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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.

10 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds like just the ticket by Tastecicles · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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  2. It's probably worth pointing out... by Gordonjcp · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... 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.

  3. Re:Conspicuously missing: the actual price by ThatsMyNick · · Score: 4, Insightful

    T-mobile USA calls their prepaid plans "Pay-as-you-go", so it might also mean the service is prepaid (like you buy a certain number of GBs in advance)

  4. Re:Conspicuously missing: the actual price by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Un, no. Pay-as-you-go means pre-pay. It's the exact opposite of receiving a bill at the end of the month.

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  5. Re:LEO or GEO by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2

    Don't forget that the 240ms RTT is an absolute minimum - that's the distance to the first hop, and not including any processing delays. You're looking at 300-350ms as a minimum for a complete path. Still, the bandwidth is better than the ADSL that my mother gets, so if it's not stupidly expensive then I can imagine it being useful. The 4Mb/s downstream is (just!) enough to stream iPlayer HD.

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  6. Cost not listed because it's a wholesale provider by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:Conspicuously missing: the actual price by Melkman · · Score: 2

    Well, the actual price would be about 15,- euro per 1GB if you can believe their reseller at http://www.europe-satellite.com/EMS/webshop/online_tooken01.htm. But Avanti is not the first, Tooway has been providing a similar service for several years now.

  8. The latency... by __Paul__ · · Score: 3, Informative

    ...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.

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  9. Re:LEO or GEO by Ash-Fox · · Score: 2

    Very few apps are adversely affected by the long RTT times over 2-way satellite links.

    I have used systems that have high latency (not satellite) which caused problems with sites that use AJAX.

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  10. Re:Conspicuously missing: the actual price by Alioth · · Score: 2

    That's actually significantly cheaper than roaming charges on 3G, which are usually about 1.50/MB (MB, not GB) or about 1500 eur per GB. So satellite internet is actually two orders of magnitude cheaper than 3G roaming!