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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[grcumb]

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

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

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

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

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

Re:Amazing

[storkus]

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

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

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

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

I hope this helps at least somewhat.

Mike

Re:Amazing

[had a lobotomy]

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

Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[Scuzzm0nkey]

Try and set up a chain of repeating 12' satellite dish broadcasters retrofitted for 802.11G like the one they set the distance record with. It got like 125 miles, so 10 or 15 of them ought to get out to the middle of nowhere. Latency would probably blow, but it's still better than satellite.

Re:Get some of those BUDs in that other thread

[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

[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

[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]

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

[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....

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.

... ... ... Latency?

[game kid]

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...

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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

[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!

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?

[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?

[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.

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

[Yvan256]

Unfortunately all we have in Canada is metric ethernet cable.

Use Beaver Net...

[gwn]

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

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: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

[LordKaT]

9.6mb/s would be awesome.

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).

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: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.

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.

Carterphone!!!!!

[xtype2.5]

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

Re:uh!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Get three providers

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

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

Re:All Satellite Internet Providers are Shared

[Hyppy]

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

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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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

[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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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