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ViaSat Delivers 12 Mbps+ Via Satellite
An anonymous reader writes "Last Thursday, ViaSat announced pricing for its new home broadband service, which is set to deliver 12 Mbps+ download speeds (3 Mbps+ up) beginning next week for $50 per month. Engadget just dropped by the company's demo home just a few feet from the Engadget trailer at the Las Vegas Convention Center parking lot to try it out, and posted their review." The comments there, understandably, wail for information about how much data that $50 buys.
Caps can be an issue, but if you are rural these speeds and prices are an instant upgrade.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Download speed is nice, but for gaming, latency is God...
Actually there is something else I would like to know. Ping time. For gaming, that is what matters most and there can be huge differences depending on your ISP. And yes, I might seem spoiled but the difference between 33ms and 300ms is far bigger to me then whether a patch takes 5 minutes or 50 minutes.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Really nothing you can do about it, no mater what the bandwidth is having to go to orbit and back will make this unusable for a lot of stuff.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Latency is about 1 second. That's simple physics for the orbit the satellite is in. So no, you won't be gaming on it. Basically anything else though you could get away with.
it is satcom based, therefore ping times will be at least 600ms. it will probably be unusable for both console and pc online gaming.
Only latency-sensitive games, actually. Anything that's either turn-based or not simultaneous would run fine (that includes a whole bunch of casual games, turn-based strategy games, etc.).
the question is of how many other users are sharing this - is your bandwidth timesliced? do you get dedicated or is it just burstable, shared with other users in a pool
What's the total bandwidth of the satellite?
If you can get 12Mbps when nobody else is using it, that sounds great until they have about 5 customers.
I was on Wild Blue Satellite for 1 full year. They do a "rolling" average for bandwidth that depends on your package. I had 17GB per month. If I used 400MB today, that would "roll off" in 30 days thus making it available again.
My latency was a solid 2000ms or higher at all times. I lost connection any time there was heavy storms between Virginia and New York. I was paying somewhere around $70/mo. I had trouble staying connected to Steam, so I stopped using it and favored retail single player games for that year.
I'm now on a more restricted local ISP and haven't really looked back. Instead of being on a rolling average I'm on a hard 600MB/day plan. I am paying more than under satellite, but I'm able to achieve 30ms pings (the ISP is actually WISP).
My fondest memories of satellite are: turning off prefetching webpages, clicking a link and then waiting many seconds for anything to happen and often wondering if I actually clicked it, and checking the bandwidth monitor logs to make sure I wasn't about to go over my limit.
Seriously, fuck satellite internet.
And there are a lot more McDonald's than 5 Star Restaurants in the world. Does that mean micky-d's is gourmet now?
This latency shouldn't bother the porn industry at all.
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
The thing people miss about satellite connections is that they are never anywhere near 100%. 98% of your packets getting through sounds good in theory, but in practice it makes most TCP based protocols painful. You won't be doing much realtime anything over satellite. Mind you, i've lived at the end of multiple satellite links that I managed in SWA. We had great conditions - flat terrain, few clouds, no smog, high elevations due to being relatively close to the equator. You still lose a few here and there. It slows down downloads, causes losses even from IM traffic, emails fail to send, you name it.
A well managed and accelerated 12mbps downlink could provide some excellent speed, comparable to a high end DSL link. The real numbers you'll see will hover in the 700k/sec range in raw download speed. The latency is never going to be better than 520ms and probably worse, depending on the ground station location.
The problem with this technology is that it's Ka based. Ka is much worse in regards rain fade than Ku itself, which made the concept famous. All Ka systems I have worked with (commercial, and military) can't hit the bird anymore when the sky gets cloudy or a few drops of rain hit ground. This doesn't sound like a winner.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
If every American gamer used a satellite connection maybe some Australian's and Europeans would start winning a few online matches.
Everything is latency sensitive, take a web page for example, all those elements inside, like those small images, each of those need a new query and get/send command, therefore you are getting 1 second penalty over every item on the page and these per connection lags accumulate resulting in one noticeably slow web experience, but somewhere in upstate Alaska that might be kind of good enough internet solution.
That's something I wondered about. This would be great in SE Alaska - faster and cheaper than my DSL line but given the tendency towards constant rain (last year I measured 97 inches at my house) it probably wouldnt be very useful.
Oh well.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That latency is far too much to have a good gameplay experience in Nethack!
that made my day.
Acceleration is the key there. When I was Network Guy(tm) for a satellite provider, we could easily push 15-20Mbps of a single stream of TCP traffic over the bird using TurboIP boxes from Comtech/EFData. It did tricks with TCP windows and ACKs that let you overcome TCP slowstart.
And I don't understand the whole "OMG 520ms latency kills VOIP!" argument. We had hundreds of Cisco IP phones out at the end of our VSAT links and nobody complained one bit about it. It takes about 15 seconds for your brain to realize "Oh, there's a bit of lag" and adjust. i think people are complaining about jittery connections that have latencies that bounce around between 520ms and 3000ms because of how you're sharing both the uplink and downlink channels with everyone else. Our systems could detect SIP calls and switch you from a shared channel to a dedicated channel big enough to handle your call + additional overhead.
I wonder why they aren't putting network satellites in LEO instead of geostationary. Just how hard would it be to use a phased array antenna instead of a dish and track the orbit? Would that negate the lower cost of only going to LEO? After all, with the satellites in lower orbit you could launch more of them, which ought to improve bandwidth. And the improvement in latency would make this arrangement competetive with any other broadband offering.
The question wasn't whether McDonald's was gourmet, but whether it's food. You may argue it's not food because it's inedible (in your opinion), but when they serve more people in a day than all restaurants rated with hats or stars combined, your opinion is simply wrong. Food is what people eat, and they eat lots of McDonald's. Games are what people play, and they play Farmville, despite your elitist complaints otherwise.
Learn to love Alaska
Cable internet is fast but the upload sucks and comcast tv SUCKS!!
Potentially useful. Does anyone have a link to a map detailing which areas of the earth are covered?
I am John Hurt.
Too expensive, so far:
See Teledesic, then Iridium Communications for examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic
I was also worried about not just data latency of VoIP but also the voice latency which tends to interrupt conversations since the pauses are too long. The TCP spoofing and VoIP audio data compression (and QoS on a shared link) really do go a long way in overcoming not just data latency but that oh-so-annoying satellite voice delay.
I had no idea, but VoIP over satellite really works. Something in the math makes the delay short enough to help your perception of the other caller's intentions (did he stop talking so I can start now?) We've all seen the funny interruption cycles on CNN with people via satellite, but when it's just VoIP, it really isn't a problem.
Ka-band in the rain is a completely different story--actually, it's a tragedy. If I were provisioning a remote site that only had satellite internet for telephones, I'd try to pick Ku-band FSS over Ka-band for VoIP traffic just to minimize the rain fade problem.
Still, satellite internet is still one of those need-it-because-we-can't-get-anything-else technologies. It's that pesky speed of light problem that gets in the way.
Kriston
That sounds like a situation crying out for another intermediate layer protocol with some redundancy so you can tolerate the loss of a few percent of the packets with no retransmits. (Or is it only as high as 98% now because they're already doing lots of such tricks?)
As a Wildblue subscriber on the highest teer package, who gets slowed down to dialup speed a couple times a year for using more then 17 gigs in a month (yes that is the current highest residential cap) I've been following this story pretty close. There are a few facts that are definetly getting downplayed so far both here and in the Engadget piece. For one Viasat isn't just partnering with Wildblue, they now own them, or at least a pretty big share. And they have been talking this kind of speed since Viasat 1 was still in design, so even though it's great to see it in practice, that is nothing new. And most blatantly absent is the caps themselves. From all reports (not publicly confirmed, but much evidence to back up) the $50 package that he mentions will only be for 7.5 gigs combined down and up. The next level is 15 gigs combined down and up for $80, and the top tier is 25 gigs combined for $130. And after that it's $10 a gig, or a significant slow down, like they have now.
You can find discussion about this on Wildblue's own forum http://wildblueworld.com/forum/
Like I mentioned earlier, Viasat has been talking this up as a real competitor to DSL for quite some time, so many of us existing customers hoped (assumed) that that meant they would give us some realistic caps to go along with the speed, but it appears that is not the case. So although the speed bump is cool, remember that at the lowest level, 1 Netflix movie along with normal browsing will probably put you over for the whole month.
Wish I had mod points. My 49ms (lowest on the crowded server) is gold in my FPS games.
This story sounds familiar for some reason.
Advice: on VPS providers
If you want rain-fade-free-reliability, C-Band is the only way to go. Our C-band links rain faded twice in the 4 years I was there. Once because of a 6-inch-per-hour springtime thunderstorm and once because of a hail storm. The latency on those links were about 750ms because they were long-path hops to transatlantic birds down into Africa and yet they ran constant VOIP, HTTP, and SMTP traffic.
You've not embedded images into style sheets with the data: scheme to avoid multiple requests, I see.
I have outages at least once or twice a year, where I lose my power, cell phone, land line, cable and of course Internet. Power I can get around with a generator, but the others not so much. I don't miss the cable TV, but no phone service of any kind is definitely a problem when it last more than a few hours.
I'd love a cheap plan that only let me subscribe when I needed it, no charges for a month I don't use the satellite, or at the very least a sub-$20 package that isn't fast or has a lot of data that I can at least use to get information off the Net with (send email, maybe Skype). If they really want to shake up the industry, they'd offer a super cheap package for folks like me.
ChuckyG
A phased array antenna is substantially more expensive to make than a dish-and-horn. More electronics in it, and in particular more PIECES, which means more pick-and-place time.
Economy of scale might bring it town to something comparable a couple years into a big deployment. But it will still cost a bunch extra at first - which is when you are trying to recover startup costs and simultaneously underbid the competition. And then you need a bunch of satellites rather than one or two.
So a new player would find itself in a position similar to Iridium vs. the carriers' cell-site networks, trying to recover the costs of a constellation of LEO satellites and custom consumer bricks from the revenue of a niche market (when a GEOsat competitor sells/leases cheaper bricks and flies 'way fewer birds.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ku usually has a serious problem with rain-fade more because dishes are sized just large enough for clear-weather communications. Throw a Ku-band LNBF on a nice big 3 meter (C-band) offset dish, and I bet your rain-fade problem will be history.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I don't think you'll want to use Skype over a satellite link. :)
Ref: 2001 A Space Odyssey
anonymous@foo:~$ ping www.google.com
PING www.l.google.com (74.125.225.114) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from ord08s08-in-f18.1e100.net (74.125.225.114): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=16.8 ms
64 bytes from ord08s08-in-f18.1e100.net (74.125.225.114): icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=17.5 ms
64 bytes from ord08s08-in-f18.1e100.net (74.125.225.114): icmp_seq=3 ttl=53 time=16.3 ms
What really makes the dropped or clashed packets or aks painfull is tcp's backoff. Especially in a situation with hidden transmitters. The killer is, back off is exponential.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Amen, everything you have said resounds with me, and especially my father. The only service available in the rural upstate NY village is satellite, or a 3G modem (which has better pings, but much worse caps of around 5GB per month). The entire street petitioned for cable to be run (everyone would agree to subscribe), but the cable company's response? Ok, pay us $10,000 per mile of cable we need to run and we'll do it. A few hundred feet down the next road is a house with DSL, but it is unavailable where my father is. Satellite internet is a mechanism that should only need to be used on Arctic expeditions (akin to Satellite phones). Fuck it, and fuck the state of U.S. internet as well. Other countries seem to love taking American inventions and improving them, while America squanders them. Here in Tokyo I can buy a 40 Mbps WiMax subscription for $40 a month and use it anywhere in the city and surrounding areas with up to 10 devices at once. However, my poor father has too hard of a time even talking to me on Skype because of the 2000ms delays and no alternative choice. To add to what to above poster said, here is an even better tidbit: Back in the earlier days of satellite they DIDN'T EVEN GIVE YOU A BANDWIDTH GAUGE!! You just had to guess, and if you thought you went over because the quality was shit (i.e. half the time in fair weather and 90% of the time in bad weather) you called in to ask them how much you had used.
Ku usually has a serious problem with rain-fade more because dishes are sized just large enough for clear-weather communications.
Depends on who's engineering the link. Our Ku VSAT links could close the link with a 7-8db Eb/N0 on a 90cm dish, but we opted to go for a 1.2m dish for the extra rain fade margin. We also opted to spend a little more on the space segment to be able to transmit a hotter signal.
Throw a Ku-band LNBF on a nice big 3 meter (C-band) offset dish, and I bet your rain-fade problem will be history.
If your C-Band dish is Ku-capable, sure. That means no mesh dishes, and stricter manufacturing tolerances. Satellite owners get cranky when you splatter across 2 or 3 birds because of a dish that is out of tolerance for what it is being used for. Plus there's the potential problem of overload. I've had instances of having to pad down a signal because the system was engineered for 1.2m dishes all around and someone pops up with a 4.5m dish because that's what they had already. The receiver would overload and we couldn't turn the transmitter down far enough to not splatter all over the transponder.
Ping times of 600 msec are nearly impossible when you're going through a geosynchronous satellite. Each trip to the satellite and back takes 230-278 msec, and any kind of channel access eats another 40 msec or so, in each direction. If you take the satellite round trip as 250 msec, that adds up to 580 msec with no buffering. In real life, with other subscribers contending for the channel, I'd expect ping times to be 2-3 seconds.
Valid points. I was really just trying to make the point that Ku isn't inherently unworkable with heavy rains. The same probably can't be said about Ka.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What I find amusing is we are still in the stone age compared to Japan. They put up a satellite back in 2007 with minimum download of 100 Mbps to max of 1.2 Gbps download, depending on size of dish, and we are satisfied with a paltry 12- 25 Mbps. I install Netkaster & Xplornet systems up in Canadian arctic. We have to put up with download restrictions, actual data blockage and excessive monthly fees. I pay $150/month for only 2 Mbps with a 20 GB cap and $2/GB above cap. My download full speed is only available from 0600Z to 1400Z. Outside this time, hit and miss, mostly miss. Xplornet recently launched a new satellite capable of up to 25 Mbps, but this satellite is not available for northern users. They promise a 2nd satellite that might cover our area, but not holding my breath. Broadband in the north is a joke.
Everything is latency sensitive, take a web page for example, all those elements inside, like those small images, each of those need a new query and get/send command, therefore you are getting 1 second penalty over every item on the page and these per connection lags accumulate resulting in one noticeably slow web experience, but somewhere in upstate Alaska that might be kind of good enough internet solution.
Their hardware/software is smart enough to fix this. It understands unencrypted web pages that have redirects, embedded images, and the like. Web browsing is quite comfortable.
After watching Super Size-Me, it's not too much of a stretch to think of McDonald's as either a drug or a poison because of the supposed addictive qualities of deliciously-unhealthy food combined with the argument that too much makes you obese.
That said, three meals a day at a gourmet restaurant everyday for a month might not be as bad for your body, but your pocketbook would be suffering. So if your definition of "food" excludes things that are not sustainable week-to-week then neither McDonalds, nor gourmet restaurants fit the bill. :)
When we first moved to this island in Lake Ontario the only choices for internet access were dialup (claimed 32kb but 18kb on a good day) or satellite. We got satellite and except for 2.9sec ping times throughput was pretty decent (no Netflix then). When local WiFi became available we signed up and ran the two in parallel using various load-balancing/failover configurations through the firewall. The WiFi was much faster than satellite at a slightly cheaper price (but the data rates the installer claimed have never been approached in real use). The plan was to evaluate the two and then drop one. Problem was that the satellite has been far more reliable than the local WiFi connection -- think underconfigured land line and indifferent system administration. We have come to think of them as the local offline service. And the number of businesses in the area that get left connection-less for days is depressing. Cloud service? Not here. Hopefully in the next few weeks we get switched to a new, higher datarate satellite and we start all over again. Maybe this time we shoot the WiFi and consider a cellphone stick as backup.
I've used Ku in some pretty shitty environments with little issue. As you pointed out, the dishes were oversized for clear weather but were sufficient for burning through weather. With the exception of the little Swedish 0.92m, which was just tiny but a great performer. Consider this an endorsement of their gear. The rest were mostly autoacquire AVL 2.0m and 2.4m dishes. The dishes mostly were set up for quad band, with separate sets of LNB/BUC/waveguide/feed horn for each band. Ku was easier to get in some areas of the world than other bands, so that's mostly what we used.
Also, we could test out the Ku in CONUS before we went out there. There is no traveling to some remote armpit of the earth without testing the stuff at home first.
Our BUCs were mostly sized at about 30-35w. Sufficient for the task. Some people (think the Army) put huge BUCs on their dishes (hundreds of watts), but it mostly just serves to do bad things to the transponder on the bird.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The problem is mitigated by TCP acceleration - PEP in particular. I guess you could call it a change of protocol - at least in between the two proxy nodes - the one at your end of the link and the one at the ground station end. It does quite a bit of spoofing and avoids waiting for ACKs. It is usually combined with proxying of web traffic (think Squid) and some sort of lossless compression (think v.42bis on modems or gzip on http).
It works. It isn't a panacea. I have tried just about every PEP product available out there and none can achieve more than a 30% acceleration of a link on a general basis. They can get more in specific circumstances - easily compressible traffic, something that was plagued with handshake delays otherwise, etc. None of those situations are normal so using the 30% number is appropriate.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
"Still, satellite internet is still one of those need-it-because-we-can't-get-anything-else technologies. It's that pesky speed of light problem that gets in the way."
And do not forget the even peskier radius of geostationary orbit at ~3.6*10^4 km altitude.
Du kan glomma dina ensama stunder, du kan lita paa teknikens under - Wilmer X
How playable is WoW with a 600ms ping?
why are you multiplying by 4 instead of 2?
geostationary orbit is 35,786km above sea level.
so round trip would be 71,572km.
speed of light is exactly 300,000km/second.
(it's exact because the definition of a meter is based on speed of light)
300,000 / 71,572 = 0.23857333 seconds
or 239ms.
100ms equipment overhead? are you using a 1200b/s serial cable to connect to your satellite modem? i can ping google at 14ms. surely the backbone connection at the base station can beat my connection. 239+14=253ms theoretical speed. i expect no more than 300ms even during the busy time of the day.
Its OK, they all use AOL anyway.
Gourmet food would be bad for your body as well. Lots of butter and salt in everything. And the few actual 5-star restaurants I've been to have few items on the menu (they just make sure the things on the menu and done exactly the way they want them). They aren't designed for well balanced meals, but a haute dining experience.
Learn to love Alaska
How playable is WoW with a 600ms ping?
Let's just say you can't be a healer.
I live in a Rural Area and there is no DSL anymore since Oct09 and no Cable for the outlining area in a city total of around 14,000 people. The Choices are Dial-up, Satellite Internet, 3G, WISP. I was on Dial-up for 1 year then 3G for 1 year then I found a WISP provider called WISPrenn that is Point to Point Wireless I get 1ms to tower then on Speedtest.net 16-27ms ping to a LA Server. I pay $56 for 5Mbps Download 600-700Kbps upload and 75GB/s amonth and I am a Gamer. I talked to my ISP and they say that ALOT of there customers are Gamers for a Company that started in 09 by someone that his family thought he was crazy. The person that lives next to us was one of the lucky ones with DSL and speeds around 1-2Mbps but my Wireless is Faster and Less laggy then the DSL were when you ping google on the DSL it is 90ms ping.
It's not an improvement. Under the Anik F2 I can reliably get 20 MB/hour = 480 MB/Day = 15 GB/month. Under new system I can use up my daily cap in half an hour, and my monthly cap in 10 hours, if I didn't have the daily cap in place.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
It's worth checking out. When the CuNim is piled 35,000 feet thick, we lose connectivity. But the average drizzle isn't too bad.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Ka works if you concentrate power in narrow beam widths with spot beams, which is what ViaSat is doing. Believe they are running margins in excess of 15dB with very good receive G/T at the satellite. The other plus of spot beams is frequency reuse; this is how they are accomplishing 140Gbps of throughput.
Iraq billions