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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
i wonder what our great leaders grand plan is, maybe they would like to re-instate slavery or something similar again. Sure looks like it's going down that way
Just watch out for Wimax (Score:1)
It will be ubiqitous by 2009.
Posted from my Iridium Satellite Connection.
Sounds like just the ticket (Score:5, Interesting)
for Navy buckets operating out of normal, unrestricted hardline/line-of-sight microwave/wifi ranges.
NATO have already approved Avanti satellite uplinks for operational use [avantiplc.com].
Re:Conspicuously missing: the actual price (Score:5, Insightful)
T-mobile USA calls their prepaid plans "Pay-as-you-go", so it might also mean the service is prepaid (like you buy a certain number of GBs in advance)
Re: (Score:2)
T-mobile USA calls their prepaid plans "Pay-as-you-go", so it might also mean the service is prepaid (like you buy a certain number of GBs in advance)
Sounds about right. In Australia the telco's have something called a "capped plan". One would think that a "cap" is something that reflects the maximum amount you spend each month, but it's actually the minimum you spend each month.
In retrospect though, "pay-as-you-go" does sound like it is more likely to be a prepaid plan... my bad.
Re:Conspicuously missing: the actual price (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
it can mean both things.
in this case it's named as data-usage-basis, which might mean both as well. however paying per gb is the norm for many satellite services since they were made available, which could lead to very, very high charges if someone left streaming on.
so this is a service which enables to make limits.
“Some users may wish to limit their exposure to bill shock, yet still have a need for high speed service upon demand without being subject to traffic management policies. Our service allow
Re: (Score:3)
Well, the actual price would be about 15,- euro per 1GB if you can believe their reseller at http://www.europe-satellite.com/EMS/webshop/online_tooken01.htm [europe-satellite.com]. But Avanti is not the first, Tooway has been providing a similar service for several years now.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the actual price would be about 15,- euro per 1GB if you can believe their reseller at http://www.europe-satellite.com/EMS/webshop/online_tooken01.htm [europe-satellite.com]. But Avanti is not the first, Tooway has been providing a similar service for several years now.
Full disclosure: I useTooway [toowaydirect.com]. I use it because I'm off-grid, so land-line based solutions are impossible, and it's a lot cheaper than a terrestrial microwave relay. And actually, I think for anyone in a remote rural area who needs decent bandwidth, it's a good solution even if they do have a landline. But ping times are long so you aren't going to play multiplayer games, and I find that skype audio (but interestingly not video) is unacceptably poor. It's also more expensive that people in cities pay for ban
Re: (Score:3)
That's actually significantly cheaper than roaming charges on 3G, which are usually about 1.50/MB (MB, not GB) or about 1500 eur per GB. So satellite internet is actually two orders of magnitude cheaper than 3G roaming!
Re: (Score:2)
Pay-Through-The-Nose Satellite Broadband (Score:2)
Buying in bulk is usually cheaper than getting nickel-and-dimed to death with most stuff. Look at your supermarket per unit prices for King Size, Family Size and Holy Roman Empire Size packages. I'd rather see the service offered with daily, weekly, monthly flat rates instead of the old telephone pay-per-call system.
But I guess telephone companies like that system, because they ended up charging more for service than for flat rates.
Re: (Score:2)
Why not have a cable meter, 25 cents per hour per channel. A family watching 4 hours/night = $1 per day, 8 hours = $2 etc etc.
Modern metering can easily do this
Cost? (Score:1)
Only $50/GB. Plus 4 pints of blood from your firstborn.
LEO or GEO (Score:2, Interesting)
Where are the satellites, LEO or GEO ?
I'm guessing GEO so ping times sux
(Oh I spose I should clarify - LEO = Low Earth orbit - no more that a couple of hundred miles up. GEO = Geostationary - up at 25000 miles so it stays in the sameplace relative to the ground.)
Re: (Score:2)
they're comsats with personal or base uplinks, so they'll be GEO. Right now, from what I've read, they're only offering contracts to military contractors and service providers. The PAYG service won't be going live until after the orbital testing on their second bird is complete at the end of August.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
3 second pings dont matter at all. 99% of us that do real things with the internet connectivity are not FPS gaming.
When I am uploading 20gig of photos I dont care about ping, but then I make money using it.
Now the Financial FPS games called day trading, I think they would hate 3 second pings. That might be a cool torture device for a financial trader... your order to sell showed up 5 seconds too late.... you will re-spawn in 5....4....3...2...
Re: (Score:2)
Google [google.com] says it's 0.238584003 light-seconds... not that heavy, I suppose.
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.
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.
If you have to ask (Score:2)
You can't afford it.
Re: (Score:2)
I wish we could get that here in the USA. (Score:2)
Yes 3G 4G "broadband" is in a lot of places, but I wish I could get heughes net for just one month or even 1 week when I need it at a event. This weekend I had Verizon and their "superior" network.... that did not work... ZERO bandwidth with a crowd of only 125,000 Verizon utterly sucks. I had to switch to the wife's AT&T iphone and illigimately tether, and then hit the freaking data cap and slowdown to 28.8 dialup you get to enjoy.
A nice dish pointing at the sky would have solved that.
Directional or omnidirectional antenna? (Score:1)
Mobile use, particularly at sea tends to involve omnidirectional antennas. Directional, gyro corrected antennas are very expensive and large.
Can this service tally with a handheld sat phone for lower speeds? I would hazard a guess of a yes but I've never found any info on this...
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, there are maritime satellite services but they are nicely segregated into "it's cheaper to buy your own airplane than to use satphone" category.
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.
Round-trip latency (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They will also have to add this same ability to the satellite so it can track base stations.
Sounds a bit messy.
Re: (Score:2)
Round-trip latency can definitely be improved. It just means using LEO satellites instead of GEO.
Or just use thousands of UAVs.