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Ariane Launches A New Way To Get Online 260
pdaoust007 writes "According to the BBC, 'Europe's Ariane 5 rocket has lifted off after three earlier delays, carrying the world's largest commercial telecoms satellite.' There is also coverage from the CBC and some video here." What's really interesting is what's on board that satellite, though: "Telesat Canada, a subsidiary of BCE, has commercialized the Ka-band technology to allow universal high-speed access to internet service. Apparently, this should make high speed access available anywhere in North America. Gear will be $500 and service $60/month ($CDN)."
Shared bandwidth? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Shared bandwidth? (Score:2, Informative)
I imagine it's impressive, considering its size (48 metres solar array!)..
Re:Shared bandwidth? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Shared bandwidth? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Shared bandwidth? (Score:5, Informative)
the vast bulk of.... (Score:5, Interesting)
So, it's gonna be something like this satellite (prices are cheaper than dish networks I see,, 750 versus the new lower price of 500$ install, and 70+$ a month instead of this claimed 60$), or the FCC gets real with wifi and allows more power and more spectrum, or something. I'm paying right at 80$/month for a landline phone and dialup connection,and if it wasn't for the big install cost-which I ain't got- I'd jump on satellite, even with it's faults. I use cell phone for voice, I only use the landline for inet connction, that's it. My dialup connection goes out whenever some squirrel jumps on the line or a rain cloud passes over, so that's no big deal anyway with occassional outtages, it's expected.
With this quarter profits corporate strategies, no one will ever put in any sort of hard wired solutions beyond intermittent and flaky alleged "broadband" telco monopoly dsl in some areas that really are just suburban, not rural.
So I say GO SATELLITE. Or something else. First guy to offer me an affordable *real* broadband deal close to what I am paying for a 28.8 connection, including install price, will get my loot. Until then, dialup, that's it, and I'm greatful to the local mom and pop ISP for even having that.
Re:the vast bulk of.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:the vast bulk of.... (Score:2)
Re:the vast bulk of.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:the vast bulk of.... (Score:2)
boy, are you.... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, for me, after 15 years living in a big metro area, I give up, it's not worth it, too much crime, noise, filth, too expensive, too artificial, packed in like termites. Yeech. Ya, having a deli close by was nice, being able to have a pick of movies to go to was OK, having a lot of cleat TV channels was ok, being able to go to tthe store closeby was ok, but ya know what? I willingly trade all that for what I have now. Not for this boy, just don't like it back to the city, and ya'all can just stay there, too, thankee kindly.
My "commute" is outside the door, we only go to town once a week and I could just as easily make that once a month, we burn little gas in that regard. Step outside, and I'm at work. A traffic jam to me is someones beefer gets out and is standing in the road. And I have no desire to live in the half and half zone of suburbia either, where you have *neither* advantage that urban or rural living really has to offer. I tried that too, you still had to go drive everyplace to do anything, you had little privacy, prices were almost as bad as the city, and I don't think endless streams of quickstores and the same sqwuare houses in constitutes "culture" of any note.
I have *many* reasons to prefer living rural, just as many as folks who enjoy more urban amenities like theirs. I'll put up with dialup and be greatful for it, like I said, I really am greatful for it.. It doesn't stop me from wanting a good net connection. If it takes waiting for satellite or better quality wifi, so be it. If I couldn't get dialup I would definetly get satellite some way or another, but right now I can struggle by with dialup, I'm just gonna complain about it and give encouragement to any companies out there who might want my money and have me as a customer, to tell them that they have a good potential niche market of millions of people for broadband once they can pull it off, so I'm encouraging those efforts. I think that is *reasonable*. I've given up on any wired solutions though, that has a dismal to "no" chance of occurring any time soon, but wireless somehow just might work. Eventually. Soon maybe, I just don't know.
And as to work, yep, my income is based on poultry production once you follow it two steps from what I do *exactly*. I do the outside maintenance on a really large complex that includes big farms, businesses and residential areas but it's the farms that make the money,although the government seems to be doing everythibng it can to destroy that as well. You tell me why that might be happening, but it's as big a problem as IT outsourcing is, just on slashdot we just aren't going to be talking about it any time soon, beyond the occassional sentence someone like me may make, because of the demographics here. We rural folks *know* we are in a tiny minority here.
I think you might have a distorted view of life in rural USA, we are still "humans" out here, we noticed it is the 21st century. And yes, we actually "use" technology and enjoy it and profit from it. I was a geek growing up, my dad was a mainframe guy, and I inherited the interst in geeky things. I just like living in the sticks, that's all. You use rural geekiness too, just maybe you don't see it or don't really know where your food and water and energy comes from. Big hint, it starts in the rural areas and it takes humans to get that stuff -> to you in the burbs and in the urban areas, and all we want is a little notice and to be treated with a modicum of dignity and respect, same as you want I think. It's not a majority here on slashdot, but there's a decent minority of rural dwellers here, and we are ALL geeks and like a lot of the same stuff. So of c
Re:boy, are you.... (Score:2)
1. Wish I had some mod points.
2. Why do you waste of time trying to explain stuff that is common sense to people who are obviously lacking any sense at all.
(I am a couple months away from leaving "the city," - Tokyo - for "the sticks" - some place or another in rural British Columbia. So, this satellite is possibly good news; need more info before making up my mind. The only thing I'll be missing about the city is the 15 minutes subway trips to Akihabara.)
Re:boy, are you.... (Score:2, Funny)
I need to tone it down. Or get a talk radio show, one or the other....
Good luck with your new place!
Re:Shared bandwidth? (Score:2)
Pah, new fangled stuff. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Pah, new fangled stuff. (Score:2)
Re:Pah, new fangled stuff. (Score:2, Funny)
Monetary conversion (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Monetary conversion (Score:2, Insightful)
Latency is sure to sux0r (Score:5, Interesting)
Barring sudden improvements on the speed of light, any geosync satellite is going to suck mud through a straw from a latency perspective. There is just no way around that 75,000 km round trip.
Re:Latency is sure to sux0r (Score:3, Funny)
Sure there is . . . we can call it a 45,000 mile round trip. It's sounding better already.
Re:Latency is sure to sux0r (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Latency is sure to sux0r (Score:3, Informative)
To ping the satellite, yes. However, that is of limited interest - since most people want to actually communicate with other internet hosts - not just their edge router. Plus, as far as I know the actual SV is just operating in bent-pipe mode -- there is no packet-level processing on board, so there is no actual router inside the satellite to ping. (Disclaimer: My IP-over-satellite experience is based soley on setting up VSAT systems -- these consumer products might be engineered differently.)
There a
Re:Latency is sure to sux0r (Score:2, Informative)
Ie:
home->sat->isp->sat->home == 480ms.
Re:Latency is sure to sux0r (Score:3, Funny)
I can't believe nobody can figure a way around the speed of light limitation. We have some of the brightest minds of all time alive today and we're still limited to 300,000 km/s. On Star Trek they have subspace radio.. why aren't people doing more research into sending signals over subspace like in Star Trek? It'
Re:Monetary conversion (Score:2)
Only downside being latency, but I'm not much of a gamer so that's not a huge issue.
Re:latency aside ... (Score:2)
Quite frankly, if you're checking e-mail while camping, there's something wrong with you.
Re:latency aside ... (Score:2)
Watch out, speeders! (Score:5, Funny)
As a side effect, all radar detectors in North America will spontaneously go off and keep doing so until thrown away.
It's as if millions of speeders suddenly cried out in rage, then were suddenly silenced.
Re:Watch out, speeders! (Score:2)
Re:Watch out, speeders! (Score:2)
"Anik E2 Ku-Band there are two wideband DVC signals in each transponder sharing the available EIRP. The EIRP of each DVC signal is about 5 dB below the saturated EIRP."
The footprint cuts an arc through the middle of the US reaching about midway through the state of Missouri at the highest bandwidth / angle of view available. The signal is way below what radar detectors should be able to receive. If a transciever (a small dish with an active emitter) were to leak enough RFI to set off
Re:Watch out, speeders! (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Radar detectors are illegal in Canada. I don't think our CRTC (Canadian FCC equivalent) recognises the frequency wavelength as commerically viable in that capactiy. (i'm guessing here).
2) For a country that covers such a large landmass, satellite based internet access is HUGE. Something like 80% of Canada's population is spread across a 100km deep band bordering the US. DSL, Cable, T1/3s etc are readily accessible to these people. However, for the rest of Canada, internet access is a biatch. In many circumstances, some communities will be getting high-speed internet access before a phone line. (e.g. Nunavut)
Re:Watch out, speeders! (Score:2, Interesting)
This is misleading. Radar detectors are completely legal in BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan. Only Manitoba and Ontario ban them outright.
Re:Watch out, speeders! (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, someone is probably working on a radar detector detector detector...
Re:Watch out, speeders! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Watch out, speeders! (Score:2)
With a laptop, solar panel, sleeping bag + tent, GPS etc, I wouldnt need human interaction at all, well, maybe to hang around the locals learning Inuktitut while on my photography trips.
Heck, to be honest, I'd pay $120 if I can blog my way to the pole.
Oh dear.... (Score:5, Funny)
High speed? (Score:2)
Depends whether you class high-speed as only meaning high bandwidth, as I'd expect ping times to be slow on such a service.
Re:High speed? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, daahhh!!!! For the signal to get from Earth-Satellite-ISP-InternetSite-ISP-Satellite-Ea r th will be about a second.
To be in geostationary orbit, you need to get to 36,000km above the earth. Since lightspeed is 300,000km/s and you need to travel the Satellite-Earch route 4 times (you to internet and then internet to you), that means the total distance is at least ~144,000km. S
Re:High speed? (Score:2)
It would still be fast enough to go for a Slashdot pirst fost if you are that way inclined.
Re:High speed? (Score:2)
Re:High speed? (Score:2)
---
Pinging google.com [216.239.39.99] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 216.239.39.99: bytes=32 time=186ms TTL=236
Reply from 216.239.39.99: bytes=32 time=165ms TTL=236
Reply from 216.239.39.99: bytes=32 time=155ms TTL=236
Reply from 216.239.39.99: bytes=32 time=159ms TTL=236
Ping statistics for 216.239.39.99:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 155ms, Maximum = 186ms, Average = 166ms
---
I'm inclin
DIRECTV (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.high-speed-internet-access-guide.com/n
Re:DIRECTV (Score:2)
I don't see how this is really different from DirecTV's offering.
Nice but... (Score:2, Interesting)
I am seriously interested.
Can I get the earth station gear in PCMCIA format?
If so, will there be an OSX/Linux/*BSD/Solaris driver?
If this service is accessible while mobile, I am getting rid of my voice line and DSL link.
At $60/month for wireless broadband, that's a hell of a lot cheaper than what telus mobility was offering last time I checked.
Admittedly it would be latent as hell... but I can live with that...
Re:Nice but... (Score:2)
Seriously, I think they will have all of that in hardware that you buy. You will probably just get a regular ethernet gateway. So if you have drivers for your NIC, you will probably be able to use the service. Hell, they don't want people hacking their satellite now, right? So they cannot have *anything* on the computer end.
The latency *has* to be at least 500ms (light speed constraint and all :).
Re:Nice but... (Score:2)
By way of Comparison (Score:5, Informative)
Its already available in the U.S. (Score:2, Informative)
These systems are widely used by Gas Stations (Chevron), and retailers for inventory/accounting/etc to the central office.
I was forced do go with the Echostar solution until my are
Recall Iridium (Score:5, Interesting)
The Iridium project was started with a similar goal in mind: to give cellular phone access to anywhere around the globe. Given the cost of launching the satellites (and the phones themselves, which were about 10 times larger than regular cellular phones), Iridium lost a lot of customers who realized that worldwide cellular access simply wasn't worth the price and the equipment size. Except for a few truly adventurous types, nobody signed up.
This project has a noble goal, but I think that it has the same destiny as Iridium. $60/month is more than anyone currently pays for DSL, and save for those few people who really need high speed access in rural areas (I suspect there aren't a lot of people there that can't survive off of dialup), there really is no market for their product/service.
Re:Recall Iridium (Score:4, Insightful)
Now certainly, the prices of airtime and equipment will keep the general public from adopting this, but the ability to make a phone call from anywhere on the planet is very valuable to some people. Think about people who sail across the ocean, or who's job sends them to lots of remote places.
The original Iridium company probably overestimated the market for their product, but now that another company was able to get into the business at a greatly reduced expense, it seems like a useful and viable business model to me.
Also, the cost of sending up this *one* communications sattelite for broadband is tremendously cheaper than the cost of putting up the *72* sattelite constellation that Iridium uses (66 active plus 6 in-orbit backups).
Re:Recall Iridium (Score:2, Informative)
Using standard TCP/IP is a non starter. But while this is a technical problem, Iridium was more of a business problem, too expensive to launch 66 sats for what a few people would pay. If it had got to millions of users, then it might have worked. It was a phone service not a Data service.
The econo
Re:Recall Iridium (Score:2)
All the existing satellite folks are using methods to overcome TCP/IP's limitations [nwfusion.com] in the high latency satellite environment.
(That's not a particularly good article in terms of getting details right, but it's an okay overview)
- Peter
Re:Recall Iridium (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Recall Iridium (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but anyone that gets real DSL access, ie >= 750 upload, no PPPoE, a handful of static IPs, no restrictions on any kind of server (as long as it's not deemed abusive) is easily ~$60. You can keep your SBC "DSL" with its dynamic IPs and peer disconnects at regular intervals.
Re:Recall Iridium (Score:2)
I wouldn't be so sure. There is a BIG demand for broadband access in rural areas. When I worked tech support for a major Canadian ISP, we recieved a *LOT* of calls from rural people wondering when and if broadband would be available in their area.
In fact, one could argue that there may be a
Re:Recall Iridium (Score:2)
Despite the weak interest, I ended up just signing up for a T1 anyway, splitting the cost with my dad's business which is next door. I figure it is cheaper than moving into town. I might still try again, somehow tweak my promotion, but I need to experiment and
What about latency? (Score:5, Informative)
Another problem, Ka band has high losses in rain. May work for Phoenix, may not work for Portland.
Re:What about latency? (Score:5, Informative)
I've used satellite connections, and they are just fine. You get used to the latency, especially if you have a lot of bandwidth (say, 8 Mb/s). VoIP over satellite is awkward at first, but I understand you get used to it after a while.
As far as rain fade, modern satellite systems adapt power output for attenuation due to weather. What works in Phoenix *will* work in Portland.
Yeah - until you do SSL (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem, as I understand it, is that encryption protocols tend to be very "chatty", sending keys back and forth, and that this forces them to be high latency.
Re:What about latency? (Score:5, Informative)
uhmmm.... no. Have you heard of TCP's 'sliding window'? TCP doesn't just send one packet and wait for its response before sending another, etc.... after your connection is established, if packets are not dropped, more and more packets are sent at once before their ACKs are received. There can be up to n packets 'in the network' at once, where n is the dynamically determined window size.
Will you still have huge latency? Of course. But UDP will fare little better than TCP, and your bandwidth may still be appropriate for those ISOs.
Re:What about latency? (Score:2)
UDP would be a better protocol for satellite links
How so? UDP is, as the name says, unreliable. That means that in order to get reliable communications, you either have to use forward error correction, which will cut your net bandwidth dramatically (since forward error correction is just fancy ways of sending all of your data multiple times), or implement a system of acknowledgements. Maybe with a dynamically-sized sliding window?
TCP is actually amazingly resilient in the face of widely varying cond
Re:What about latency? (Score:2)
IAAESISC (I am an engineer specialized in satellite communications). You are right, we use FEC in sat links. However, forward error correction is *not* just a fancy way of
Re:What about latency? (Score:2)
However, forward error correction is *not* just a fancy way of sending data multiple times. It was first demonstrated theoretically by Claude Shannon, in 1946 IIRC, that it's possible to create a coding system that gives high reliability without infinite redundancy.
Yes, I'm well aware of Shannon's work. FEC, however, is pretty much what I said. It's a mechanism for using redundancy (though finite, and much less than might naively be thought) to ensure that the data can be reconstructed even in the pres
Re:What about latency? (Score:2)
You are correct, of course. I actually knew that, but I've been calling it Unreliable Datagram Protocol for so long that it slipped my mind. Maybe I shouldn't encourage others to think the same thing, because people tend to assume that "Unreliable" is derogatory, rather than just descriptive.
Thanks for the correction.
Windowing (Score:4, Informative)
Instead, the sender starts sending packets, and will send some number N packets before requiring an ACK. The receiver will NOT ack each and every packet, but rather it acks groups of packets.
For example, the sender might start with a window of 100 packets - it will send 100 packets before pausing for an ack. The receiver might ack the first packet, then ack packet 10 (implicitly acking packets 2-9), then packet 50, then packet 100. Upon receiving the ack for packet 10, the sender might increase its window size to 1000 packets.
Thus, unless the delay*bandwidth product is HUGE, the data will keep streaming until either a) there is a NACK due to corruption of a packet or b) the job is done.
So for non-interactive moving of freight like BIG FTP transfers (downloading an
However, interactive operations like browsing suck because you pay the startup penalty for each HTTP request. However, modern browsers have HTTP pipelining, wherein the broswer can open the connection, request the main document, then, as the document comes in and is parsed, send additional requests (for images, etc.) without closing the connection and before the main document has been fully retrieved, thus burying the cost of the startup in the transfer.
However, this is less effective with everybody and their dog's website putting images on a seperate server, thus requiring a second channel to be opened.
Great (Score:2)
Sweet (Score:5, Informative)
Oh well, Canada again pioneering the way of the *non-military* satellites (first commercial geostationary communication satellite was by Telesat Canada as well :)
For cities, like Toronto, this will do absolutely nothing since they already have a few MBps though DSL/Cable.
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
So the old saying is true: Its better to be latent than never.
Re:Sweet (Score:2)
Satellite is far cheaper than pulling cable all the way to the US/Europe.
Re:Sweet (Score:2)
FYI, Ariane is a goddess of fertility. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:FYI, Ariane is a goddess of fertility. (Score:2)
2004 the year of Ka-band (Score:2)
Not for everyone, but... (Score:2)
Satellite is not that bad. (Score:2, Interesting)
However for "normal" web surfing it is quite usiable. Over the past few years, caching techniques for satellite have improved. There are multi levels of caching available depending on what unit you have installed at your home or off
Re:Satellite is not that bad. (Score:3, Informative)
Because the satellite combines packets into larger frames then net effect is that web pages then come back in a similar time across satellite to DSL. The difference is that with a satellite the page will then tend to
Satellite Internet-my love for you is like a truck (Score:4, Insightful)
120ms for a one-way trip (@ ~36,000km orbit)
However, if the _bandwidth_ is high enough (say, that of a semi-truck or 747 packed with DVDs) and we had a decent (and easy to use) QoS system available, this could make a nice addition to your existing DSL/cable connection.
Use DSL/cable to start a transfer, system recognizes that it's one gigantic file transfer and moves it over to the satellite network.
Re:Satellite Internet-my love for you is like a tr (Score:2)
Don't we already have this (Score:3, Informative)
Mobile Wireless Broadband? (Score:2)
Competition in Satellite Internet (Score:3, Informative)
Don't confuse Ka-band (Kurtz-above band) with Ku-band (Kurtz-under band). Ku-band has already been in use for satellite Internet for some time now through (awful) services like StarBand and DIRECWAY, and is also widely used for digital TV broadcasts. Amazingly, even C-band Internet service is available [cband.net]. C-band service requires a much bigger dish, but in some areas this is the best (or only) broadband option. Ka-band service may change that for certain regions of Canada.
I wonder if owners of big dishes will be able to modify them to handle Ka-band Internet. It would probably be inconvenient to share if you want TV as well, but merely adding the decoding module would be trivial if they released a kit. It's already relatively simple to add support for new kinds of services, such as 4DTV [4dtv.com].
Anik-F2 images here (Score:2)
What's so special about this? (Score:2)
Why not southern ehmisphere as well? (Score:2)
Norstar (Score:3, Interesting)
Ariane 5? (Score:2)
Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
But, you have to be in their service area [thaicom.net].
I'm wrong, too: 8Mb/s down, 4 Mb/s up (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No thanks. (Score:4, Informative)
Couple points:
Advertised rates are 750k down, 128k up. Yes, slightly over $100/mo is what that costs. Are any frame-relay or ISDN services much less than that?
The worst part is there's no way around the time it takes the signal to travel the 88,000 miles to and from the satellite TWICE to get a packet to the internet and back. Right around 500ms latency, minimum.
So, if it's "cheaper to have ISDN or Frame relay" then by all means... but it is NOT cheaper in many, many areas of the US. In some more rural areas, you just can't get any high-speed services at all. The rural telco will just laugh at you, or offer you $1000/month prices. (To their defense, if you're many many miles from the nearest CO, building a T1 out to you costs BIG BUCKS for them)
It all depends where you live.
Cool thing: Starband [starband.com] is offering a self-pointing dish system [starband.com] for mobile homes etc. Try getting frame-relay to a moving target!
What I'm looking forward to is more constellation-based low-orbit satellite systems with higher bandwidth. Latency is much less of a problem, with orbits of 300 miles instead of 22000. But the economics of such a system just doesn't quite work yet. (Think of the problems Iridium has had)
- Peter
Re:Upload (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Upload (Score:5, Informative)
The killer for satellite network access is latency. A typical DSL line has about a 20ms round trip (time for a packet to go from your network to the ISP network and back). If you lived on the equator directly under the satellite (and assuming the satellite adds no latency), you've just added 480ms to the round trip time. Move off the equator and to a different longitude, and latency gets even higher. This kills anything interactive (gaming, VOIP, telnet/SSH) and causes trouble for anything using TCP (window scaling wasn't expected to handle half second round trips).
What is done in some cases is to use special hardware on each end that adjusts TCP to better handle the latency. Also, I've heard some talk about putting caching servers on the satellites (so web access that hits the cache doesn't have to go up and down twice), but I don't know if anyone is doing that.
Re:Upload (Score:5, Informative)
But if you have a system of non-stationary satellites (like the 'Iridium' project), only a few msec will be added by satellite access.
One problem with Iridium (Score:2)
Re:One problem with Iridium (Score:4, Interesting)
But Iridium's bandwidth is very low -- about 2400 bps. Low-earth-orbit satellites have less latency, of course, but the cost of bandwidth turns out to be a problem. Especially if you have to pay full price for them, vs. getting them as bankruptcy assets. Geostationary satellite turns out to be cheaper.
Re:It should read (Score:4, Interesting)
Cheers!
Erick
Re:Low Cost Data Centre (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Ariane launch (Score:3, Informative)
Regretfully true, for that thing... Anyone know why they chose Ariane to launch this, as opposed to Titan or Proton? Cheapest option, maybe? - because it can't have been the reliability record.
Re:Ariane launch (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"Universal" (Score:2)
If there are stories on Europe (think: Software Patents) then anyone 'daring to point out' that Europe is 'in fact, not the centre of the Universe' would be:
a) incorrect
b) flamebait
This story is about Canada and point b) applies there as well.
Quite apart from that, I thought I read that only Canada and some of the more northerly US states would be covered by this - not the 'whole of N America'.