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First of 2 Australian NBN Satellites Launched Successfully
New submitter aduxorth writes: Sky Muster, the first of the two satellites that will comprise Australia's NBN's Long-Term Satellite Service, has been successfully launched from Guiana Space Centre in South America. The two geostationary satellites will offer a total capacity of 135 gigabits per second, with 25/5Mbps wholesale speeds available to end users. The second satellite is expected to launch next year. Testing of this satellite will start soon and will continue until services are launched early next year.
the second communications satellite built in Argentina!!!
The latency is bad, but not that bad. Earth to geostationary and back round trip is about 250ms. Switching hardware and ground relay adds a few tens of milliseconds more, so typically you're well above 250ms but not usually more than 300ms. 700ms is some other problem; congestion or something.
But yes, the long round trip makes these systems unsuitable for low latency applications; certainly real time gaming is impossible, but also even just voice communication becomes awkward with that much delay. Some popular online games can be played with high latency; I know of EVE players that play successfully over satellite. That game only updates clients about four times a second at best.... so another quarter second of lag isn't that big a deal.
If your alternative is living in the dark then tens of megabits of high-latency bandwidth is pretty damn appealing.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Well, either the people who did this are complete morons .. or they've worked out their business model and decided it is viable.
I mean, who is going to string thousands of kilometers of fiber through the outback?
Me, I'm thinking by the time you build and launch the satellites you've give it some thought, and that random comments on the internet aside, have probably concluded it is worth it ... by whatever metrics you use to make that decision.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What business model would that be? It is Australia's NBN which is a government funded scheme to provide a new national broadband network. Most of the 400,000 premises that the NBN satellite connect will be in remote small towns. Places like Coober Pedy not stations in the middle of nowhere.
The NBN satellite program is around 1.5 billion USD, that is an awful lot of fibre optic cable, and in 15-20 years time when the satellite packs in will need to be spent again, while the steel armoured fibre will be doing just fine, carrying way more data at much higher speeds.
In the long run the only game in town is fibre, *EVERYTHING* else is a stop gap. This is a very very expensive stop gap.
Well, in the mean time, people will be able to have satellite internet now ... as opposed to waiting 15-20 years in the hope that someone eventually strings cable to them.
I have an aunt and uncle here in North America .. they're on an old fashioned party line and can't get cable ... because they're about 3km past the end of the cabling, and would have to spend HUGE amounts of money to get it ran as far as them. Like pay thousands of dollars for every few hundred feet since the companies don't see it as worth their time.
I know people who can't get internet, but instead rely on a cellular router to be their internet. Again, if they want anything over a wire they have to pay thousands of dollars.
Sometimes, the cost to string cable and all that entails, or the sheer number of years likely to wasted until it happens means that "stop gap" means you can actually see a solution, instead of hoping in 15-20 years you have a solution ... which in 15-20 years might still be 15-20 away.
A lot of this stuff never actually seems to happen. So, then it's not a stop-gap, it's the only damned way it will get done.
I'm betting in 15-20 years, a lot of people would still find they're no closer to having it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I would have serious doubts that this is cheaper than running some fibre even in the short term let alone the long term.
You do understand quite how the population of Australia is dispersed right?
Well let me help you with it. Australia is only a bit smaller than the USA and has less than 1/10th of the population. The population we have is heavily centered around a handfull of major cities on the east, west, and south coast with two minor cities up north. Inland there is nothing. We don't have a Dallas, we don't have a St Louis, no Oklahoma city, or a Denver. What little population we have in the bush is highly decentralised to the point where we own the world biggest single lot of private land, and some people have even managed to claim a whole part of Australia as it's own country.
What we do have is Texas style heat and even worse UV indexes so just throwing cables down across the desert will result in something that will last even less than 15 years. Speaking of effort we also have one of the most expensive labour forces in the world, and high cost of products, so take a rough estimate of what it would cost to run the fibre and then triple and you may start getting into the ballpark.
Running fibre is about the single most expensive activity possible and the cost analysis was done (note I didn't say cost benefit, fibre in the rural areas failed purely on cost grounds without even considering the tiny amount of people out there), and to top it all off it wasn't even done by the current anti-internet government, it was done by the previous government and even they couldn't justify the cost of fibre out there.
You don't decide to launch satellites just because.