from our main offices to our service area 500 miles away. Our ping times from the main office to our service area is on the order of 600ms. We do use VoIP (sometimes) and it does work (sometimes), but then again, we have half the latency you described above.

Re:Amazing

[Sandbags]

The backbone doesn't have to stop there, just pass there. Sureley there is a road connecting that town to others. down that road somewhere is a telecommunications hub and a fiber drop. One only needs to get the provider to build a node to connect to and lease you fiber access.

If you REALLY can't get the level of service you require, and it's impacting your business, then ROI and simple sense dictate you should either move said business, or change your requirements for service expectations.

Unless you're talking about working in remote arctic areas, say for research purposes or for access to burined resources, then you should have, within reason, access to proper services, it;s just a matter of getting someone to do the work and spend the money to hook it up, and if you're within 30KM of a medium sized town, major road, or highway, it should be able to be done for well under 30K (less if multiple companies can share the connection)

If you're further out, then low latency dedicated satellite may be your only option. Keep in mind, feeds like that are not only expensive to buy, but the bandwidth fees are ridiculous!

i get the impression from the original article that they're in a mildly populated area, not some remote outpost...

Re:Amazing

[kriston]

You would be REALLY surprised how well it works.

If you choose a highly-encrypted codec, like G.729, it takes less time to transmit your voice data than it takes you to speak it, so when you're done speaking the other side is better than 1/4 second behind you, and it's just like an analog satellite voice connection--some would say better because the fidelity is so much greater due to the codec.

Data transmission is not the problem, and neither is latency. People who use satellite phones are already used to the extended pause when one party stops talking and the other starts talking.

However, transmitting the data is no worse than analog, and with the right codec, you won't be struggling for bandwidth.

Re:Amazing

[Fjandr]

I reiterate, you haven't looked at a map of Northern Canada, have you?

You don't have to be in the high arctic to be in an area with no roads, or where roads are impassable much (or most) of the year. Look at a map. There are very few medium-sized towns period, so most areas are certainly not within 30km of one.

i get the impression from the original article that they're in a mildly populated area, not some remote outpost...

From the summary: Our company works in remote locations in Northern Canada.

Re:Amazing

[kriston]

Naturally I meant to type "if you choose a highly-COMPRESSED codec, like G.729" up there.

Re:Amazing

[magarity]

Modded down; what is it, insecure Canadian mods day? "Tropical equator to northern Canada = god only knows how far" is mild mannered humor.

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

[rs79]

I have Hughes sat. I'm 30km away from any halfway (and that's a stretch) interent. It's hilly aorund here and wifi is a bit of a crapshoot. I've used VOIP on the Hughes sat - it works, but there's one helluva lag. The worst bit though is that it (uh, skype software I haven't played with others) seems to just sit there in a tight loop digitizing sound and sending. Even when there's dead silence it's furiously digitizing sound into zeros and sending those buggers as fast as it can.

With the bandwidth cap on the Hughes service this would take you down in no time.

Is there any stuff that only sends when there's actually data to send?

I don't care about the other end that's in NYC and isn't an issue.

Re:Amazing

[DewDude]

As I've stated before with satellite internet: If you're using it for a real-time service, say VOIP, well, you might as well just shoot yourself in the foot. You've got serious physical latency to deal with. Ping times of 500, 800 ms? That's quite normal. Let's look at a basic part of radio theory...radio signals travel at speed of light, around 186K miles/sec. Geosync orbits are 22.5K miles above the equator. My math sucks, but I do know that if the sats are positioned over equator, and you're up in northern canada...you're going to have a whole lot more than a 22,500 mile haul for your signal...so you've got all this physical latency to contend with. Sending analog signals (like they used to for international calls) generally works fine...but when you add in TCP/IP, it's just painful. It's really only good as a replacement for dialup..that's about as useful as it is. Sure, you can download large files pretty quick, but if you're doing any kind of real-time communication, seriously, save yourself the hassle and look into maybe getting some kind of microwave link for tellcommunications, it'll probably be cheaper in the long run than maintaining satellite systems...not to mention they're a LOT faster.

Re:Amazing

[dilvish_the_damned]

Only about 600ms (RT) of that is due to the SAT link, the rest is probably large queue depths at both ground sites, your terminal and the gateway, or it could be slot timing latency in there as well. At 700ms (RT), voip is still usable since its really 350ms each direction. Most cell to cell links will give you something like 250ms-300ms per direction, you get used to it.

Re:Amazing

[matthaak]

I don't know what ACK spoofing is. Does that create fake acknowledgments locally so that a TCP client doesn't hang around waiting for real acknowledgments on every packet before sending the next?

Re:Amazing

[ProfessionalCookie]

We assume that phone lines aren't available otherwise we all know the poster should just get a T1.

Re:Amazing

[ProfessionalCookie]

Wildblue ping times are typically ~1sec. I'd guess the at sd=2 you're out to 600ms to 1400ms. No lies.

Re:Amazing

[ProfessionalCookie]

35786 / c * 4 * 1000000 = 477ms

I thought c was the speed of light??!?! I kidd.

Re:Amazing

[onepoint]

30 miles in the middle of no-where, that's like a short walk up in those areas, maybe you should look at 200 miles.

Re:Amazing

[BattleWolf]

UDP, which is what VOIP traffic (or at least VOIP traffic I am aware of) uses does not need ACKs...

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

[Anonymous Coward]

And now you pick up the moron baton. Pythagoras' theorem is for right triangles only. I assure you that the center of the earth to the north pole to a geostationary sat does not in any way resemble a right triangle.

Re:Amazing

[kriston]

Hi, Skype is probably doing much more than just phone data.

A simple VoIP phone (or phone adapter), such as from Grandstream, has a setting that can set up the codecs to not transmit anything when there is silence.
It's called "Silence Supression." The phone (or adapter) runs an algorithm that detects silence and transmits a packet that says "silence" and stops transmitting. When the silence is over it transmits another packet that wakes up the other end. While all this is happening a "comfort noise" is played to both party's handsets so it doesn't sound like the phone disconnected.

I don't know if Skype offers configuration of comfort noise and silence suppression because I do not use that service.
Nearly all the real VoIP providers do, and for a few years I have been using Broadvoice using my own VoIP devices for around $5 per month.

Re:Amazing

[ResidentSourcerer]

I don't think fiber will cost under 30K.

Our school had fiber brought in as part of the Alberta Supernet project. They had to lay 30 km of fiber at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars. That was laying it next to nice roads where the workmen had a 40 minute commute home at night.

Mines are difficult to move. The technology of cheaply transporting multiple cubic kilometers of granite crust is not well developed. (Cheap compared to a fiber link)

With a name like 'pitchblende" I suspect that his company is one of several that is mining uranium in northern Saskatchewan. If so this is some of the most unfriendly terrain for laying cable. Over most of this country there really is no 'dirt' It's granite, or it's bog. Some places it's just glacial till. Bad gravel roads cost a million dollars a mile. When the Gulf mine went in on Wollaston Lake, the initial road was so bad that the trucks carried 4-6 spare tires, and after each trip replace the entire set of tires.

Some of these places only have winter roads: Wait until the lakes freeze solid enough to support a D9 or D12 cat, run the cat over the lakes, push the trees aside. Then, depending on the quality of the road, bring equipment in with normal semis (fully chained wheels) or huge sleds towed by those same cats. Typically a winter road requires a few weeks of preparation each year, and is usable for 6-8 weeks. All the heavy equipment, fuel, non-perishible supplies come in during this time.

If the mine site has more than a few dozen people at it, they will probably carve a gravel air strip near it. Otherwise they use the lake and float/ski planes. If the latter, then for a few weeks during freezeup and breakup you are either stuck there, or you have arrangements with a helicopter charter company.

From the mining districts in northern Saskatchewan it's 200-300 kilometers to LaRonge, a town of about 5000 people. I don't think LaRonge has fiber, but it may have microwave relay to Prince Albert.

If Pitchblend has at least a winter road into his area, it might be possible to put up a chain of wireless relays. This would require a tower periodically. Given that the country is fairly flat, and the trees pretty scrubby (30 -40 feet tops) he might be able to get away with a tower every 30-40 miles. If a winter road maintenance would be a bitch. Except in winter, access would be by helicopter or canoe. Nothing quite like working in the northern muskeg during horsefly or blackfly season, I tell you.

I've got satellite internet. It's erratic. At non-peak times it's pretty good. At peak times it is still better than dialup. There is a lot of latency, and a huge amount of jitter. (I've had ping times as long as 5000 ms. 800 is more typical)

That said, Pitchblend may want to consider satphones. They are pricey, with plans typically running a few hundred dollars a month and time around $2/minute. But it may make a good backup alternative when VoIP goes pear shaped. The advantage is they use different satellites, ones closer to earth. The disadvantage is that depending on how far north he is he may not have continuous coverage. A given satellite is visible for only about 7 minutes, and the polar orbits I don't think are full.

Welcome to the true north

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%

Re:Amazing

[Sandbags]

Is there a phone there? Unless they have NO access to hardline at all, no cell towers, only Satelite for TV and SatCom for phones, then there is a buried line within 30KM of their location, and to that line can be installed a noc, and in that noc can be installed a fiber to analog interconnect, which can carry up to 100Mbit signals.

If not, then 30K for a low-latency sattelite it is. You want to open a business in the middle of fucking nowhere, that's part of your operational cost...

Re:Amazing

[Sandbags]

If you're really that far out, guess what, it sux, sattelite is your only option. If there's no existing buried cable within 30KM of your location, it also sucks, or if the terrain won't accomodate it.

Several hundred grand for fiber at 30K? I've got an airport here that laid 4 miles of fiber run (with multiple bundles in each run for redundancy, nearly 28 total miles of fiber), and they had to cut through concrete to put it in the ground across almost every foot of the runs, including across runways which caused major logistical headaches getting it done. Total installation was under 100K. (most of the labor was their own, instead of paying $75/hr for contractors)

Urban fiber runs are the most expensive, costing upwards of 500K - 1 million per mile, but a lot of that is due to access limits, permits, conduit sharing fees, and complications of underground deployment in urban areas. Suburbs and pole mounted fiber can be 200-400K per mile. Along rural highways, with few crossroads to deal with, and using quick and simple dig and drop installation, without the worry of cutting anyone elses lines, underground gas, etc, cheap. You can do 1/4 per day typically. Most of the cost of laying fiber is in the labor, and in the leased conduit/pole access.

Again, out that far into the deep north, hey, they chose that type of business, and that location. difficult and expensive communication simply comes with it.

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

[diodeus]

...and the electricity would come from?

Go look at a map of northern Canada.

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[Scuzzm0nkey]

Solar? In the summer those things would be glowing.

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[jacquesm]

solar panel, battery and a small wind genny should do just fine. That's how most weather stations 'up north' are being powered and it would work quite well for a small low power router. There is a Canadian company in the rockies that makes really nice hardware for just that purpose, check out valemount networks http://www.staros.com/

here is another example.

http://www.ecofriend.org/entry/solar-powered-wireless-router-to-bring-internet-access-to-remote-areas/

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

[Smidge204]

Weather notwithstanding, combination battery/solar would probably work. It's not like they use THAT much power. Still talking a few grand *per relay* plus permission to use the land.

You should probably just bite the bullet and have a cable run. How far is it, exactly, to the nearest whatever?
=Smidge=

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[m.ducharme]

Yeah but being down for the whole winter is a drag.

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[snowraver1]

Not to mention that the winter is when most the work up north gets done. In the summer the roads melt and are impassible.

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[Endo13]

No shit sherlock. That's why he mentioned wind in the first sentence of his post. It's excusable to not RTFA before you post, but you do need to at least read the post you're responding to.

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[colesw]

Actually, at least some of the weather stations up north (Ellesmere Island) are powered by diesel generators.

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[Brigadier]

solar or wind with battery ?

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[jacquesm]

Yes, but those are the ones running significant hardware, the smaller data collection and transmission ones are almost all of them powered by renewables, simply because pulling power lines to them is not an option (cost) and the power requirements are modest.

The ones you are referring to are (I believe) 'manned' stations, the ones I meant are simply remote telemetry units. I'm talking about a less than 1 cubic foot box, you're talking about something along the lines of a base camp...

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[colesw]

actually no they aren't manned, there is a bigger manned station near by, but they fly out in helicopters to re-fuel the smaller stations all the time (my father went along for a ride a few times while working up there).

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[Goody]

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.

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[Coniagas]

Solar panels? Someone has never worked the high arctic. There are 2 seasons, day and night. In July at the top of Baffin Island there is 24 hour sunshine and in November you have 24 hour nights.

Then depending on location there is the task of anchoring anything you set up. In Pangirtung on Baffin, the airport is secured with steel cables anchored to the baserock. In the 70's watched a DC3 while taxing get airborne as the wind caught it. The wind across the Davis Straits can put a basic hurricane to shame.

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[jacquesm]

neat, do you have any idea what kind of hardware is in there ?

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[jacquesm]

Indeed, I haven't lived/worked in the high arctic, but the original poster mentioned 'remote locations in Northern Canada', which is not the same as the 'high arctic', and since I've actually lived in such a location for three years in a solar and wind powered home I think I have some relevant knowledge. In fact, in the Canadian winter when it's clear solar panels will have amazing output because they are kept nicely cool by the surrounding air :)

The simple fact that they use satellite there right now according to the OP, indicates they are not in the high arctic or even near it, because there are no satellites in line-of-sight doing telco in the high arctic as far as I know, *maybe* inmarsat has some coverage there (it will cost you dearly though, but if you need them they are almost always the only player), but certainly not at the rates the OP quoted.

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?

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[colesw]

No idea, my father was military, and just went along for the ride (very close to the weather station), he wasn't really interested in what was inside of the things they were filling up :)

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[jacquesm]

hehe, but I am :), most weather stations are 'sleeping' when they are not transmitting, they wake up periodically, sample windspeed, temp, humidity and a bunch of other stuff, prepare a packet and they then either send it off through wireless or they store it on some flash chip, then they go back to sleep.

One that needs a diesel generator would have some pretty significant stuff in there, especially since the diesel would be running 24x7 and would at a minimum idle around 100 watts or so.

makes me curious... next trip up north bring some tools and a camera and have a peek will you ;) ?

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[element-o.p.]

Uh huh. And how do you get diesel to the sites to refuel? What do you do when (not if) the generator breaks down? Now what do you do if either of these happen in the middle of a storm?

The company I work for provides service on the west coast of Alaska -- rather similar to Northern Canada. We have a couple of mountain top sites that we assume we simply won't be able to reach for at least a week at a time. As a worst case example, we had a site go OTA in April. By the end of June, the ice on one of these mountain tops had finally melted enough to get a crew up to repair damage to the microwave antennas, which is what took the site down.

Dropping 802.11g routers every 125 miles to reach Northern Canada would probably be even worse than sticking with satellite.

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[grcumb]

In Pangirtung on Baffin, the airport is secured with steel cables anchored to the baserock. In the 70's watched a DC3 while taxing get airborne as the wind caught it. The wind across the Davis Straits can put a basic hurricane to shame.

Ah, good times.... Pilots servicing that air strip call their passengers 'Pang Pukers'. I'll never forget walking into an Iqaluit bar and hearing the end of a conversation between two bush pilots: "So I turned around and said to her, 'Lady, do you mind not screaming so loud? I'm trying to land the plane here.'"

I've landed about three times in Pangnirtung, and everything they say is true. But it's worth the trip. It's one of most forbiddingly beautiful places in the world.

Back on topic: Solar is right out in places like Pang. It's not worth the effort of bringing the equipment in. Wind, on the other hand....

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[Coniagas]

It will always be Frobisher Bay in my mind.

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[Chewbacon]

A company I worked for used microwave to communicate between our offices. They were only a few miles apart, but it worked great for data and voice. However, this was in the Florida Keys where the air was salty so corrosion was always a concern and during busy hurricane seasons I'd find myself scaling a building with no convenient roof access to reposition the misaligned antennas every other week.

The sheriff's department (or so I heard, could be someone else) there now uses something similar. Every few miles on the highway you find a large antenna pointing in either direction. It connects the entire 100+ miles of islands and is a great example of a large scale project and large-budgeted project.

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[ProfessionalCookie]

Did you use a repeater at the radio level or did you move packets from a receiver to a transmitter? Which hardware did you use?

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[Endo13]

You're not too good at tracking threads are you?

Appropriate mod for your post is -1 Fail.

VoIP over satellite?

[Jonboy X]

VoIP over satellite? How's the latency?

Re:VoIP over satellite?

[Yvan256]

Orbital?

Re:VoIP over satellite?

[hob42]

Through the roof?

Out of this world?

All Satellite Internet Providers are Shared

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the dirty little secret of the industry.

And if some punk on your satellite is doing p2p transfers all day, there is nothing you can do to stop it.

If you want a real dedicated connection, you will have to launch your own.

Re:All Satellite Internet Providers are Shared

[Cutting_Crew]

most satellite providers though have a hard cap. lets say 200MB i think for Dish Network. Once you hit that cap you are lowered to turtle slow connections and gradually you get faster and faster. satellite internet sucks.

Re:All Satellite Internet Providers are Shared

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that's not true. You can pay for a guaranteed chunk of bandwidth - your own dedicated PID. And yes you will pay a sizeable amount (5k+ per month for 1-2Mbits).

Re:All Satellite Internet Providers are Shared

[Syrinx_87]

Actually, my satellite ISP blocks all P2P traffic. That means no torrents, no DC++, etc.. I tried for weeks when I first got satellite internet (it wasn't my decision to switch from dial-up (high speed isn't available where I am) and I'm not the one paying for it) to make torrents run. They'd start to run at like 1 or 2 KB/s (or less) and then start going slower and slower until they dropped all connection with the seeds.
MSN used to sign out constantly because it's technically P2P. I use Pidgin now which doesn't disconnect as often.

To top it all off, now I'm having problems with FTP downloads. The download will start, get x% finished and then just freeze. It'll look like it's still downloading but it's not, it just sits there until you cancel the download. I've emailed my ISP about it several times and they've never answered me...

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:All Satellite Internet Providers are Shared

[gnuman99]

Ok, so you get about ISDN speed for $250? That would work for VOIP connections, albeit there is latency.

Re:All Satellite Internet Providers are Shared

[Cutting_Crew]

what i meant to say was 200MB per day and didn't mean per month - just to clarify. i dont know why this person i am thinking has to worry about that but it does happen.

Re:All Satellite Internet Providers are Shared

[UncleTogie]

The download will start, get x% finished and then just freeze. It'll look like it's still downloading but it's not, it just sits there until you cancel the download. I've emailed my ISP about it several times and they've never answered me...

If you're in the US, call their sales department. Get a name and email addy for the rep, and forward an article to 'em like this:

Set for a read receipt, and follow up with that rep. See if they change their minds...

Re:All Satellite Internet Providers are Shared

[Syrinx_87]

Thanks but I'm in Canada and I can't do much when talking to reps because the connection isn't in my name.

Re:All Satellite Internet Providers are Shared

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Looks like Japan is making it much more affordable. Might even be possible to live on a small island in the boonies of SE asia and still get verizon fios level speeds. Excellent way to outsource.

Re:All Satellite Internet Providers are Shared

[Hyppy]

The latency though... the latency is DEADLY!

Re:All Satellite Internet Providers are Shared

[socsoc]

So 15 of you paid roughly $266/month each for a combined speed at around 1.5 Mbit? I thought Asia was ahead of the West in terms of connectivity...

I am assuming normal consumer activities, if you ran anything that required a fast upstream, maybe it was worth your while.

Re:All Satellite Internet Providers are Shared

[Hyppy]

Not central and southwest Asia.

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.

Re:Feel your pain

[jacquesm]

cell phone coverage in rural Canada is a joke.

In fact, telecommunications outside the few large cities that Canada has is limited to the most basic of service levels.

Re:Feel your pain

[Nos.]

cell phone coverage in rural Canada is a joke.

In fact, telecommunications outside the few large cities that Canada has is limited to the most basic of service levels.

You are generalizing quite a bit. Cellular and high speed internet coverage in some rural areas is amazing. How about a town of http://www.sasktel.com/Store/popups/hsb_communities.htm (see Davidson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davidson%2C_Saskatchewan).

The far north however, is a different story

Re:Feel your pain

[jacquesm]

rural != town... pretty much by definition

Re:Feel your pain

[Nos.]

Let's have a look at what you said shall we?

cell phone coverage in rural Canada is a joke.

I didn't refute that point specifically, but here you go, its not a joke: http://www.sasktel.com/personal/mobility/coverage/coverage.html

In fact, telecommunications outside the few large cities that Canada has is limited to the most basic of service levels.

So do you consider 958 people to be a large Canadian city?

Re:Feel your pain

[snowraver1]

Actually, I think that Alberta has some of the best rural coverage around. TELUS has high speed EVDO coverage for a large part of the provence.

http://www.telusmobility.com/ab/coverage/pcs_home.shtml

There are many oil companies that have paid telus big money to have coverage at thier site. As a result, there aren't many places that you can drive to that aren't covered. Alberta has the best coverage out of all of Canada though, so if you are in SK, you likely are SOL

Re:Feel your pain

[MrMacman2u]

958 people, eh?!?! That's no where NEAR large, eh!

It's HUGE, eh!

Omfg, eh! Maybe they have that new fangled "high speed" internet stuff there, eh!

Re:Feel your pain

[jacquesm]

hehe, no, but that easily qualifies as a candidate for a cell phone tower. Rural Canada to me is say halfway between Sault Ste. Marie and Wawa :)

... ... ... Latency?

[game kid]

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

What latency? It works great to me!

Re:uh!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

You can get a dedicated satellite for 30K..........

Hey, did you know you can get a dedicated satellite for 30k?!?

Quickly now, somebody post a reply to me to let everyone know you can get a satellite for 30k. Because that hasn't been said already.

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.

Skycasters has speeds in which we commit data can

[Joe The Dragon]

Skycasters has speeds in which commit data can be transferred and they have Platinum Service Plan will be optimized for VoIP

All plans include 1 publicly routable static IP address.

http://www.skycasters.com/broadband-satellite-compare/compare.html

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.

Re:Move

[BuckaBooBob]

He is in Northern Canada... its highly likely He has no other choice.. Its likely he is using VoIP because there are no copper lines for 100's of miles. Its likely he is even running of a generator for power..

Being in northern Canada.. its much like being in the middle of the ocean.. Good luck on getting a landline :)

Re:Move

[realmolo]

No, I meant the speed of light. The signals to/from the satellite travel at the *speed of light*.

In other words, you're a fucking idiot.

Re:Move

[aceofspades1217]

There is always the bright side that if you do lay your own fiber you could rent it out to everyone else and recoup the cost. ....Though if their was people who wanted to pay for fiber to beging with than it would already be there.

Re:Move

[Free the Cowards]

You know that there are satellite phones, right? Yes, the latency is annoying, but 500ms and even 1000ms is not crippling for a phone conversation. It will not be natural, for sure, but you can still talk. If his VoIP has been getting worse then it's clearly not due to inherent speed-of-light latency, because those satellites don't suddenly get farther away.

Re:Move

[hpa]

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 know... satellite used to be the only option for intercontinental phone calls, too. It wasn't until the late 80's that undersea fiber cables finally dominated that market.

There is, of course, a perceptible lag, but it's perfectly serviceable.

Re:Move

[Free the Cowards]

I know that some satellite phone systems, namely Iridium and Globalstar use low earth satellites. But I had no idea that geosynchronous satellite phone systems such as Immarsat, ACeS, Thuraya, and MSAT don't actually exist. Thank you for correcting my horrible misconception, Mr. AC!

Re:Move

[gravis777]

I truthfully am surprised satelite is this bad. You just said it, you are limited by the speed of light. Speed of light is, what, 176,000 miles per second, roughly. Satelites are stationed at 36,000 miles above the earth. Let's for kicks add another 4,00 miles onto that for the distance to Northern Canada (sorry, its right after lunch, don't feel like doing the math right now). So, lets say 40,000 miles one way. Lets say the ISP offering this is, oh, in San Francisco, so, what, 39,000 miles, if that. So, 40,000 + 39,000 is 79,000 miles. San Francisco is one of the major internet hubs, so let's say you ping Google. Roughly about 450ms one way, so probably around 900ms roundtrip.

VoIP? Really should not be an issue, if the person you are calling is on a landline. You have what, a one second delay? I get that sometimes with my cell phone. Now what would be hard is if you are using VoIP to contact your other offices who are also using satelite and VoIP. Now we start to approach a two second delay.

Then you have to worry about dropped packets. Isn't satelite reception that far north only capable of recieving around 50% of a satelite signal?

No, I think the best option here may be a bit costly upfront, and that is microwave. It works for companies that need a fast connection who are on the outskirts of cities here. I am not for sure what the line of site is on microwave, and how far away you are from a city that has a decent internet connection, so you may need repeaters, but at least then it will be a dedicated connection, and it should significantly lower your ping time, although do not expect fiber speeds.

Re:Move

[element-o.p.]

And when you have no other choice, you use satellite, even for business.

Also, your backbone doesn't have to be built on cable (copper or fiber). In extremely remote -- or ecologically sensitive -- areas, laying copper or fiber may not be an option. The company I work for built a smokin' Metro-E ring using terrestrial microwave. We would have had to lay about 600 miles of copper or fiber across the Alaskan permafrost if we were to go wired. So far, the network has been pretty reliable, although there have been a couple of outages due to the severe weather where we operate. Ever seen a microwave dish crushed by ice expanding from the tower behind the dish or ice shields that collapsed because they couldn't handle the weight of ~ two feet of ice build up? It's pretty impressive.

Re:Move

[green1]

>> Satellite internet service has latency issues that will NEVER go away.

That's what they used to say about the latency on satellite phones... but the latency DID go away, they didn't change the laws of physics, they just moved the satellites closer, now they're LEO instead of geostationary.

Data currently tends to go through geostationary satellites, but there's no reason that in time it won't be migrated to LEO satellites, at which point the latency will be quite acceptable to anyone but a hardcore gamer.

Re:Move

[lucifuge31337]

While you are of course correct about the limitations, when that's all you get, you get used to it. Oil platforms typically have the same setup, and VoIP calls to/from them are to the point of having to just about say "over" at the end of your sentence(s), but its still better than using radio. It's all about setting expectations, and what's available.

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?

[RichMeatyTaste]

Damn butterfingers....

Re:Have you tried a Riverbed device?

[Kamokazi]

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.

Re:Have you tried a Riverbed device?

[gubers33]

Funny that you mention the Riverbed Steelhead devices, because I am currently testing two of them. I just set them up, so I can't vouch for them yet. I'm currently just browsing the web trying to get numbers for them. But if you are having issues with the satellite service do to outages from storms like snowraver1, I don't see how the WAN optimization would help you. I mean maybe if you switch to a provider where their uplink center is in better weather conditions that could definitely help. If you have multiple offices WAN optimization may help from going between the offices if the only problem with the service is that the satellites are overlaoded.

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.

Re:Have you tried a Riverbed device?

[element-o.p.]

The Riverbed units will only help if your upstream bandwidth is greater than the bandwidth you are trying to provide. We tried to replace our Sky-X Mentat boxes with Riverbed last fall, but found that the Riverbed didn't perform even as well as the Mentats in our network.

In a nutshell, we have 6MB from our upstream via fiber or copper (not sure which) and we provide 6MB Internet service to our service area (500 miles away) via satellite. After hooking up the Riverbed, we had no perceptible difference between accelerated/unaccelerated traffic. After doing some testing, we figured out why: the far side Riverbed would send the request to the near side Riverbed. The near side would request the web page (or whatever) from the Net, then would calculate some kind of hash or checksum, which it would send back to the far side. Meanwhile, the far side unit would check for a cached page, and if it found a cached page, it would calculate a checksum as well. If the checksums matched, the near side would serve the cached page; if not, it would download and cache the new version.

Unfortunately, if your upstream bandwidth is the same as your service bandwidth, you get no acceleration, since the near side unit can't download the requested data any faster than the far side.

In fact, the protocol acceleration that the Riverbed devices provide isn't quite as good as the protocol acceleration that the Mentat boxes provided, so the Sky-X Mentats actually performed slightly better for us than the Riverbeds did, even though the Mentats don't do any caching.

Re:Have you tried a Riverbed device?

[evilviper]

Riverbed didn't perform even as well as the Mentats in our network.

You could get much better performance by just adding some sapho...

How's the latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Astronomical.

You can

[kellyb9]

You should run a few hundred miles of ethernet cable down to Pennsylvania. I'll let you plug into my linksys router.

Re:You can

[Skye16]

Don't forget to power all the repeaters you'll need :O

Re:You can

[Yvan256]

Unfortunately all we have in Canada is metric ethernet cable.

Re:You can

[ProfessionalCookie]

Monster Cable sells a Platinum Plated Metric to Imperial Ethernet Converter. Use it to browse all the over seas websites. Not cheap though.

Use Beaver Net...

[gwn]

never underestimate the bandwidth of a DeHaviland BEAVER full of cd and DVD's...

Re:Use Beaver Net...

[fnj]

But the latency blows. Milliseconds? Hours! First you've got to go wake up the pilot ...

For every packet.

Re:Use Beaver Net...

[Astadar]

I had a vision of a vast array of semi-aquatic rodents with wi-fi repeaters strapped to their backs.

And lasers to implement security.

Ask nicely

[xpuppykickerx]

If SETI will let you borrow one of their satellites for a while.

I just stayed at a holiday in last night

[fragbait]

My first thought was "Wow, your bandwidth is precious and you waste it on posting to Ask Slashdot?" Sure, there could be someone here with extensive knowledge and experience with network infrastructure that communicates with satellites. Regardless, it is still like asking someone who just stayed at a Holiday Inn last night (or that just read a magazine article about it, if you haven't seen the Holiday Inn commercials).

There is going to be way to many worthless posts here to filter through. I hope the mod system helps you out a bit. Perhaps even modding down this post....

-fragbait

Terrestrial Wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

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 =)

Re:Terrestrial Wireless

[Reziac]

I have this type of fixed wireless here in SoCal -- it was my ONLY available broadband option. I'm about 15 miles from the tower. It does need to be line of sight, but is generally not affected by weather (tho I've noticed some wobbly connections during rainstorms). I get 1.5MBit for $35/month, with no caps other than "please don't upload full-blast all day every day". It's available up to 5.7Mbit, at a suitably higher fee.

My provider guy says Motorola are the only good radios for the purpose; all the rest generate more complaints than customers.

Re:uh!

[Yvan256]

You can get a dedicated satellite for 30 000$ CAD.

I don't think I'd be able to buy a dedicated satellite with a 30K resistor.

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!

Re:Satellite? Screw that. Go radio

[chinakow]

HAH, well here in the states it is limited to 9600 baud so good luck with that. I am fairly sure Canada doesn't have the same restrictions but they are not setting up wireless broadband connections either.

Re:Satellite? Screw that. Go radio

[Gunfighter]

9600 baud limit is for HAM operators. What about commercial use/licensing?

Re:Satellite? Screw that. Go radio

[LordKaT]

9.6mb/s would be awesome.

Re:Satellite? Screw that. Go radio

[TheRaven64]

I'd have thought $30K would be enough for a license to use some other bands in such a remote area. Who else is going to want them?

Re:Satellite? Screw that. Go radio

[mmontour]

Get with some of your local ham radio geeks.

For example, http://www.bcwarn.net/bcwarn-wiki/

Re:Satellite? Screw that. Go radio

[spitek]

Satellite is RF. aka Radio.. hmm.. this is slashdot.. be specific!

Re:Satellite? Screw that. Go radio

[dfranks]

You can use ICOM ID1 1.2ghz radios providing 128K half duplex. It is possible to run a pair at each end with high gain antennas to get full duplex without requiring a diplexor. They run around $1000 each, require NLOS and should get you 50-100 miles with very high gain antennas on both ends. Amateur Radio Technician grade license required in the US, don't know what the Canadian equivilent would be. Under amateur service there are restrictions on business use and data encryption (FYI). http://www.icomamerica.com/en/products/amateur/dstar/id1/default.aspx Dean

Postal Packet

[kellyb9]

I think you should print out all your data packets and send them via mail.

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.

Re:What is meant by "shared"?

[element-o.p.]

He is probably talking about a channel on the satellite. Yes, the satellite is shared, but the satellite has multiple communications channels running in parallel. So, he has a shared channel and wants a dedicated channel.

Re:What is meant by "shared"?

[sumdumass]

You have a guaranteed connection or bandwidth rate. Shared usually means that when no one else is on, your connection is X and as more people come on line, your connection is X/people and rated for usage.

The difference isn't the shared satellite but the dedicated bandwidth available to the user at any given time. The latency sucks with satellite compared to wired solutions so I'm not sure if there would ever be a VoIP product use without issues on either.

oops...

[Tastecicles]

...sorry, that'll be me torrenting Inuit rock...

Re:I'm no expert

[snowraver1]

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.

astroqat

[astroqat]

not unpublished. 450M/day

Yuh Huh

[Greyfox]

I notice they don't say anything about the latency. They say they tweak the TCP/IP stack to mitigate the latencies, but you can't tweak the laws of physics. Could one of their customers please ping the next router upstream and post the results?

Don't get me wrong, it's probably great for browsing the web and email and stuff. I'd be really surprised if you could manage a decent VOIP connection or any gaming over that connection.

Re:Yuh Huh

[compro01]

IIRC, the theoretical minimum to-the-satellite-and-back latency for a geo-stat satellite is about 240ms, so double that for getting there-and-back from an earthly server, not even counting other normal delays, so tack on about another 100ms to that.

With tweaks, VOIP should work fine, though you might want to treat it more like radio than telephone.

Non-turn based games are obviously a non-option.

Re:Yuh Huh

[PastaLover]

Non-turn based games are obviously a non-option.

I wouldn't say that. You can play WoW (sort of) with a 1s latency. Pretty much within the numbers I've seen mentioned here (700ms sounds like a sort of good connection). Sure, if you want to do pvp you might run into some problems (you'll never beat anyone who knows what he's doing and running at 50ms latency) but I'm sure it works, as I know someone who did it (on piss poor 2.5G cellular).

Hosed, Eh?

[da' WINS pimp]

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.

Upper canada?

[Madman]

Try chipping the ice off it, that usually helps.

I'm sorry

[damburger]

Its not your ISP causing the problems. Its The Thing. You are all doomed.

Carterphone!!!!!

[xtype2.5]

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

Re:uh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Har har har! And you probably wonder why you never get laid.

Satellite has large latency - speed of light rules

[rahmrh]

First of all satellite is going to be horrible on latency, the *BEST* that can be done is around 600ms (speed of light), and at best that is going to be horrible on VOIP and VPN. And with most for *ONLY* $100 per month you will have bandwidth usage limits (the consumer plans have low bandwidth limits 20-40GB/month for that kind of money), to not have bandwidth limits and not be shared it will cost quite a bit more.

You might want to investigate using a point-to-point connection of your own, back before the TCOM companies had connections everywhere large companies did their own microwave links, and I understand that the new point-to-point wireless stuff (not consumer grade-commercial stuff) can do at least 20-30 (or more) miles point-to-point, if you have a line of sight to something with TCOM access you should be able to do it, or you could setup a string of relays to do it.

The big question is how remote is it?

We have a VoIP over Satellite solution

[johnlange]

We are located in Canada and have a VOIP over satellite solution which we deploy to fishing Lodges. Unlike the VOIP from the large providers we have tuned the settings specially for the long satellite latency times and the service is surprisingly good. Though the latency times are obviously higher, it is quite reasonable to have a conversation with an average 800ms delay. We can provide references to existing customers if you desire. I believe my email address is available in my profile so please contact me if you are interested or post a reply here.

Try QOS

[Rabbid Marmet]

I know satellite is notoriously (laggy). Its latency will always be causing problems for VOIP. If you have the option to go with something else I would; however if you do not I would try exploring QOS options and traffic shaping this would allow the VOIP packets a ticket to the front of the line in router queues. We use VSAT technology for backups to our primary links.

Re:uh!

[Anonymous Coward]

I could affor it, if only it were USD rather than CAD!!!

More Information Please

[FrZ!Commodore]

How Far north? There are multiple companies that have been building Wireless high speed networks in both Northern Alberta (Rainbow Lake Area, High Level) and Northern BC (Chetwynd, Ft. St John, Ft Nelson). but if you are talking NWT, I got no idea, please give us as much information as possible!

Re:uh!

[Red Flayer]

Quickly now, somebody post a reply to me to let everyone know you can get a satellite for 30k. Because that hasn't been said already.

That's mooosecrap. Launch costs alone are over 30k.

What?

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:Get three providers

[Luthe_Faydwire]

The VoIP protocol has a fair amount of jitter correction built into it. Human speech also has expected pauses that people are good at adjusting to fit the phone medium. The delay going to and from the satellite compares fairly well to intercontinental calling.

Budgetary prices and some extra info

[pegdhcp]

Hi; I will provide some numbers, and I believe, as our market is truly global, these should provide you more or less a valid idea for Canadian pricing. For shared VSAT terminals 1.000 USD (or 999) is pretty much common. Depending on your location and extra needs (larger dishes) this can go up to 1.300 USD. For the service, the bit rate based offers are not so meaningful, you need to know your daily quota in Mbytes. Our 650 MBytes/day limited service is 155 Euro (~250 USD) per month.

For dedicated services; equipment cost is very dependent on capacity and traffic structure. Our regular dedicated Internet capacity customers' baseline cost for equipment (for a 1024/256 asymmetrical dedicated Internet capacity) is around 15.000 USD and monthly service fee is around 2.500 Euro (~4.000 USD) per month. If you have a seriously big capacity need (10+ Mbits), by investing into special equipments (~40.000 USD and above) you can decrease unit service cost up to 50%.

Re:You're screwed...

[mweather]

Inukshuk wireless? Apache Chief is in IT now?

Tethered balloon?

[oldspewey]

How far apart are the sites you need to work from? Within a few hundred kilometers of one another or literally all over the place? If you can set up a high-powered WAP in some kind of central location that has high-speed, you might be able to figure something out by putting some kind of repeater using dish antennas way the hell up there on a balloon or something.

Depends on your bandwidth.

[LWATCDR]

You could try Iridium or what every they are calling it now. I know that they use it as a backup system in the Antarctic.

Check out Inmarsat BGAN

[Akita24]

http://www.inmarsat.com/Services/Land/BGAN/default.aspx

Advice from an "expert".

[DarthBart]

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.

Re:Advice from an "expert".

[TheSync]

Let's put some numbers on it: bulk satellite transponder time is going to cost you $100 to $200 per hour depending on band and desirability of satellite.

If you go with DVB-S2 on 36 MHz transponder Ku satellite, I'm assuming you can generally get by with 8PSK 2/3 modulation (except when it rains very hard), about 7.1 dB Es/N0, for a data rate of ~60 Mbps.

To just break even on $100/month service, you need to revenue of around $100k a month (add in uplink equipment depreciation, internet access costs, to transponder costs), and that means you need at least 1,000 subscribers.

Average data rate of 60 Mbps / 1000 subscribers is 60 kbps. Yes, Internet use is bursty, but this is a worst-case scenario.

I suspect most of these systems probably have 10,000 subscribers for a 10:1 oversubscription on a typical 60 kbps end-user capability.

Note that I've ignored any return satellite bandwidth.

The Ka band satellites do have the ability to have smaller spot beams, and they may use DVB-S2 variable bitrate to ramp up on cells that have no bad weather, but I don't think the SpaceWay sats are actually being used in this fashion right now.

The verdict I've heard from everyone using satellite internet: better than dial-up (but with more latency for games), but that's about it.

Re:Advice from an "expert".

[DarthBart]

DVB-S2 hasn't been around all that long, though. Most of the satellite ISPs are using QPSK 3/4 or 7/8s modulation. That'll squeeze you about 45mbps out of a 36Mhz transponder.

And true bulk time is measured dollars per megahertz per month.

TheSync...now there's a blast from the past from my Cidera days.

Re:Advice from an "expert".

[TheSync]

TheSync...now there's a blast from the past from my Cidera days.

And I'm still moving big files over satellite (though with HD video and 5.1 audio, they are getting bigger and bigger all the time) - btw, check out Cerona, they're the new upstart DVB-S2 folks in Frederick.

Re:Advice from an "expert".

[andyr]

re 5) - I am having difficulty getting answers to what seems a simple question - can I get a satellite modem to do enough routing to run a firewall ? Surely this must be possible ?

Re:Advice from an "expert".

[Grailyn]

I run the network for a medium sized explosives company with about 70 locations in the US and Canada. We tried satellite for obvious reason 3-4 years ago and just could not make it work well. I've been thinking of giving it another chance and could really use an expert to work with this time around instead of the idiots at retail who didn't know what they were selling. Never tried to contact anyone through slashdot before and I don't see any type of PM feature. How can we get in touch?

Re:Advice from an "expert".

[sharpmarble]

Typically bulk Ku-band bandwidth over North America goes for $3000-4500 per Mhz per month. That being said, assuming you're leasing a full 36MHz transponder, the bandwidth cost alone per month is $108,000 per month best case. Using the example of 8PSK 2/3 DVB service, which by the way comes out to approx 53Mbps in a 36MHz transponder, you would need approx 1080 users in order to break even on the bandwidth alone. One thing i'm noticing is that you guys aren't factoring in modem filter rolloff so your numbers are a bit optimistic on the bandwidth. Data Rate / Modulation Factor / FEC coding * (1 + Filter Rolloff) = Actual Allocated Satellite BW in MHz.

Re:Advice from an "expert".

[TheSync]

8PSK 2/3 DVB service, which by the way comes out to approx 53Mbps in a 36MHz transponder...one thing i'm noticing is that you guys aren't factoring in modem filter rolloff

Heh, well some people are using roll-offs of 0.2 even with DVB-DSNG 8PSK and thus getting 30 Msps in a 36 MHz transponder for 55 Mbps with 10 dB Es/N0 requirement. Not in EN 301 210, but widely supported by modulator vendors and you need to watch your OBO and also make sure you aren't stepping on your neighbors.

DVB-S2 8PSK 2/3 @ 30 Msps gives you 59 Mbps with similar required Es/N0 + OBO (~7.7 dB) of good old DVB-S QPSK 3/4. And yes, it works, I've done it on AMC-3 Ku. I would bet that C-band operations with big dishes are considering even higher FEC rates for DVB-S2 8PSK.

Re:Advice from an "expert".

[sharpmarble]

there is only one modem manufacturer that even touts being able to do a 20% filter rolloff. That manufacturer does not however, support these kind of data rates as of yet and satellite operators will only allow it if you twist their nipples real hard. 30% is about as good as you're going to get and the standard is still 35% and as far as more aggressive FEC techniques in C-Band, not gonna happen with the current generation of spacecraft on orbit. the transponders are relatively low power ( 40Watts per transponder) and what you gain in less atmospheric losses at C-Band you lose in lack of gain from the low frequency band. Not to mention that follow-on spacecraft won't be much more powerful in C-band because then the satellites would run the risk of interfering with terrestrial microwave networks.

Re:Advice from an "expert".

[TheSync]

satellite operators will only allow it if you twist their nipples real hard

Never been a problem for me...I've personally witnessed folks putting up 0.2 alpha 30 Msps on AMC-3 Ku and a Galaxy sat that shall remain unnamed on C-band with the satellite operators happy as a clam. Mind you, these were totally bought transponders, not little carriers.

here is only one modem manufacturer that even touts being able to do a 20% filter rolloff.

The following modulators should do 0.2 alpha on DVB-DSNG: Tandberg, Newtec, Radyne, although you are right in a way because it will soon be tough to get DVB-DSNG parts as it is a no-brainer to move to DVB-S2 for greenfield builds.

On the receiver side, it doesn't really matter. I've never seen a change in BER on a receiver due to modulator alpha change (within 0.2-0.35).

the standard is still 35% and as far as more aggressive FEC techniques in C-Band

I have first-hand knowledge of someone doing 0.2 alpha on a 36 MHz C-band transponder under DVB-S2.

Re:Advice from an "expert".

[BlueManDish]

One place to get a decent price is from MyBlueDish Satellite Internet.

I've seen other mentions of WildBlue on here. If you are really looking for a cheap option WildBlue is probably the way to go. Installation prices are comparable to other providers, but service plans start at $49.99.

Note: It might not be available in all of Canada and reviews are always mixed with satellite providers on Broadband Reports.

Re:VoIP on satellite IP?

[TheGreek]

You can squeeze that down to 200 ms+ for one-way with some voodoo.

That's some pretty impressive voodoo.

How remote?

[zappepcs]

If you are only remote from a town with broadband by a few tens of miles, why not take that $30k and build a couple of towers with WiFi or WiMax relays?

WiFi on cantennas gets some decent travel and even better on purpose built antennas. Two or three hops might add some latency, but I'm betting it won't be as bad as you are seeing now. See http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&output=googleabout&btnG=Search+our+site&q=WiFi%20distance for some examples of how to do it. Some of those records are impressive.

Re:How remote?

[Reziac]

Or use existing cell phone towers, which is what my provider does. (I have fixed wireless here in SoCal -- no other options here.) I vaguely recall he said you could get into the business for no more than a few grand -- the base station is about $3k and the individual receiver radios are about $200. (Motorola)

Regardless, I think you're right -- they may well be better off DIY'ing than trying to find a suitable provider.

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.

Check out WildBlue

[noelhenson]

I use WildBlue. I get download speeds of about 1.2Mbps with a 17GB monthly BW at around $80/mo. Like others, I can't believe that you got VOIP to work at all. I typically experiend 1,600ms - 1,800 ms ping times. I tried Starband (echostar/hughes) with good success but about twice the price, slower download speeds and less BW.

iridium

[aonic]

Have you tried the iridium network?

I know it's expensive, but they have decent data rates, low latency (relatively... LEO instead of GEO) and their coverage up north (at both poles, actually) is actually really good, as all of their orbital planes intersect and you have more satellites overhead.

and you can avoid voip cause it's a voice network too.

Re:iridium

[maxrate]

Iridium runs at 24oo baud - very slow - i know, I own an iridium device

Re:I'm no expert

[snowraver1]

Sorry, the pole is 4" in diameter. The dish is a 3-4' dish. Bigger than a starchoice, but smaller than a BUD

Re:I'm no expert

[timster]

Exactly how small is "small"? Because a Linksys duct-taped to a Pringles can isn't going to cut it, even if you bolt some solar panels to the bottom.

Re:VoIP on satellite IP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that is a long way from the truth. I work with a company heavily involved in VOIP over satellite with customers in Northern Canada. And yes it works fine, but not at $100 a month. Here is the kicker. The Service he is talking about is a home grade consumer product. It was built for Momma and Poppa out on the farm to send the odd email back to the kids in the shiny big city. Sadly every Dick and Jane exeuctive out there decided one of these would be great for the holiday cottage, hence the whole system is oversubscribed...

So a system that is not designed to work with VOIP and over subscribtion.. not so good.

Now, if you are willing to lay down a little bit more moola things change quickly. At under $1000 a month you can get QoS on VOIP as well as dedicated data rates on a shared network. The voice works and works well. We even run it through a variety of call quality monitoring tools and the end result it the voice we hand back to the PSTN is generally better than we get from them!. Yes, there is lag, but if you compare the lag to the average Cell phone call you wouldn't notice the difference.
Latency really is not the issue here, consistency of latency is. If you get a steady 560ms ping, it will work great.
  Just don't try gaming on it.

Tachyon

[bmalnad]

Try http://www.tachyon.net/ Very fast and reliable (expensive) service.

Switch from TCP/IP to CP/IP

[bingbong]

Use CP/IP (RFC 1149 ).

You'll get great bandwidth, especially during migratgory seasons.

Good, Cheap, Fast.

[zentigger]

Pick 2.

We operate over 50 sites North of 60, with our own uplink facility in Southern Canada. I can tell you satellite bandwidth is EXPENSIVE! Face it, it costs a lot of money to get those things floating around the planet and keep them up there.

There are a few options available to lower the cost, which tend to lead to the 3 options.

The one thing that Infosat does is use KU band. This is cheaper because is has a much greater suck factor. The main problem is the impact of rain-fade. This becomes especially significant in the high north becuase, being on the edge of the footprint (lower gain) and having much more atmosphere to pass through, plus lower elevation angles on the antenna lead to higher noise from terrestrial radiation. (we used infosat links for a number of years, and had the same problems you talk about)
The other option is to use C-Band. It has a better footprint in the north and rain fade is a fairly negligible factor. It is also significantly more expensive.
Telesat now has KA band as well, but I'm not that familiar with how it performs, or is priced. There are some issues with KA band, as well because it uses spot beams, so you cannot have a direct link between the East and West without a downlink in the middle somewhere.
Most providers that are offering a "cheap" solution will also provide shared bandwidth solutions. This works well up to a point, as it allows you to make use of extra space when other users aren't using it (commonly called "burst" speeds), but the main problems with this are that everyone tends to want to use it at the same time (more or less) and it is easy for the provider to oversubscribe the link. You may be able to talk to your provider about traffic shaping options to see if they can prioritize voip, although I suppose that is not a very PC remark these days :)

If you use the service mostly within the communities, there is a last mile broadband solution available for most places in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut (www.qiniq.com / www.airware.ca) using MCS (Clearwire).

Re:I'm no expert

[Intron]

"most of the people up north can barely tie their shoelaces, let alone work satellite equipment."

I wonder why the OP would be looking for a new provider? This is the attitude I get when I call tech support at my ISP.

Get a better antenna

[carn1fex]

All satellite providers very precisely align where there radio energy will land and conversely where they will get reception from.. every watt wasted costs loads of money. So all you can do is improve your reception and transmission. Buy a higher gain antenna and better align it to the provider satellite if its in geostationary or a tracking system. Going from 20dBi to 30dBi has a great impact on your maximum data rate.

Re:uh!

[JWSmythe]

Well, according to This page, you could lease a single transponder for about $335k/mo (average across the listed rates).

    I think for that much, it'd be cheaper to buy a few select pieces of land, put up a 100' tower on each. 100' towers at sea level will get you 28 miles. 100' tower on a 5000' mountain will get you 115 miles. If the sites happen to be so lucky that there's a 5,000' and 7,000' mountain to use, they could be used for 220 miles. :)

    Rather than buying land and building towers, you can always lease tower space. But, if you put up towers, you can lease that space, should you be in a good area for it.

    There's a whole lot of remote northern Canada, so it's hard to even guess at how many installations would be required.

LEO

[flyingfsck]

Some providers use LEO satellites. The latency is of course worse with stationary satellites.

VSAT

[battery111]

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 . . .).

Re:VSAT

[clanrat]

You could run off a charger and batteries to smooth any power bumps from the genny.

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.

Re:VSAT

[Agripa]

You could also try using an inverter based generator but I suspect given your working conditions that a couple of online UPSes would be better since they could be used with any available source. A ferroresonant power conditioner would probably solve any AC power related issues at least as reliably as any UPS but would not provide any backup time.

Re:VoIP on satellite IP?

[Emb3rz]

With the decision-prediction headset dictating your conversation to the VoIP client this is reduced to an incredible -6700ms!

Re:T carrier systems might be cheaper.

[MrMacman2u]

Honestly, it never ceases to amaze me what some people think the word "rural" means.

Here's a hint, the odds are somewhere between EXCELLENT and OUTSTANDING that there are no communication lines AT ALL (including phone) with in 10-50 MILES, possibly more, of this guy's location.

Signed,
The Disgruntled Former Rural Dweller

Re:I'm no expert

[snowraver1]

Your ignorance is startling. I said nothing that would imply that windows was running at the site. In fact, the site controller is an embedded system, not a computer at all. Thanks for coming out.

What are your requirements?

[metoc]

Before you can expect any serious answers you need to answer some questions:

How many sites?
What are your data requirements? Are you web surfing, doing email or using SCADA?
What are your voice requirements? How many minutes a month per site? To where?
What is your latitude?
Do you have to be portable?

As for soultions, have you considered Inmarsat's BGAN service, MSAT, VSAT and Iridium?

Re:T carrier systems might be cheaper.

[Coniagas]

Try 500 to 1000 km for the true north. We used to call the Hydro systems U boat power as most settlements and villages powered by NCPC consisted of WWII german U boat diesels.

Verizon MPLS over vSat

[ACMENEWSLLC]

I just sat through an hour long presentation where Verizon was trying to sell me on switching to their MPLS;

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/032107-verizon-business-mpls-vpn.html

One of their features is a PIP satellite MPLS connection which has much less jitter (latency) than Hughes, DircPC, and such. They said they have customers using this for Citrix, VPN, and Voice and these customers find it much better than traditional satellite. They also offered to us to have one of their disaster recovery mobile MPLS satellite vans pull up so we could hook a laptop and VoIP phone up and test for ourselves.

They also offer such services over EVDO (or will) if you get Verizon EVDO in that area of Canada.

I don't speak from experience, but you asked for options and this might just be one.

Smoky D. Bear

[Smoky D. Bear]

I've had to deal with this for a couple of Oil and Gas companies. The only none satellite alternative that we found was the Telus Raven system. If you add the optional yagi, they work to about 5 hours north of Fort St. John BC. The coverage does vary, but has been getting better regularly. The Ravens are an EVDO system that give your end user an IP with no configuration or drivers needed. Trouble shooting is very easy. If 1 light is out, it works. If anything more than 1 light is out, send it back for repair. Communications Group in Red Deer keeps them in stock.

Why not WiMax?

[ArhcAngel]

I was under the impression that was one of WiMax's original target markets

Re:I'm no expert

[The Cisco Kid]

I don't know anything about satellite data, so I could be talking out my ass here. But if a dish is 'auto-aligning', and all you have to do is drop the thing 'anywhere' and push some buttons, if it went down, couldn't your on-site monkey just turn it off, and then turn it back on, and let it think it has just been dropped 'anywhere' again, and push the same 'few buttons', and start from the beginning?

Re:You're screwed...

[hkmarks]

You're thinking "Inuk-chuk."

Apache Chief's secret identity is unknown. So who knows? He may in fact be in IT.

Re:Simple...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but you must be careful when you die because a rotting body will also release carbon.
You should really bury yourself.
But you should also try not to disturb the environment by digging holes so I would suggest lying down at the base of a mountain that you think is due for a natural land-slide.

Poxies?

[anfi]

Do you use per key services proxies?

High latency is "deadly" in combination with non negligible packet loss.

P.S. had used ISP offering via two sat links connection to most of the Internet "a few+ years ago".

Re:I'm no expert

[Chillintau]

Ahh, but it is all about the satellite real estate, you would need a geosynchronous satellite to stay in the same spot in the sky. That place is expensive to get to because it is so far out, so your satellite needs a boost to that orbit and be able to transmit and receive data at such a distance. That, and everybody wants a spot, good luck getting a geosynchronous satellite over North America without some big venture capital. Nano and Pico Sats are for research and low, decaying orbit projects, just because it is a satellite doesn't mean it can cut it for your needs.

Great if you can work in the limitations.

[popoutman]

Disclaimer: I used to be the lead tech support for 3 years for a small satellite-only ISP (25 employees) up to 18 months ago, which resold bandwidth from SES-Astra using both Gilat-360e satmodems for SOHO and BBI satmodems for the enterprise products, and later on EMS (now Advantech) DVB-RCS terminals for the enterprise.

Latency is usually considered the biggest issue with IP over satellite. The best latency you can possibly get is 550 msec round-trip. If you are working with 2 satellite-enabled sites, your best will be 1100 msec, as there isn't any method of routing packets on the satellite. Packets will have to be sent to the groundstation and be rerouted, re-encrypted and repackaged for transmission to the other endpoint.

The other big killer for satellite IP is the issue of jitter. If you are close to noise floor for receiving or transmitting, you will get a *lot* of jitter as you miss your timing slots or the SIT requests retransmission of the packets. You will also get jitter if you are close to the throttling limits that the provider has enforced in the background that will delay the transmission of frames as a crude QOS system.

Latency kills applications that use lots of small packets for data transmission, e.g. RPC, older implementations of remote desktop, certain VPN solutions. Jitter on the other hand kills things like VOIP that function best with an expected and consistent timing of packet arrival.

The usual method of IP over satellite that I saw in practice was the DVB-RCS protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-RCS which in essence packages an encrypted datastream in the mjpeg frames that would be handled as part of a television feed. Knowing the limitations of exactly how the data is transported can go a long way towards explaining the reasons why some apps work great for some people and other apps plainly suck.

There is not a huge amount of bandwidth available on the transponders, and the cost of the use of a transponder and the associated equipment at a groundstation can be frightening.

The issue of pointing accuracy and available power is also critical with satellite IP. The receive strength is important, but not as critical as the pointing required for the transmission side of things. The usual method that we had for pointing was to contact teh upstream provider that had the oscilloscopes on the feed, setting a carrier wave on the satmodem, and changing the point until there was a power peak. Then the antenna was tightened up and comissioning was completed once the routing was set up.

Satellite is good if you work within its limitations. It'll give you good service if your equipment is correctly specified and performs to its spec. It's unfortunate that the cost is so high, but that's the cost of using a transponder on a commercial satellite.

Re:T carrier systems might be cheaper.

[Deadplant]

Oh ya? when I was a rural kid we had to walk 5000 to 10000 km to get to the nearest phone and it was uphill both ways!

Re:I'm no expert

[snowraver1]

Yeah, we get them to do that. We umplug and reset the modem and satellite controller, and then press the auto-align button, but for some reason it doesn't always work. There is a GPS module that connects to the site controller so that the site knows where to look in the sky to find the bird. Sometimes the GPS module acts up and the site dosen't know where it is, so can't find the bird. This seems to be when a tech has to be dispatched.

Satellite from a Cruise Line Operator

[bigdaddy42]

I'm not sure how much of this will carry over to you since my experience is VSAT on cruise ships. All our ships are on KU band instead of the BUD's because of the size of the ships. We've spent a lot of time talking to a lot of different providers and in the end, you get what you pay for. Our ships have between 128Kbps and 192Kbps. You can burst double that for a maximum of four hours a day. We have phones onboard with VOIP and it works fine. The satellite dishes (raydomes) cost about $60,000 because they are for marine use, have GPS in them and track the satellite as the ship moves. On top of that, we pay anywhere between $3000 to $5500 a month per ship for that dedicated bandwidth. Are their cheaper options? Yes but the bandwidth is not dedicated. We get enough complaints about speed from our guests and crew that we wouldn't think about going to a shared connection and VOIP works very well over our connection.

Re:I'm no expert

[isorox]

> because I'm not sure a geostationary orbit would be visible that far north.

Geostationarry is visble up to about 80 degrees with a flat horizon, but I wouldn't like to do voip over it.

blimp / stratellite?

[ypctx]

Use blimp(s) with wireless repaters. Also called Stratellite (tm).

Off course, you'd probably be the first one to really do it, but then, someone has to start!

Common Theme

[andcarne]

This really strikes a chord with me, as I spent about 6 hours on the phone with InfoSat the other day trying to get our satellite connections functioning properly, in the remote part of Northwest canada that I'm currently located in. What ended up fixing it was when the tech tried 'upgrading our service', then suddenly all was better. My suggestion is just to keep riding them until they fix it. You're paying a lot of money for a reason, and you should be getting your money's worth. Also, if you're going through a subcontractor I highly recommend bypassing them and contacting the real provider directly, as that was the only way I could solve my problem.

Sorry but Satellite internet sucks, VOIP sucks

[omfglearntoplay]

I hate both with a passion. I would consider it complete insanity to use one on top of the other. Literally, I would have to quit my job or have someone else deal with that system completely... whether it be supporting it or using it. Email over satellite would be my only option if I were you people.

Satellite internet in Northern Canada

[kriston]

Most of these posts concern the Fair Access Policy limits and latency but you are probably excessively familiar with it already. I'm discussing how to solve your problem with access.

The key phrase that catches my eye in your question is that you are in remote, Northern Canada. The beams you are able to receive are at such an oblique angle you should feel lucky to get any service. As you know the satellites are over the equator. The latitude at which you are located is likely so far north that the satellite signal has to travel through so many hundreds of miles of murky atmosphere before it has to travel another 22,500 miles to the satellite. You might consider yourself fortunate that it even works at all at such a high latitude.

Northern Russia has an even bigger problem and they solved it with highly-elliptical orbits, sometimes called "tundra" orbits, but that requires some expensive ground equipment to track the birds and it's not even 100% available. The Antarctic uses huge C-band dishes and they're not even available at all times of data due to even more atmosphere attenuating the signal.

While you do not specifically mention the provider or the satellite format you are probably using a Ku-band system like Starband or HughesNet. WildBlue, while actively marketing to Canada, has most of its spotbeams aimed at just north of the Canadian border and they're at really oblique angles at that. Since WildBlue uses Ka-band it's out of the question for these distances and will be unavailable when the weather is rainy.

To solve this problem you'll be looking at expensive, non-consumer solutions that work in the C-band. Though the signals were somewhat weaker in the past, the newer satellites serving up north have surprisingly powerful C-band beams and, being in the C-band, they aren't affected by raindrops like Ku-band and Ka-band are, so the low angle in your location wouldn't be such a huge problem.

The following outfits provide this kind of specialized internet service. I hope they are useful to you.
For this kind of money, and the way C-band works, you can find dedicated transponder segments (and even entire transponders) so you will have a dedicated link.

This firm provides custom satellite solutions:
http://www.bcsatellite.net/

These sites have VSAT terminals for C-band (they do exist in case you were wondering):
http://www.satcomresources.com/VsatTransceivers.jsp
http://www.anacominc.com/prod_xc.html

Finally, you can punt and use Inmarsat terminals. They're not optimal but they can give you data in a pinch.

Meteorburst radio might be a little helpful

[danincb]

May have missed it in this thread but I have not seen any reference to "meteor burst" radio.

Definitely not good for much data but for basic signals (like "keep-alive" signals) this technology has worked for years. I work for a scientific field station and we hope to use this stuff in areas for limited data communications in areas that cannot "see" the southern horizon.

Meteorcomm is one firm that does this stuff. There may be others as well...I do not know. (I do not work for MeteorComm but have visited them and they seem to be good folks.)

http://www.meteorcomm.com/technologies/tech_burst.aspx

(from their website) "meteor burst communications system (MBCS) uses ionized meteor trails as a means of radio signal propagation. These trails exist in the 80 to 120 km region of the earthâ(TM)s atmosphere, and reflect the RF energy between two stations. The height of the trails allows over-the-horizon communication at distances up to 2000 km. However, because the ionized trails exist for only short periods of time (usually from a few milliseconds to a few seconds) communication is intermittent, and high-speed digital transmission techniques must be used to convey the information. The system is particularly well suited for long-range, low data rate applications for both messaging and data acquisition."

hope this helps this thread ....

Re:WiFi?

[element-o.p.]

You've never been to the far north, have you? ;)

WiFi is a last-mile technology. Before it will do you any good, you first have to build the backbone to the last mile.

Satellite

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used satellite and VOIP extensively in the oilfield for remote locations. Spacenet offers a good service that is not over subscribed. It is certainly not DSL speeds or cost, but we have successfully run 2 phone lines, fax, and internet over the same connection with minimal issues.

I am in rural northern Ontario myself...

[Panaqqa]

And I have faced down exactly this issue: lousy bandwidth and latency on satellite Internet. There are a few alternatives that come in way less than the $30K you mentioned, but the availability very much depends on your location.

If you would like, you can email me at panaqqa [at sign] gmail [separator dot] com with more specifics and I'll let you know if my solution would work for you. FYI the best satellite I know of gives RELIABLE 2Mbps down/450kbps up.

No, it's not...

[pestie]

Hams are not limited to 9600 baud by any kind of regulation. That's about as fast as you'll get on UHF with a single FM narrowband channel, but some of those crazy bastards working microwave frequencies have achieved digital data rates much higher than 9600 baud.

Wireless Broadband

[CaptTofu]

I'm part owner of a wireless broadband provider. We use Alvarion equipment to deliver high speed internet from a local mountain top in southern New Hampshire. Much better than satellite because the distance the signal has to travel is only 6 miles vs. 30k from a satellite, which has bad latency.

If you can get a leased line, look at splitting up the costs by then being a small community broadband provider, as one of my partners did prior to us merging with his company.

Maybe not worth a loonie, or am I?

[phreaki]

It could be that new hire in cubicle #2 downloading Hello Kitty Tea Party. Wait, I bet it's that guy who still doesn't get The Sixth Sense so he's downloading it again. I got my fingers crossed for him. You did not elaborate into how efficient your network is but rather just ask for a new company by insisting that the shared plan is to blame. I'd stick my head into the network and figure out why delay is increasing. If all else fails, I find that a reliable jitter is the best and letting the network traffic produce the jitter is not the best idea. Let me know if you want more information on this. Sorry, I can't answer your question because it is a satellite connection. I feel everyone's pain.

Troposcatter

[Therefore I am]

The entire Eastern seaboard to Cape Dyer and a major arc across to Alaska were linked, mostly by troposcatter, when I was last up there. Bandwidth wasn't huge but reliability was high. I understand some of the stations are now run for "research" by some alphabet government department.

Satellite sucks ...

[kbahey]

I am writing this while traveling in the near North of Ontario.

My connection is via xplornet, a satellite provider while I am on this trip.

Latency really sucks. Everything has a lag to it, but most noticably SSH is unusuable at all.

Bandwidth seems to be OK, but at times, the transfer rate crawls to just BYTES per second.

I am glad this is only temprorary in my case, and I pity those who have to deal with an SSH connection over satellite.

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

power?

[Psychofreak]

If power was available, then wires would exist and a cable for data could be laid (or hung) cheap-like. If towers are 28 to 220 miles apart, where are we getting the juice from? Diesel? Last time I checked solar wasn't very effective in the northern latitudes because of solar penetration and weather. How long will a generator last to power said tower? How much fuel would it require? How much juice to push 220 miles through stinky weather? 25 watts ain't gonna likely cut it.

That said, if the right piece of real estate could be had to put the right pieces of hardware upon AND have service capabilities and backup power provided without herculean efforts this may work.

Said calculations are for line-of-sight frequencies over a theoretical horizon. With use of reflected frequencies and some ham radio capability a network could be set up, but I don't know the details, but service would still be spotty because the ionosphere "moves" changing where signals reflect to.

Using multiple systems of varying capacity may be the best approach. Or pay to have a cable placed.
See about running over the pole to Russia

Have fun, good luck
Phil

Re:power?

[Magic5Ball]

For inspiration about remote links, see:

http://www.albertasupernet.ca/the+project/news/IEEE_Spectrum-SuperNet.pdf

I don't recall if that article in particular mentions bouncing radio off the sides of geological features to deliver broadband to certain remote POPs.

Re:power?

[JWSmythe]

Power would obviously need to be part of the site selection process.

    There can be power in isolated areas, that don't necessarily have high speed internet access. Those would make excellent relay points, if they have good visibility also.

    Everything depends on where his physical locations are, what features exist around those locations, what his budget is, and what his expectations are.

    "remote" may 100 miles away from the nearest city, on top of a big mountain, with wind and diesel power generation. It could also mean 1000 miles away from the nearest city, in a valley, with mountains ranging from 2,000 feet to 19,000 feet, with no practical means to get power to any of them. Then he's really stuck, except for satellite.

    With so many variables, he can't really just ask the question that he posed. Then again, I wouldn't really suggest outlining your entire company in a Slashdot question.

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

MW Backhaul

[Niobe]

Microwave backhaul can be very cost effective and very scalable in terms of the bandwidth you need, even when you must pay installation costs. In some cases these can be shared or avoided if a MW provider believes they can attract other customers onto the same infrastructure. Of course you don't mention if the remote locations are 'fixed' or 'roaming'.. to some degree portable MW tx/rx can solve roaming problems as well.

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.

Re:I'm no expert

[NateTech]

Not into geo-synch orbit, moron. Maybe LEO where it's relative motion will mean roughly 10 minute passes at relatively high speeds over you fixed locations, requiring tracking devices, and only a couple of times a day.

IsoTropic Networks should have the solution

[datumsoft]

From their website http://isosat.net/ IsoTropic Networks, Inc. (IsoTropic) is a global solutions based provider of VSAT satellite communications systems. IsoTropic is widely recognized as the âoeNew Gold Standardâ that can integrate satellite and terrestrial technologies in a seamless fashion to provide customers with reliable, robust communications solutions. Currently operating on 8 satellites, IsoTropic covers 95% of the world. When communications have to be there, anywhere, right now, IsoTropic delivers.

Try Immerse Communications

[blanchae]

They specialize in satellite communication links (specifically VOIP) in difficult to reach places worldwide. Small company - excellent services out of Calgary, Alberta http://www.immersecoms.com/home.htm

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)

It's all in the return channel collisions...

[Anonymous Coward]

It has to do with the way satellite works, and in particular, collisions with other subscribers on your return VoIP traffic. In most cases, you're running over a TDMA (time devision multiple access) or RA (RAndom Access) return channel. This means you burst your return traffic to the bird with no clue who else is talking at the moment. Think ethernet hub, but with 700ms latency. You can hold more subscribers in this manner per satellite with less overhead. If you get a collision, it re-transmits, but this service level is entirely inadequarte for voice as you need guranteed return traffic. Latency is not an issue, as long as packet loss and jitter are ok. Latency only gives you annoying delay, which you must deal with.

Now, to get voice to work you need some provider who will offer some type of call admission control who will dedicate a time-slot to your return channel sufficient for the bandwdith of the call. Then it will work great. Unfortuantely, even 64kbps of dedicated return channel spectrum is expensive. Your only hopes to find this economically is some system which flags, classifies, and provides dedicated bandwidth on deamnd for the duration of a call, and then releases it to other subscribers when you hang up. I mean really, dedicated bandwidth specturm (khz), which then is bandwidth is expensive for a megabit, expect to pay $10,000/mo (now I'm sure they pay less in quantity and have fewer capital costs). For a 50kbit VoIP dedicate return channel that's around $400/mo. Just think of the oversubscription level necessary to sell that to you @ $100/mo. With normal intrnet usage only, 80 people on a T-1 sized line is entirely possible. Or VoIP usage if it only holds that channel upon during the duration of the call is quite economical too.

This is all assuming the outbound (hub to you) is not just oversubscribed, but that should never have loss outside of oversubscription. The return will always have loss, even if it's not oversubscribed under TDMA/RA, just less loss.

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

Iridum doesn't come cheap

[westlake]

Or even better, use satellite phones instead of rigging up a more expensive and less reliable facsimile of satellite phones.
.

Less expensive, I think not:

Calls to Iridium phones are notoriously expensive, ranging from US$3 to US$14 per minute. It is possible to call with charges reversed by first dialing a number in Arizona; the call is charged to the receiver at the standard rate for satellite to landline calls, but the caller only pays for the call to Arizona. Since Iridium will not sell prepaid cards or even its subscription call service directly, it is hard to obtain the exact price of making a call. There are numerous distributors that will activate Iridium phones and sell pre-paid vouchers and SIM cards. Regardless of the price, each pre-paid card or monthly plan comes with a number of minutes. These minutes are the "basic rate" to landlines. For a 500 minute annual plan the cost of the "basic rates" fluctuates around US$1.50/min.

Iridium operates at only 2.2 to 3.8 kilobaud, which requires very aggressive voice compression and decompression algorithms. Latency can range from 800 to 3500 milliseconds. Iridium

If he has the broadband link, why not use it? The low latency connection is a fantasy. Save the Iridium minutes for when you really need them and not the-keeping-in-touch call to your sister in Toronto.

VoIP over satellite

[musatov]

I actually work at BusinessCom (www.bcsatellite.net) All what everybody else said is pretty much true. Solution: try to find an iDirect-based service network operator that can setup custom QoS for you. That is, prioritize your VoIP traffic over everything else. Additionally, make sure you purchase some small quota of dedicated CIR bandwidth, and you'll have a crystal clear VoIP over satellite.