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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.
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?"
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.
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.
140 Gbps/1 satellite - approx 12000 users downloading at full capacity in the same time.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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 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
I understand the thrust of your opinion here, but wanted to clarify regarding your dismissive statement, "And if junior has a sister, she's going to be rooting for the Netflix too" -- a 2004 survey by the Entertainment Software Assoc. had females comprising 25% of console gamers and 39% of PC gamers.
Citations please. Most of my fellow gamers (our clan has 450 members) are males in their late 30's to mid 60's, with about 15% female in their late 20's to late 40's.The average gamer is 37 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_culture The average social game is a woman in her early 40's. http://gigaom.com/2010/02/17/average-social-gamer-is-a-43-year-old-woman/
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.
I don't think the geostationary distance is responsible for the latency
Err, do a calculation before saying stuff like this..
geostationary orbit is about 40,000km from surface of US, more or less. Speed of light is 300,000km/s. So ping due to speed of light limitation is 40*4/300 = 533ms. Remember, packet has to go from base station to sat to your residence then ACK has to go from your residence to sat to base station.
Now add another 100+ms for you equipment latency and base station, and you have in excess of 650ms. And that's not accounting for even errors in trasmission.
So yes, geostationary distance is most of the latency issue.
A phased array antenna, however, has LOTS of moving parts
Maybe you don't quite understand how a phased array works... No physical movement is needed for repointing the antenna, but an apparent movement is done by introducing phase shifts between the various parts of the antenna surface. These phase shifts are introduced electronically, no physical movement needed.
It also costs anywhere between $5000 and $30000 depending on your specifics
Although such antennas are more expensive than normal fixed antennae (due to the additional electronics), the difference is nowhere as big as you make it.
Some satellite providers are designing such phased array antennae right now, for the purpose of receiving from multiple orbital positions (formerly this has been done either by multiple antennae, or one dish with multiple LNBs). So, the technology can't be that expensive (once it is mass-produced), or else it would never be able to compete with multi-LNB dishes.
especially given that you need to bump up the transmitter power vs. an equivalent GEO radio to get equivalent data rate
A LEO satellite will be much nearer, thus less loss due to distance, so you'd actually need less transmitter power rather than more.
Top that off with the fact that you're going to lose your connection everytime the LEO bird your dish was tracking goes over the horizon and it needs to lock onto a different satellite.
Make it so that your system can lock on to several satellites at once, and you can start looking for the next satellite long before the previous one goes under the horizon.
Never mind that I'm unaware of any commercial LEO data systems available today that provide greater than 9.6 kbps data rates...
Probably, this has more to do with the fact that there are no mass-market LEO constellations available yet, and the few fringe players have to save costs due to their small user base.
Once a major player gets into this market, prices will drop, and bitrates will go up.
They invented these things called cars. You drive for an hour to get to the closest town. I know people who drive 2+ just so they can live in the country. I think they are insane but hey they are free to do it.