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Europe Gets Pay-As-You-Go Satellite Broadband
judgecorp writes "Europe is set to get pay-as-you-go high speed satellite broadband from Avanti's Ka-band HYLAS1 satellite in the 26.5 — 40GHz range. Avanti says satellite broadband services have improved massively including a far better uplink than used to be available, though the round-trip latency can't be improved much." Conspicuously missing: the actual price.
But have you seen the power strips the USA has?!?
It will be ubiqitous by 2009.
Posted from my Iridium Satellite Connection.
for Navy buckets operating out of normal, unrestricted hardline/line-of-sight microwave/wifi ranges.
NATO have already approved Avanti satellite uplinks for operational use.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Conspicuously missing: the actual price
Can't you read? It's "Pay-as-you-go". That means they don't tell you the price until the end of the month.
Buying in bulk is usually cheaper than getting nickel-and-dimed to death with most stuff. Look at your supermarket per unit prices for King Size, Family Size and Holy Roman Empire Size packages. I'd rather see the service offered with daily, weekly, monthly flat rates instead of the old telephone pay-per-call system.
But I guess telephone companies like that system, because they ended up charging more for service than for flat rates.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Only $50/GB. Plus 4 pints of blood from your firstborn.
Where are the satellites, LEO or GEO ?
I'm guessing GEO so ping times sux
(Oh I spose I should clarify - LEO = Low Earth orbit - no more that a couple of hundred miles up. GEO = Geostationary - up at 25000 miles so it stays in the sameplace relative to the ground.)
Still cheaper than SMS
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
... that there are companies in the UK and EU who have been doing satellite broadband for over a decade now, with both flat-rate and pay-as-you-go billing.
This is *one* company that has started to provide it, nothing particularly new here.
I won't be using it
B2C is handled by various European ISPs reselling the service at different prices. For example, Broadband-Portugal sells 1GB tokens, which are valid 30 days, for 15 EUR. Primesatellitebroadband offers subscription plans where add-on gigabytes cost £7.20 (about 9 EUR). There are other satellite operators which offer broadband internet access over a bidirectional satellite link.
USA! USA! God damn Euro people and their garbage tech. It sucks
Wish we had it though.
You can't afford it.
If you need to ask, you can't afford it.
For the first time C seems slow, 230 milliseconds travelling to and from GSO seems a lot in this context. Comms through 'Spooky action at a distance' can't come soon enough.
Yes 3G 4G "broadband" is in a lot of places, but I wish I could get heughes net for just one month or even 1 week when I need it at a event. This weekend I had Verizon and their "superior" network.... that did not work... ZERO bandwidth with a crowd of only 125,000 Verizon utterly sucks. I had to switch to the wife's AT&T iphone and illigimately tether, and then hit the freaking data cap and slowdown to 28.8 dialup you get to enjoy.
A nice dish pointing at the sky would have solved that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
3 second pings dont matter at all. 99% of us that do real things with the internet connectivity are not FPS gaming.
When I am uploading 20gig of photos I dont care about ping, but then I make money using it.
Now the Financial FPS games called day trading, I think they would hate 3 second pings. That might be a cool torture device for a financial trader... your order to sell showed up 5 seconds too late.... you will re-spawn in 5....4....3...2...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Mobile use, particularly at sea tends to involve omnidirectional antennas. Directional, gyro corrected antennas are very expensive and large.
Can this service tally with a handheld sat phone for lower speeds? I would hazard a guess of a yes but I've never found any info on this...
A blog I run for the wealth
...makes these services next to useless, especially now that the web isn't just a bunch of static pages anymore. I was using satellite broadband a few years ago, in rural Australia - it was barely better than the dialup line it replaced. We only took it up because the line quality on the dialup degraded to such a state that it couldn't stay online for longer than twenty minutes, and Telstra were incapable of fixing it.
Only low-orbit satellites are going to be able to make satellite-broadband useful.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
Google says it's 0.238584003 light-seconds... not that heavy, I suppose.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Living in Spain (still part of Europe) I can tell you this is the trend nowadays, satellite broadband pay-as-you-go, justice pay-as-you-go, health care pay-as-you-go, its the future!
Having used satellite in Canada ( I live way out in the boonies ) for a couple of years, I can say that for browsing it wasn't bad. God help you if you have to use a VPN over it though. If you have to use a VPN, dial-up is just as fast as satellite :-( . Also because it uses a shared resource, you may find that they throttle back high bandwidth users aggressively ( i.e. don't try to download anything big ).
Even though I'm less than 50 miles from high-tech San Diego, until recently dial up was our only option. For the past several months we've been using Viacom's Exede satellite service. Their big advertisement campaign was that it would "feel like fiber". Yes, really, that's what they went with.
The thing is, it actually is really fast most of the time. Of course you can't do things requiring low latency, such as playing video games online, but for most other activities, such as normal surfing, watching videos on youtube or elsewhere, or downloading files, it is extremely fast. Faster than most DSL services even.
The biggest downside (aside from no gaming) is pretty typical of just about any high-speed connection in the USA these days: insanely low data limits. Their cheapest data plan is $50/month, and gets you 7.5 gigs download and upload combined. $80/month gets you 15. So even though it "feels like fiber", and you could easily watch streaming movies (which they advertised heavily as a selling point before disclosing the data limits), in practicality you could maybe get one movie a month before getting throttled back.
So I guess what I'm saying relative to this discussion, is that satellite can be a viable internet option, and it actually can be high speed. But as long as you have no other choice, they have you by the balls and can limit you to ludicrously low amounts of data per month.
Round-trip latency can definitely be improved. It just means using LEO satellites instead of GEO.
Firstly I have been using this service for over a year. It is currently available on a geostationary satellite at 9 East broadcasting to most of Europe. The increase in bandwidth is possible as they use 82 spot beams and so re-use the same frequency over and over again. The system also allows variable transmit power during rain etc. It also allows bit rate to vary per customer so if rain losses go high enough they can reduce bit-rate to keep link active.
The home dishes and trias were for sale on eBay in the UK as a once off cost. Then a top up or monthly package can be purchased. In Ireland one of the spots also carries a TV carrier for local TV. The power of the spots can also be varied per carrier.
But in general Satellite based internet should only be considered a last resort. Long ping times can affect VOIP and VPNs and real world bandwidth is shared between many hundreds of users meaning throttling and caps with rolling averages over minutes, and hours, meaning you get a fast initial burst of data, but they stop high usage users. Some suppliers make this very clear, others do not. Speeds of 10MB and even 30MB are available to commercial customers and even guaranteed speeds, but you pay much more.
Due to the number of spots and low cost of service it's probably better than other satellite based internet, but if you can get a 3G connection go for that. All new satellites launched for Europe will now start to carry KA transponders for TV and internet.
that's actually funny, i a sad and very depressing way
i wonder what our great leaders grand plan is, maybe they would like to re-instate slavery or something similar again. Sure looks like it's going down that way
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?