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.

Comments

Sounds like just the ticket

[Tastecicles]

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.

It's probably worth pointing out...

[Gordonjcp]

... 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.

Re:Conspicuously missing: the actual price

[ThatsMyNick]

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)

Re:Conspicuously missing: the actual price

[TheRaven64]

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

The latency...

[__Paul__]

...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.