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The Internet Communications Space

Ariane Launches A New Way To Get Online 260

Posted by timothy from the please-start-this-one-up-quick dept.
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)."
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Ariane Launches A New Way To Get Online More

Ariane Launches A New Way To Get Online

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  • Shared bandwidth? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 18, 2004 @01:53PM (#9731828)
    How much bandwidth do they have? It seems like eventually they'll oversubscribe and people will simply be better off with dialup.

    • Re:Shared bandwidth? (Score:2, Informative)

      by kristofme ( 791986 )
      Was asking myself the same question; the only information I could find was on the ariannespace website [arianespace.com]: "It uses the Boeing 702 satellite bus and carries a mixed payload of 32 Ku-band transponders, 38 Ka-band transponders and 24 C-band transponders."
      I imagine it's impressive, considering its size (48 metres solar array!)..
      • According to what I've been told the Ka-band is capable of trasmitting and recieving as much data as a standard OC-192, which makes it the largest satellite throughput I've ever heard of..of course, its up to the 'customer' on how much bandwidth and time they buy on the satellite.... So, it's gonna be interesting to see what happens with this one
    • Bandwidth is already limited on existing (Directway) satellite internet systems by d/l limitations. Pull down your whole quota and the system slows you down to 56k . . . last I heard from a friend that had Directway, the quota works is like a bucket with a hole in the bottom. The hole in the bottom drains at 128kbps and the fillstream at the top runs a 56k. You can d/l at full 128kbps until the bucket empties . . . then you drain the bucket as fast as it fills (56k) until you stop using the system and allow
  • I still get my internet access at 1200 baud via Sputnik, tovarishi.

  • Monetary conversion (Score:4, Informative)

    by sstidman ( 323182 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @01:57PM (#9731859) Journal
    $60 Canadian is about $46 US Dollars, in case anyone wanted to know. If the latency is good (which it likely won't be), this might not be a bad broadband option.
    • Actually, the huge advantage is that the satelite can cover areas that no other broadband access could reach (such as the northern regions of Canada, Alaska and all those small towns no company considered implementing infrastructure as a valuable solution.

    • Latency is sure to sux0r (Score:5, Interesting)

      by YankeeInExile ( 577704 ) * on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:13PM (#9731962) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • There is just no way around that 75,000 km round trip.

        Sure there is . . . we can call it a 45,000 mile round trip. It's sounding better already.

      • The physical minimum latency for a geosync sattelite (at an altitude of 22,300 miles) is 120ms [google.com], if anyone is interested. Of couse, you'd double that for an actual ping, since the signal has to go both up and back.

        • 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)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Except that the request packet travels 44,600 miles, and then the return data travels another 44,600 miles.

          Ie:
          home->sat->isp->sat->home == 480ms.
      • 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.

        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'

    • Man, I'm paying $65CDN/mo for cable as it is (though that includes television & internet). I don't watch much television; if this is significantly faster than cable, I'd actually be saving money on a faster connection.

      Only downside being latency, but I'm not much of a gamer so that's not a huge issue.

  • Watch out, speeders! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chairboy ( 88841 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @01:58PM (#9731865) Homepage
    > the Ka-band technology

    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.
    • That is a really good question. Will this interfere with radar detectors. I understand that maybee the satellite broadcast isn't strong enough, but what about someone's base-station? Does anyone actually know?
      • From the Telsat site:
        "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)

      by Ubergrendle ( 531719 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:07PM (#9731928) Journal
      Two things:

      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)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Radar detectors are illegal in Canada.
        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)

        by prof_peabody ( 741865 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:18PM (#9731995)
        Radar detectors are NOT illegal in Canada. It is only illegal to operate one in your vehicle while driving. You can still buy them at car audio stores all over Canada. The RCMP and other police agencies have radar detector detectors (which are very expensive so there are only a few of them on the road).

        Yes, someone is probably working on a radar detector detector detector... ;-)
        • Ironically enough these have been out for a few years now. My 2 year old radar detector detects X, Ka, K bands as well as laser and VG2. VG2 is what cops use to tell if you are using a radar detector or not. Around Columbus OH, some of the police radars actually include VG2 detection even though radar detectors are perfectly legal here. My radar detector automatically shuts it self off for a couple of minutes if it detects VG2.
      • $60 sounds good, I'll take it if it works close to and beyond the Arctic circle. I've always wanted to build myself an igloo in Salikiluaq, Salluit or somewhere on Baffin Island even. I'm a sucker for remote Canadian wilderness, but my IT job forbids travel.

        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)

    by Scrab ( 573004 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:04PM (#9731909)
    I just felt a distubance in the force. Like a million canada jokes, all shouted out loud,and were suddenly silenced...
  • Apparently, this should make high speed access available anywhere in North America.

    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)

      by gnuman99 ( 746007 )
      Depends whether you class high-speed as only meaning high bandwidth, as I'd expect ping times to be slow on such a service.

      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

      • In other words: lousy for online games where reaction times count, but adequate for most other purposes and certainly far better than a modem.

        It would still be fast enough to go for a Slashdot pirst fost if you are that way inclined.
        • Online games, irc, ssh, vnc. Sure, most people don't connect to their home computer when they're away... but a couple of years ago most people didn't download mp3s either.
        • I am on 33.6k (on a good day) dial-up:

          ---
          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)

    by jamesl ( 106902 )
    Similar to the current offering from DIRECTWAY and DIRECTV?
    http://www.high-speed-internet-access-guide.com/na tionwide-satellite.html [high-speed...-guide.com]

  • Nice but... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bastardadmin ( 660086 )
    ...is there a link out there to any info about the broadband service?
    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...
    • If so, will there be an OSX/Linux/*BSD/Solaris driver?

      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 :).

    • They have had sattelite broadband for a long time. I don't understand why everyone is excited about this. It is nothing new.

  • By way of Comparison (Score:5, Informative)

    by Quirk ( 36086 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:07PM (#9731929) Homepage Journal
    Cable in Canada runs about $45.00/mo. The modem can be bought for about $60.00 bundled with the service.

  • Its already available in the U.S. (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Echostar, DirectWay, and StarBand ( http://www.starband.com/ [starband.com] all have two way broadband available in the US. Echostar charges $500 for equipment and $65/mo. They use compression and a modified ip stack to get you ~1Mbit down and ~64Kbit up for HTTP and FTP protocols. Bypassing their ip stack gets you ~56Kbit down and ~128Kbit up.

    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)

    by bobhagopian ( 681765 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:11PM (#9731948)
    I have serious doubts about the success of this project. Does anybody remember Iridium? Their satellites are still in orbit, and pretty much all they do now is reflect sunlight.

    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)

      by Sokie ( 60732 ) <jesse AT edgefactor DOT com> on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:28PM (#9732049)
      Actually, since another company bought up the Iridium sattelite fleet at a bargain price, they are doing much more than reflect sunlight. Anybody can go buy an Iridium phone for a little over a grand and purchase either prepaid minutes or subscribe to a monthly plan.

      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)

      by fireshipjohn ( 20951 )
      The difference here is that Iridium was in Low Earth Orbit (780Km), and would allow short delays, this is in Geostationary orbit (36000Km) so you get delays in the order of 1/2 second, for every packet handshake.

      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:3, Informative)

      by timeOday ( 582209 )
      Unlike this project, iridium wasn't a satellite. It was a constellation of satellites - 66 satellites + 14 spares! [iridium.com]. Just think of the difference in costs. Service isn't $60USD, it's $60CAN. You could hardly say "hello" to your Mother for that much at Iridium's initial asking price. As for rural folk not "really needing" Internet, well none of us does, but we pay through the nose anyways. I live in a city of 500,000 people where DSL is not available in my neighborhood, and cable costs almost the same

    • Re:Recall Iridium (Score:3, Insightful)

      by lidocaineus ( 661282 )
      $60/month is more than anyone currently pays for DSL...

      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.
    • ...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.

      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
      • Different rural regions may have different responses, but I went door-to-door asking people if they were interested in high speed internet. I even tried to sell it as a way to be online without tying up a phone line. I only got maybe 5% interest.

        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)

    by mangu ( 126918 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:12PM (#9731954)
    TCP/IP sucks for satellite links. The need for ACK packets means that each packet takes 550 milliseconds to arrive. UDP would be a better protocol for satellite links, but would the applications be able to handle UDP? Satellites are better suited to broadcasting, not two-way internet.


    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)

      by Tony ( 765 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:38PM (#9732103) Journal
      Good points; however, with a proxy TCP stack providing increased TCP buffer sizes at the gateway, and gateway-side ACKs, along with other [ietf.org] methods, TCP over satellite is not only possible, but practical.

      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)

        by Fished ( 574624 )
        The protocol stack options are great, but they don't generally work for anything encrypted. That specifically includes IP/SEC, SSH, and SSL. So, it's not too bad for standard browsing, but sucks when you need to access your bank account or use a VPN.

        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)

      by Zamfi ( 127584 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:42PM (#9732122)

      TCP/IP sucks for satellite links. The need for ACK packets means that each packet takes 550 milliseconds to arrive. UDP would be a better protocol for satellite links, but would the applications be able to handle UDP? Satellites are better suited to broadcasting, not two-way internet.


      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.

    • 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

      • 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?

        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

        • 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

    • Windowing (Score:4, Informative)

      by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @05:28PM (#9733315) Homepage Journal
      You don't seem to understand the idea of TCP ACK windowing - you DON'T ack each packet.

      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 .ISO image, for example) the latency is a non-issue.

      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.
  • Is this another reason for our revnue-ehancement troops (highway patrol) to continue their move to lidar speed traps rather than the standard KA band radar?

  • Sweet (Score:5, Informative)

    by gnuman99 ( 746007 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:13PM (#9731963)
    For those that don't know, most of Canada has average population density of less than 1 person per sq. km. This satellite is going to bring internet to everyone, including those spending the summer at the cottage (could be 100s of km from other people and phone lines). This connection could even provide VoIP, though latency might be noticable (better than no phone though!)

    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)

      by frank249 ( 100528 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:17PM (#9731984)
      This connection could even provide VoIP, though latency might be noticable (better than no phone though!)

      So the old saying is true: Its better to be latent than never.
    • Uh? Most of the developing world is behind satellite gateways already. Canada isn't pioneering anything.

      Satellite is far cheaper than pulling cable all the way to the US/Europe.
    • So....how do the people in this sparsly populated area with no phone lines find out about this service?

  • FYI, Ariane is a goddess of fertility. (Score:3, Informative)

    by kyknos.org ( 643709 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:13PM (#9731966) Homepage
    Her name comes from the French spelling of Ariadne - an old goddess of fertility form Crete and Mistress of the Labyrinth. In later Greek mythology, Ariadne's divine origins were submerged and she became known as the daughter of King Minos of Crete, who conquered Athens after his son was murdered there.
  • Knowing nothing about Ka-band I ran a search. According to a Jan 03 article [www.gcis.ca] this year will see the first implementations of ka-band with North America leading the way. from the article: "Nour said it is expected that first implementations will be seen in 2004. For example, SpaceWay, owned by Hughes Networks Systems, based in Germantown, Md., a division of Hughes Electronics Corp, plans to launch Ka-band that year. And WildBlue, based in Greenwood Village, Co., plans to jump into the industry at the same tim
  • Having just finished a stint working with a rock and roll concert tour in which nearly every waking moment was spent in a venue and nearly every non-waking moment on a travelling bus, AND, having been ill-prepared for the connectivity issues I would encounter while on this tour (it's easy to get 'net in a hotel while on the road, but what if you're never in hotels?!), I can honestly say that I'd be very interested in any technology that was a) mobile (PCMCIA or CF format?!) and b) available anywhere in Nort
  • I have worked closely with Telesat in Canada and have been testing hardware such as this over the past few years for my company and dealerships. It is true that satellite Internet has horrible ping times and as such is not suitable for Internet gaming where latency is important.

    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
    • For web browsing the trick is simply to set your browser to retrieve a lot of items in parallel rather than a smaller number serially. By default browsers are set to pull back only a few items at a time (IE and Firefox are both 4) but for a satellite connection this needs upping to 30 or so.

      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
  • While satellite Internet sounds attractive on the surface, the speed of light mocks you and your attempt at moving data with any reasonable respect for latency.

    120ms for a one-way trip (@ ~36,000km orbit) .. Your data has to get there and back, meaning 240ms minimum to your gateway. Include the reality of equipment inefficiencies and the average latency of actually accessing something across the Internet and you're reaching 400ms before you know it. A decent modem/PPP connection can get you to 80-120ms.

    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.

  • Don't we already have this (Score:3, Informative)

    by mysterious_mark ( 577643 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:43PM (#9732133)
    Seems like all of North America is already covered with data service resold through vendors such as Star Band, the satellite is geo-synchronis, so the packet round trip would exceed 700 ms, this amount of latency is a big problem for gaming, VOIP etc., I don't reaaly see how this new satellite brings any new type of service since you can already get internet and data via geo satellites almost everywhere in the northern hemisphere. Mark
  • Otherwise it doens't make a great deal of economic sense.

  • Competition in Satellite Internet (Score:3, Informative)

    by base_chakra ( 230686 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @02:59PM (#9732267)
    WildBlue [wildblue.com] promises similar service (1.5Mbps down, 256Kbps up) for 2005, but it looks like Telesat/Viasat [telesat.ca] might beat them to the punch.

    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].
  • On the Telesat [telesat.ca] website.
  • New satellites are launched all the time [lyngsat.com]. Is it because it's an internet-only communications satellite? Eutelsat already launched one: e-BIRD at 33 deg. E [eutelsat.com].
  • Since the satellite is necessarily in a geostationary orbit, that means it is directly above the equator (longitude=111.1 degrees). So why are they not covering the Southern hemisphere as well? I suppose the reason is that the antennas are directional, and pointed up North.

  • Norstar (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Sunday July 18, 2004 @05:50PM (#9733473) Homepage Journal
    This is a lot like the first Ka-band satellite licensed: Norstar [lta.com]. That satellite was licensed in 1992 and had spot-beams for frequency reuse, two-way digital communications, etc. Due to some funding problems with the business, it was never launched but it did have basically all the attributes of the Milstar satellite (and the upcoming ACT satellite which NASA launched on the Space Shuttle in contravention to the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 requiring them to use commercial launch services wherever possible as an incentive [slashdot.org] for commercialization of launch services).
  • Shouldn't they be on Ariane 6 [umn.edu] now? Or did they put Humpty-Dumpty back together?

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