Europe Gets Pay-As-You-Go Satellite Broadband 58
judgecorp writes "Europe is set to get pay-as-you-go high speed satellite broadband from Avanti's Ka-band HYLAS1 satellite in the 26.5 — 40GHz range. Avanti says satellite broadband services have improved massively including a far better uplink than used to be available, though the round-trip latency can't be improved much." Conspicuously missing: the actual price.
It's probably worth pointing out... (Score:5, Informative)
... that there are companies in the UK and EU who have been doing satellite broadband for over a decade now, with both flat-rate and pay-as-you-go billing.
This is *one* company that has started to provide it, nothing particularly new here.
Re:Conspicuously missing: the actual price (Score:5, Informative)
Cost not listed because it's a wholesale provider (Score:2, Informative)
B2C is handled by various European ISPs reselling the service at different prices. For example, Broadband-Portugal [broadband-portugal.com] sells 1GB tokens, which are valid 30 days, for 15 EUR. Primesatellitebroadband [primesatel...adband.com] offers subscription plans where add-on gigabytes cost £7.20 (about 9 EUR). There are other satellite operators which offer broadband internet access over a bidirectional satellite link.
The latency... (Score:4, Informative)
...makes these services next to useless, especially now that the web isn't just a bunch of static pages anymore. I was using satellite broadband a few years ago, in rural Australia - it was barely better than the dialup line it replaced. We only took it up because the line quality on the dialup degraded to such a state that it couldn't stay online for longer than twenty minutes, and Telstra were incapable of fixing it.
Only low-orbit satellites are going to be able to make satellite-broadband useful.