Slashdot Mirror
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...
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?"
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.).
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?
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.
If every American gamer used a satellite connection maybe some Australian's and Europeans would start winning a few online matches.
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
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.
Unless the downloaded data originates on the satellite.. it has to be transmitted up from the ground first so actual user capacity would be about half that. Not great when you consider the area one satellite covers. It would be interesting to know if they are using some sort of advanced caching or multiplexing routines when it comes to things like netflix.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Slashdot crowd seriously underestimates how much engineering goes into modems to ensure that the end user experience is optimal.
It's 140Gbps for all user spot beams combined, and another 140Gbps if you count the associated gateway spot beams. I guess you could say it's a 280Gbps satellite if you want to count bandwidth the Cisco way (half vs full-duplex) :D
And yes, all of that subscriber traffic will end up at one or multiple terrestrial Internet gateways. One would hope they've provisioned enough infrastructure to scale up to the full satellite capacity. I doubt they purchased 140Gbps worth of Internet bandwidth on Day 1.