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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.
Latency is an issue for Farmville? For 90% of the Internet using public, latency of a second is acceptable - speed when connected is king (can it stream music/Netfix/Youtube). Farmville doesn't really have a latency issue...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
that's why I use straight path neutrino beams through the planet. I quit using CERN's neutrino source though, because of the negative latency. It's annoying to get the results of a command while I'm still typing it.
The question, however, is how much people care. Gamers don't seem to realize that most people don't give two shits about MP games, and there probably aren't many gamers living in rural areas anyway, as 20-somethings generally live in metro areas.
Ever try to load Gmail over a high latency connection? Anything with a lot of redirects will cause an issue - and that is a lot more stuff than you think...
I'm not saying the technology is worthless. I'm saying I live in a rural area (40 mins to closest large town, 20 mins or more to a motorway). I get a maximum of 2MB/s 'broadband', but my ping is reasonable (twice most others, but still reasonable). I'd prefer this to 10MB/s download speed and double the latency...
Not everyone is a gamer, but in my original comment, I simply stated that for Gaming (COD, L4D etc) latency is more important than download speed. And it is.
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.
Gamers don't seem to realize that most people don't give two shits about MP games
According to Wiki: "Modern Warfare 3 went on to gross $1 billion throughout the world in 16 days of availability, beating Avatar’s record of 17 days, according to Activision."
None of those millions of buyers are playing online?
There are currently 3,015,146 players on steam - http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
1 second is still a disaster for complex sites: You load the page. The page includes some javascript file. Said javascript file includes some more. Then it makes a couple dozen web service calls... and that's if we hope the browser is smart enough to request every link in the page at once.
I've seen many a custom business apps that was tested with pings of 0-10 be a bit slow with 80s, and a total disaster when used from another continent. A 1 second ping makes a connection from the US to India seem like a LAN.
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.
Wow, you are really out of touch with reality. Rural life does not equate to uneducated hicks. If you were to get out of your little shell and actually meet people in rural areas you might see that we live out here for a reason. Not because of education or lack of revenue but because we do not feel the need to surround ourselves with people all the time.
I really have more to say but I will leave it at that.
P.S There are quite a few more gamers than you think out in the country.
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 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.
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.
There are quite a few more gamers than you think out in the country.
Cow-tipping is not a game.
It's a sport! :)
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.
Ever try to load Gmail over a high latency connection? Anything with a lot of redirects will cause an issue - and that is a lot more stuff than you think...
Good -- maybe all the rustic folk out in the hinterlands will complain enough to get a few sites to use less than 19 external sources of javascript tracking bugs, and to only have four or five layers of external scripts that load external scripts that load external scripts.
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