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."

Comments

There are none

[Lord Apathy]

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.

Re:There are none

[mache]

I agree. You have to understand that most Internet communications satellites are in geo-stationary orbit at an altitude of 25,000 miles. With the speed of light limited to 186,000 miles per second and a round trip of 50,000 miles a quick calculations shows a minimum latency of around a 0.27 seconds and that is just signal travel time and not any processing overhead.

-- Mache

Re:There are none

[schnell]

There are none

Correct in terms of what the submitter asked for, but he/she pretty much asked for the moon and the stars (no pun intended). There are usable services out there but, to your point, they don't provide anything like what was requested.

I can't speak to what's available in South America, but in the US you can find cheap satellite Internet service for around $200 upfront and $50 a month but the contention ratios are several hundred to one. For lower contention ratios like 10:1, you'll need a business class service that will run anywhere from $200 to $800/month for VSAT... a dedicated broadband SCPC connection with no contention is easily $10K or more per month and just as much or more for equipment.

If you're living in somewhere far North where the line of sight is lower and weather is worse, expect that upfront VSAT equipment will quickly run up to a couple thousand dollars since you need a bigger dish and higher-power transmitter. The "rain fade" thing the submitter refers to is particularly a problem with Ka-band services that are used on the consumer-grade services; enterprise-grade Ku-band services have much less of a problem with it. If you throw at 2-meter dish and an 8-watt transmitter at the problem, you can burn through almost any weather on either Ka or Ku, but again, that's a lot of $$$ to spend on the equipment.

BTW these are all for VSAT "broadband-ish" services using geosynchronous orbit satellites so you have a minimum real world latency of 600 ms. I saw another poster refer to using Iridium to get lower ping times (since that's Low Earth Orbit) but Iridium is just not usable for anything above 128 kbps in the best possible circumstance. It's just physics at work ... an omnidirectional transmitter looking at LEO satellites whizzing overhead can't bring to bear the right amount of power as you get with a fixed dish always pointed at one point in the sky.

Long story short: satellite Internet is something you use because you have to, not because you want to. Lower your expectations and you'll find something economically reasonable. Keep your expectations high and you just won't be able to pay for it unless you're turning around and selling some of that bandwidth to others to defray the cost... and even then it's iffy.

Re:I use Verizon FIOS

[i kan reed]

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?

Whats your budget?

[Fredde87]

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...

More details please

[Bluefirebird]

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.