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Ask Slashdot: Good Satellite Internet For Remote Locations?
EdIII writes "I've been looking for a decent contention service (4:1,10:1) in South America and I am not finding much. I have also heard that some frequency bands are a lot better at cutting through cloud cover. This is for a fairly remote ground station with reliable power generation, but also routinely cloudy. I would need at least 3/1Mbps with hopefully decent latency. What's your advice Slashdotters? Yes, I know that some of the solutions can cost 20K for deployment and 2-10K per month for service. Feel free to to tell me about a good commercial service. There is another ground station that might be deployed in north east Alaska."
Simple answer is you won't. There are no "good" satellite internet for anything. With luck you might find "adequate" or "usable" satellite internet. But don't let any one lie to you and tell you that they have "good" satellite internet. There is no such thing.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Just rename yourself Abdul Achmed Al Siri, and the NSA will provide you with free fiber.
Well, if you want decent latency from a satellite network, I think the LEO Iridium constellation might be your only option: 10-20ms rtt vs. 500-600ms rtt for any geosynchronous satellite.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/49385912/Iridium-9602-Data-and-Inmarsat-C-latency
Though actually, it looks like the practical rtt to another the internet can take 1800ms over Iridium, since it has to bounce the signal around other nodes until it can get to one of its ground stations :/
Of course, Iridium data rates are in dial-up territory. It seems like you might be able to get low-cost consumer grade satellite services from DirecTV or something, using Iridium as the dial-up uplink component. But it also sounds like you'll be transmitting more data than you'll be receiving, if this is for data collection :/
Given that it also sounds likely you're looking at remote sites near the poles, Iridium may be your only option, since it gets pretty difficult to hit geosynchronous satellites beyond 70 deg latitude. So you might want to be optimizing your data transfer needs to fit through a tiny pipe, augmented via occasional sneakernet.
In short: :/
Translation: "Dear Slashdot, the last RF engineer we kidnapped and enslaved has unfortunately died, can you please suggest a commercial and less bleedy replacement for our darknet?"
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
That sure will work in the middle of the wilderness. Just cary a giant spool of fiberoptic cable wherever you go, and unwind. It has the benefit on top of satellite internet that you will never get lost. Just retrace the internet back to Verizon's office.
Come on, did you even pretend to read the title?
My latency was being affected by teh satelights.
In alaska GCI (And I think ACS) are deploying a system for remote internet access via microwaves / raidowaves see: http://www.gci.com/terra you may be able to work with them to get internet at a remote location.
Good Satellite Internet, pick two
AC will be the next /. editor.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I know someone in the US who uses HughesNet and she likes it. It looks like their service is available in S. A. as well. Of course for what you are asking it better be worth it.
:FREE
Plan: 2048/256 FAP Free DOWN/UP: 2048Kbps/256Kbps monthly: $1,207.50 modem
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I recently interviewed (unsuccessfully!) with SSI Micro in Ottawa. They provide satellite internet throughout the Canadian arctic, as well as other locations around the world. Might be good to contact them.
What we were told when Hughes satellite service was going to be offered through Earthlink was that you can expect a 10 second ping time -- a request from a computer goes to one star, bounces back to a receiver in Texas, gets resent to another star, and comes back to the recipient. Or quoting the trainer: "Having 8,000 miles between you and the Internet is not a good idea."
It was basically a functional connection if you're going strictly for useful data and not trying to have fun, which I derive is what the OP was seeking -- basic communication from BFE and not Skyping or Warcraft.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
I know you say that you know of solutions which cost 2-10K, but what is your actual budget? A fixed VSAT install seems to be what you are after, it will give you 600-700ms return latency but it will give your decent speed (go for a DVB-S2 service for good value for money). However, you will be looking in that price range you mentioned... I only working with roaming VSAT services (where you have access to beams on various satellites all over the world). We pay $18K per month for a committed rate of 2048/256 which is burstable up to 10240/256. A fixed service on one beam will be significantly cheaper then that though...
First you need to mention where you are exactly. Internet service over satellite is usually sold through local providers. Furthermore, different satellites have different coverage areas.
Second, if you want high speed broadband, you will need a Ku/Ka band (small antennas) satellite terminal. The problem is that in South America, it is more common to use C band (big antennas) satellite terminals that are slower than Ku band since the spectral bandwidth is smaller and more expensive.
Third, the latency is basically the same for all Geostationary satellites and in practical terms is about 250ms from the transmission latency and 150ms for the latency of the entire transmission chain. As systems improve, this latency gets reduced but the transmission latency only depends on the relative position of the terminal to the satellite and the speed of light.
Forth, above 70C latitude it is not possible to provide Internet over satellite with geostationary orbit since there isn't enough visibility of the satellite on the horizon.
Fear is the mind-killer.
You should check out IsoTropic networks: http://www.isosat.net/
I use them in a remote area in Central America and it is consistent. The service is just part of the equation though, having solid equipment also helps "improve" the experience.
I upgraded my BUC to 4 Watts and notice an improvement for oncoming rain storms than the 3Watt.
Good luck.
Is that you?
in the 90's when i was in the army we used their phones with special modems to send data from europe to africa and back the other way
there is no such thing as 'good' satellite internet. it will ALWAYS go out when it rains, or if theres a cloudy sky, or if there are trees between the antenna and the satellite, or if it is windy, or any number of other occurrences that happen daily. satellite internet is a thing of the past. just get together with all your neighbors and fund a fiberoptic cable from the nearest city to your area.
There used to be these guys back in the day - Loral Orion Cyberstar as the satellite carrier back in 2001/2002, or whatever is their name now.
We had a 2 Mbps symmetric at Sofia, Bulgaria (too lazy to look up coordinates right now), fed by UUnet MAE EAST as far as the internet goes. Loral/Orion had a very few issues and support was extremely knowledgeable when it came to it. We were one of the few 'importing' internet into the country those days, but it really made a difference during the Mediterranean earthquake when fiber got torn.
I don't know what they are doing these day, but they were perfect back then.
Hughes net is popular in rural Alaska. I think Hughes net offers the speeds you are looking for with their commercial packages. People ditch satellite internet as soon as a terrestrial connection is available. Satellite is better than nothing but far from ideal.
Anonymous Coward..........
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_Global_Area_Network describes the BGAN system using Inmarsat's I-4 birds, which sells data two ways:
Streaming: A guaranteed delivery style of service, billed by cumulative time of use. A terminal requests a context of X bandwidth (currently 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, or 256kbit/s) and, if there your current spot beam has enough resources available, you are allocated a guaranteed chunk of the available bandwidth. So if you ask for an 8k streaming context, you will at all times be able to send data at 8kbit/s.
Background: A best effort style of service, billed by volume. Each spot beam provides a certain amount of usable bandwidth. The bandwidth which is not in use by Streaming contexts is used for Background contexts. This means that the actual amount of bandwidth you receive with a background context will vary over time. The theoretical maximum bandwidth available is ~400kbit/s.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
I live off the grid in central america and have been using satellite internet for the last year or so. For about $2500 you can get a used system consisting of an antennae (2M) LNB, and 4Watt BUC and used VSAT modem Isotropic Networks provides the service. They have a variety of options for speeds and parity. (isosat.net) Having a big dish and buc makes things like rain less of an issue. Clouds do not effect the signal much (if anything they amplify - according to vsat techs). Based on your location, you will need to determine which is the best satellite to connect to.
Considering that geostationary orbits are 22,236 miles above the equator, that's your minimum distance to the satellite. If you're as far south as the Tropic of Capricorn (23.5 south), the satellite is a minimum of 22,906 miles away - assuming that it's at the same longitude that you are. If you're a ways off east or west, the distance to the satellite may be higher... so let's go with 23,000 miles - one way to the satellite.
To calculate your round-trip ping, realize that your ping packet has to travel:
- your station to the satellite (23k mi)
- satellite to network link (my guess is that's in North America, probably a minimum of 32 north; this is definitely over 23k mi)
- network link to ultimate destination (google.com?) - call this 10ms, though it'll be noise in the end
- google back to net link - 10ms
- net link to satellite (23k+ mi)
- satellite to your station (23k+ mi)
So what's that? 20ms + a minimum of 92k mi at 186k mi/sec... this will give you a minimum of 520msec ping round trips.
I used to have satellite up/down in Northern California - about 39N120W (2002-2006) via StarBand (don't know if they're around or not and too lazy to check)... I don't think I ever saw a ping rtt below 650ms anywhere in the net.
My experience with it at the time was that it was fine for casual use... click a link, a second later you had the page. It streamed fine at its given capacity (768k at the time). Interactive use was horrible, I had to replicate part of a testing lab at my location to be able to do development because typing remotely to a console was an exercise in predictive error correction. Upload was horrible at the time, I think it was 64kbps. That's plenty for web surfing, but sending binaries of any sort is prohibitive.
The high latency of course makes something like interactive gaming very challenging. Of course, I've seeing people playing WoW from OZ or South Pacific islands at 1500ms ping, so it's possible, but you do need to realize what you're getting into.
I assume that data rates have improved; of course, data files have increased as well.
Don't forget also that there are some serious data caps. StarBand at the time used a leakybucket approach; if you empty your bucket, you're not shut off, but if you keep pulling data non-stop, at some point you'll be limited to the resupply rate (which was 64kbps at the time....).
Given that you're going to be completely remote and far from any other possible internet connection, the caveats probably don't affect you - you don't have a choice. Satellite *will* work, but understand what you get.
My company uses Harris Caprock for satelite links. We use them for locations where ground network is not available (mainly Africa in our case, but also on our ships). We use them for our corporate network, but as far as I know, they also offer intenet access.
There is a coverage map at http://www.harriscaprock.com/coverage.php
Last I looked I think it was Globalstar who will be offering always on internet soon for portable phones, different from the dialup per minute. That might make basic mobile email a bit more usable. This isn't what you're looking for but I think that's the most use you're realistically going to get without a more exact location to research.
Even though internet is probably very poor and slow where you're going it's likely to be better than satellite.
Here's another option. Look into prepay and/or contract mobile phone data. In most countries in SA it's more expensive but still going to be better than satelite. If you want bandwidth you can chain them together - can someone explain how to do that on linux? I remember hearing about a kickstarter project that does it on Windows in a blackbox kind of way...
Also look into striking up deals with any place that has a decent connection and then using a VPN.
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someone figures out how to circumvent several laws of physics. When that happens I will be the first to sign up.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
It would be more efficient to set up a tin can network with many relays:
Tin can telecom:
http://www.darsha.org/?cat=9
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
being in north Alaska you will be probably limited to C band. Your best bet is to probably find service on AMC11 and Galaxy 12. With those your elevation is only ablut 8.5 degrees so if you have any terrain to the south you will probably be out of luck. Any commercial C band provider will be open about there contention ratio. If you really want to shell out the money they will also be able to provide a dedicated link called SCPC(single carrier per channel). Any decent commercial can set you up with a quote.
sorry for my comments, I'm drunk
This is the company I work for and we provide global satellite access. Honestly you'd have to talk to our sales department for prices, but we do have coverage in South America and Alaska. We're a NASDAQ traded company that's been in the satellite business for a while.
http://www.globecommsystems.com/
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GCOM
Why we all laughed so hard we peed ourselves, for Congress soapboxing the idea on Fox; no one there would get it either. rofl.
I hear "Dead-Eye Cruz" won't be doing anything next election; someone should pitch it to him. :)
I for one could use some Comedy out of Washington, instead of more Drama.
This current group has more Drama than a pack of teenage cutters.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Get Iridium for latency-sensitive traffic (if you have any) and a geosync provider for bandwidth, and then configure QoS on your router to meet your needs.
The cost of a decent router will be incremental compared to the dishes, and you gain a degree of redundancy. (Latency will go out of spec or bandwidth will be at capacity, depending on which link failed, but it is better than nothing. At least you can send an email explaining the situation.)
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Without knowing where you are it may be possible to
communicate via WiFi balloons. With sufficient height
it is possible to reach well beyond the 20 miles that the
curve of the earth imposes.
Ultra light aluminized Mylar permits antenna gain
and up/ horizontal isolation.
Pringles can antenna links..... for the hill country.
Modern chip solutions have such improved signal to noise
and low power profiles that the big expensive micro-wave tower
solutions are less interesting than they once were.
There is a lot that can be done but there is a chicken and
egg marketing issue. However with the advent of $50 boards
like the BBB and Pandaboard the exploration of this is
at hand.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Depending how far you are from the nearest wire, a microwave link may be feasible, faster, and cheaper.
Of course if you're in a mountain valley 1000mi from anywhere, that's obviously not possible. (well, without repeaters and such).
Need more infos.
Sent from my PDP-11
Congress _could_ help by throwing $$,$$$,$$$ at http://server-sky.com/ - no reason why servers have to be ground bound.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
I have good satellite internet.
Now, the lag is at least 700 mS - so no online realtime games. But for all else, I have 5-10 mb/sec down / 1 mb/sec up.
Browsing is good. Downloads are good. Updates to my remote websites are good.
I use Hughes.
But have a look at O3B (http://www.o3bnetworks.com), which covers between 45N and 45S so covers most of South America apart from the southern tip of Chile and Argentina. Or COMMStellation (http://www.commstellation.com/constellation/index.html) which will be at 1000km LEO and have global coverage by 2018.
Ka Band VSAT mobile antenna. At the price of cable, some antenna/modems are as little as $5K.
I'm in the satellite business myself, and the reality is that satellite capacity is expensive, no matter how you you look at it. As a rough rule of thumb, satellite capacity prices roughly at $6000/MHz/Month. If you do the math, this basically works out to $6-10 per kbps per month, and that's assuming at least a 2 year contract. So if you had a 1Mbps connection with a 4:1 contention ratio, you're still looking at $1500 a month. The economics change a little if you own a whole transponder (Typically a few million dollars a year for 36Mhz), but even then it's not cheap. The only way that DirecWay and the other satellite ISPs can keep their prices within the realm of reason for the average user is by having insane contention ratios, and draconian "Fair Access Policies"
It sucks, but there's not much that will reduce these prices. There are only so many active geosynchronous satellites that can be up there, and there's only a limited amount of spectrum available. Even if SpaceX cuts the launch costs by 80%, the prices won't go down, that just means the satellite operators will be (more) profitable. The end-user pricing is demand driven, not cost driven.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Niasat for your Alaska location might be worth it
So do you want to have just one contention, or were you thinking of taking a course?
-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+ *** http://www.mountainfort.com *** +-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-
These guys specialize in maritime systems, but are known to have access to a ton of global capacity.
http://www.linkscape.net/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I used to work for GCI in Anchorage. They handle the satellite service for all of the rural schools including those north of the arctic circle. I would call them first to see if they can handle commercial work as well.
you might want to give give exede a look its cheap as 50$ a month for 10gb a month or 130$ for 25gb it might not sound like alot but from 12am to 5am the caps are lifted and you can use all the data you like. the caps also only apply to video/audio streaming not webpages. my buddy has it and shes been very happy with it she only has the 10gb plain and only went over the cap once because of just not waiting until 12 to watch videos. it is fast 12mbs but it is still satellite so the pings will be hi so gaming in fps games isn't gonna happen.
I've had to do architecture work for sites (oil derricks, mines in the outback etc) that had satellite only links off and on over my career. What I've learned is that satellite will work, but it doesn't tend to work when you want it. You also have to be very careful about bandwidth provisioning for what you sending over the connection and overages can be very expensive. Latency is terrible, weather impacts it, but it does eventually go through. If you are only setting up a single link the cost is more, if you can get a contract for a number of sites it will help quite a bit with cost. You have to have very strict discipline on network utilization or you can see overages in the tens of thousands of dollars in a heartbeat.
In one case I had to send out about 40 GB of data to a number of sites and ran the numbers for the costs. When everything was said and done I literally ended up sending out teams of techs to oil rigs in the Indian Ocean on the weekly helicopter trip with a pair of server hard drives. It was cheaper to pay their overtime for the entire week than the overage on the bandwidth for satellite links. As long as we were paying for them to be out there we took advantage and went ahead and did a large amount of overdue maintenance anyways, but it still cost a fortune.
You can optimize your connection using an optimizing proxy hardwired to the Internet. The proxy can reduce some of the latency by doing dns lookups for you and reducing page sizes. It won't make real time apps like VOIP any better. There are also services like this available: http://www.vortexvpn.com/ or Opera browser, etc. I think even Chrome has it available.
Tachyon's web site only shows options for Government and Enterprise. I take it SMB isn't of interest to your company?
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I used a VSAT Terminal (Commercial account, not residential) to backhaul dial up users for a few years. We paid about $1750 per month for 4mbps down, 1.5mbps up. The latency was between 1500-3300ms nearly always. It wasn't bad for dial up, but wouldn't stand up for any kind of broadband.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
As a satellite technician, I think I can help answer some of your questions.
1. "I have also heard that some frequency bands are a lot better at cutting through cloud cover".
This is true. C-band has about 10dB less rainfade than Ku-band does, and Ku outperforms Ka-band as well (Not sure of the exact number as I don't do a lot of Ka links). C-band also requires larger dishes. You have to take into account what the acceptable availability is as well. 99% availability is quite possible and just requires a proper link budget (basically a series of calculations of gains and losses in the signal path which takes into account dish diameters/efficiencies, weather and satellite properties, among other things). Getting high reliability when taking into account weather is usually a lot easier on C-band, but if they are using an old bird with low output power or poor sensitivity, then a good Ku setup will outperform it.
2. "I would need at least 3/1Mbps with hopefully decent latency"
Latency is usually pretty fixed. The physics say it takes about 250ms for the signal to travel from your earth station to the satellite and back to the other earth station with an RTT of about 500ms. Any additional latencies are created by the FEC coders and access methods. The worst will probably be something that uses older Reed-Solomon over Viterbi (not used much anymore. Everyone has either already moved away from this 50 year old tech or is doing so right now) on a TDMA access system. I would expect an 850ms round trip time on this type of old system. The best will be a system that implements Turbo Product Coder or LDPC on an SCPC link (Dedicated link). I would expect about 600-650ms round trip. If you get on a shared network, anything modern will be using at least TPC and possibly LDPC if they're using DVB-S2 and you'll probably see an RTT of about 750ms (best guess on my part. each network is different). Additionally, using a shared access system will introduce jitter of which 50-100ms wouldn't be surprising to me. SCPC links tend to be quite good for lack of jitter. Getting the types of bandwidth you want is really a matter of contract.
3. "I've been looking for a decent contention service (4:1,10:1)"
On any shared access system, contention would be a matter of contract, and the lower the contention, the high the cost. When you start getting into 4:1 or better you're probably better off looking at a dedicated link, even if its not as fast as what the shared service is advertising. Personally, I'd actually rather pay for slower access with more generous transfer allowances than a fast connection with a really low transfer allowance. If you do go with a shared service, read their FAP carefully and calculate how much you can actually transfer taking into account transfer speed, FAP and transfer limits and compare this with your needs. It may also be to your benefit to either have multiple accounts with the same vendor or multiple vendors where you can switch between them as the month goes through. It could be cheaper than a more expensive link or cheaper than a dedicated link. Your budget will determine this.
4. Regarding "Globalstar, Iridium, Inmarsat, Thuraya and other similar systems"
These sorts of services will not provide the types of speeds you want and will cost you a small fortune in transfer fees, though they will have much lower latencies.
Unfortunately, satellite space is very expensive, as strider- indicated (and without sounding like we're colluding, I do know that he knows the industry). You really get into the "fast cheap reliable - pick two" and it should be more like "fast cheap reliable - pick one and hope for another one.... the third is right out" when you are dealing with some of the shared access satellite providers.
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
AC for slashdot editor!!!!!
^_^
-- /\/\onkey
____
~ |rip/\/\aster
Back in the late 1990s I worked for Schlumberger Ltd. Their remote well logging trucks, which can be found anywhere there might be oil, on land, used a Ku-band Very Small Aperture terminal. They developed these in conjunction with Hughes. This system communicates with a geostationary satellite, using a dish mounted on the back of the truck. Back then they were running only 56Kb/s but according to the article cited it's available up to 4Mb/s today. A typical transmission from the truck could be hundreds of megabytes, so the system had to be pretty reliable in most kinds of weather. Considering the remote locations and extreme conditions that oil well drillers have to put up with, I would think that this is likely to be the most robust, reliable and effective system you can get. But my information is more than 10 years out of date, so YMMV.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
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Please post "Ask Slashdot" stories in the "Ask Slashdot" section. There's a reason Slashdot offers filters based on section, but it doesn't work if you don't post stories correctly.
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'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
First, I have no affiliation with these people, but they sell worldwide and actually show pricing for real VSAT, not crappy HughesNet, Viasat, Starband, etc: http://www.groundcontrol.com/
Second, almost all satellite internet is from GEO orbit, as everyone has said, with massive latency; reducing contention is done with spot beams, but the catch is that, if you're not in the spot beam, you're out of luck: this is especially true of the new Ka-band services (Viasat-1, Gen-4 Hughesnet, and probably more coming). And since ALL of these are on Ku or Ka band, unless you can afford a big dish, you can expect rain fade much of the time.
Third, up until recently we had a Ku-band Hughesnet connection here at work for our extranet. It sucked. BIG TIME. I have to echo what everyone else says: do not get satellite internet unless you have NO OTHER CHOICE!
Last, there are the slow-speed alternatives: Inmarsat is also in GEO, but much slower and more expensive; in exchange, you get portability (no dish, just one of those suitcase antennas). Then there's Iridium (2400 bps) and Global(aka Local)Star (9600 bps--no kilo!), which are only useful for e-mail without attachments or text browsing with Lynx (and even then it'll be slow): these are in LEO (Low Earth Orbit), but at these speeds from the 1980's, you won't notice the latency gain. :(
Hope this helps, Mike
Currently just a little bit South of St. Matthew's (behind which we'll hide from the blow Tue night). We use KVH. Although the connection my employer purchased isn't as fast as what you want, it's been the fastest, most reliable service I've encountered so far. Their site says they sell 2/1M for land based use, so perhaps you could get two of 'em. Their coverage map includes South America.
Might as well set up a fairly powerful transmitter/receiver on the ground for data linkage. Radio will net you better data transmission and will tolerate your weather conditions much better. Plus you could very likely get many megabits out of a few channels properly multiplexed.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Cloud cover does not cause problems. Liquid water in the form of rain does. That's why we call it "rain fade" and not "cloud fade."
In that climate the ideal satellite solution would be a Ku-band service using a 1.2-meter dish giving you between one and twenty megabits depending on how much you care to spend. The mobile terminal will increase and decrease power to deal with rain fade.
The most affordable solution would be L-band service such as Inmarsat's BGAN giving you 492 kbit/s up and down. It does not suffer from any rain fade problems.
The newest and fastest services are using Ka-band using multiple, high-powered spot beams, such as Inmarsat Global Xpress. These suffer more from rain fade than Ku-band but even higher power is used to overcome it. Unfortunately, Ka-band is also horrifically expensive.
Kriston
Remote site, no infrastructure, high reliability required, etc. We started with bare rock on the side of a channel on the northern BC coast. The only viable option to survive rain fade was C band. So now you're dealing with a 2.4m dish. Operational requirements called for 3Mb of symmetrical bandwidth which needs a 40W BUC. Leads nicely into the next point; power. How are you going to feed this beast? We elected to go with 4KW diesel engines, in a redundant configuration. Don't forget shelters for all this as well. It cost around $15k just to get all of the equipment to the site. Another $13k for fuel to keep it running for 6 months. The hardware was $265k, and 3Mb from Telesat is $35k/mo.
Are there other options? Absolutely. Hughes DirecWay, XPLORnet, Shaw Direct, etc. But they're all consumer grade, unmanaged, asymmetrical, and Ku band which is highly susceptible to rain fade.
As with most things, you get what you pay for.
We're at sea, with a worldwide remit (plans in the pipeline for the vessel range from South Africa to E. Greenland). For 4MB down, 1MB up , we're billed a couple of thousand USD a day. Don't know what the hardware cost..
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"