O3b Launches Four More Satellites To Bring Internet To 'Other 3 Billion' 80
An anonymous reader writes "O3b Networks is aiming to provide internet access through satellite, to the "other three billion" people in under-served equatorial regions (Africa, the Pacific, South America). O3b launched four more satellites [Thursday], to add to the four they already have in orbit. This is a very international effort; a Russian Soyuz rocket went up from South America, carrying satellites built in France. There's a video of the rocket and payloads coming together and a video of the rocket launch. There's also an academic paper describing using the O3b system from the Cook Islands in the Pacific, giving an idea of what it does and those all-important ping times."
Ping (Score:2)
Please put ping time in summary when posting satellite internet stories. I'm not here to RTFA.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
.15s between ground nodes, or 150ms. So a traditional ping would be about 300ms round trip.
Re:Throughput? (Score:4, Informative)
Good question. According to their FAQ [o3bnetworks.com] their satellites will be capable of delivering "gigabytes of capacity". Obviously that would be split among individual beams, and sliced up into smaller pieces for individual service providers and again for individual people. It is based on the Ka-Band which currently supports about 500 megabits per beam (with multiple beams).
Re:Throughput? (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia says 12Gbit total per satellite: O3b (satellite) [wikipedia.org]
Not enough for 3 billion people.
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2.6Mb = 325KB = half a web page, not very useful.
100Gb/s / 3 billion = 33b/s or 4 Bytes per second each.
100Gb / 10Mibt = 10,000, factor in 250/1 contention ratio and there's maybe enough bandwidth for 2.5million people, not bad but 99.9% short of 3 billion.
Re:Ping (Score:5, Informative)
The 150 ms / 300 ms round trip was the "simulated" ping time. They ran real ping tests over 24 hours to the most remote coverage location at the Cook Islands. [wikipedia.org]
One was from Surrey, England to the Cook Islands and averaged 570-800ms round trip -- the other was from California, US to the Cook Islands and averaged 420-620ms round trip. These were performed once per second for 24 hours and can be found in Figure 5 of the research paper. [arxiv.org]
Re: (Score:1)
If anyone is curious about this it is in the article.
The article mentions 150ms mean for one-way ground-satellite-ground simulated communications between the Cook Island and the US.
Although Figure 3 and 5 are more concise.
Figure 3 shows:
Ground to satellite communications between 60 and 80 ms, dependent on distance to the nearest satellite.
Ground-satellite-ground communications between 135 and 155 ms, dependent on distance to the nearest satellite.
Figure 5 shows:
A sample data plot shows path delays from the
Once satellite is mentioned (Score:3)
So while you are correct there is probably not a single reader here that needed to be corrected.
Work on that attention span (Score:2)
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Once satellite is mentioned there is no need to mention ping times
Oh ? You don't need to know the orbit, even ?
Ranges from bad to terrible ping times (Score:2)
Nice try at whatever you are attempting to do there, but it is always going to vastly exceed the time going via the much tighter curve of the Earth's surface even if it's as low as Iridium which is about as low as you get for a long term circularish orbit. (Spy sats get lower for short periods but have very elliptical orbits and don't last long).
So to sum up ping times are going to vary from bad (Iridium) to very bad (nearly half way the the moon for geostationa
Re: (Score:2)
Two things:
Iridium orbit is ~780 km. Which means worst case ping times (due to the satellites) should be around 75 ms.
Geostationary orbit is 35786 km up. Lunar orbit is 384400 km up. Note that "less than one tenth" is NOT "nearly halfway".
Triangle (Score:2)
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Note that I was only discussing speed of light lag, not lag caused by archaic hardware and other problems that apply equally well to links NOT using satellites.
In other words, a satellite link should be ~75 ms worse than a wireless link that doesn't go through a satellite.
Assuming satellites using Iridium's orbits, of course. A geosynchrono
Re: (Score:2)
Fair enough - still sounds like it's not the full ping though. Did you only count a one way trip up? How about down to the ground then back up and down again which is what it has to do to reply? It looks like you did not but were pretty quick with the criticism about being sloppy just the same.
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My point stands - if you care about ping times at all then satellites are not on the list unless they are the only thing available. If you don't care much about latency then they are worth considering.
Or you care about latency, and you still want to sell satellite connections, so you just fix the latency issues by improving current substandard technology.
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Until you have an answer my point stands in all cases. When you have an answer it stands in all cases apart from that one.
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Wikipedia to the rescue! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications)
"Latency for data connections is around 1800 ms round-trip, using small packets"
However half way to the moon for a high orbit was a vast exaggeration on my part so sorry about that.
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motive? (Score:1)
These aren't exaclty lucrative potential customers...
Who's paying for this and why?
Re: (Score:1)
The total funding now comprises a US$510m Coface-backed Senior Debt Facility provided by HSBC, ING, CA-CIB and Dexia; a US$115m Senior Debt Facility and a US$145m Mezzanine Facility provided by HSBC Principal Investments, DBSA, AFDB, DEG, Proparco, FMO, IFC and EAIF*; and US$410m in equity financing, of which US$230m is new equity investment.
http://www.o3bnetworks.com/media-centre/press-releases/2010/o3b-networks-raises-total-funding-of-us$12-billion
I do not see governments on that list, those are the peopl
Re: (Score:2)
Re:motive? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:motive? (Score:5, Insightful)
These aren't exaclty lucrative potential customers...
Who's paying for this and why?
Cruise ships. Especially in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, and South China Sea. Two years from now, fast and semi-affordable shipboard internet will be a selling point and competitive advantage. Five years from now, it will be something every ship needs just to be taken seriously.
In Shock (Score:2)
Let's see what happens (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe the other 3 billion will use a near limitless supply of knowledge for something other than watching cat videos.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe the other 3 billion will use a near limitless supply of knowledge for something other than watching cat videos.
Personally I can't wait to hear from the Kazakhstani Prince and the $20 million dollars he's having trouble moving ....
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3 billion more faces in front of ads.
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most without clean drinking water, food, electricity, adequate health-care .... But Hot-Damn, they will be able to search Google!!!!
Jeez!
But enough about Detroit... what about those people in other countries?
This is the first time I've ever seen my homeland (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, I was born and raised in the Cook Islands. How many other Cook islanders are reading Slashdot?
Because of course (Score:2)
The Other 3 billion all have satellite dishes
Re: (Score:1)
O3b's business plan isn't currently about selling satellite dishes to individual subscribers. They plan to offer their service mostly to local internet providers, who would in turn provide local service using other technologies. I don't think it's likely that the local providers will have much interest in doing wired infrastructure; 3G or 4G wireless, or WiFi for smaller areas, are more likely.
Can't eat Internet (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
How about you invest that money in helping people to improve their lives?
That is what they are doing.
the poor will still be fucking poor and in many places starving.
Funny thing about starving, a person can only do it once. The word 'many' indicates the problem will soon solve itself.
Re:Can't eat Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Substitute "books" or a video of "how to get clean water with scrapped parts" for that last word and you'll see what the big deal is.
If you can't get in their shoes think of Hurricane Katrina and how the big deal in the aftermath is the lack of communications that resulted in food rotting when there were plenty of hungry people but the communications to direct the supply efforts were not there.
By investing the money in giving people the ability to talk about how to get rid of local warlords without having to gather in a public place and get hacked to death by machettes - something like this internet thing perhaps?
Re: (Score:2)
You're ignoring my point about the local warlords. They already have money to spend because they take it from whoever they want. The warlords will be the one with the internet, not the civilians who, again, have nothing and will continu
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Yes you can and it's an extremely useful analogy to use when attempting to communicate with people with very low empathy or understanding of anywhere beyond their shores.
Read a book or go back to school before attempting to inflict such ignorance on others.
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Why continue babying you along? (Score:2)
You had your first polite reply, which was ignored, so why complain about someone being blunt enough to get a message across if that's what it takes?
The USA - land of the 1930s dust bowl, obviously no food to distribute so no need for internet - or is it not obvious at all and
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Global control (Score:2)
You're running out of places to hide.
Another bright point to the story (Score:2)
And the launch vehicle burnt up quite spectacularly over the south of Australia recently after it had done it's job.
Thanks - two this week! Who would have thought (Score:2)
Not for home users... (Score:4, Insightful)
From rtfs, it seems o3b is aimed at the ISP market. I think this could be quite neat, they are aiming at being a backbone provider for say a local wireless ISP on a tropical island, this ISP sets up their terrestrial wifi equipment, and sets up a link to o3b for backhaul.
This could transform the competitive landscape in a lot of these places where either a) becoming an ISP means signing a multi-thousands/mo deal with the 1 company that has pulled fiber under the sea for thousands of miles, or b) having no option, because the terrestrial land lines are all owned by the government run telco who has no interest in providing an upstart with bandwidth
Of course, for this utopia of competition to break out, it assumes that o3b will be charging significantly less than whoever has pulled fiber under the sea, and that government regulation in all these countries doesn't simply preclude the business model by granting unlimited monopoly power to the government run telco. I know in the 2 south american countries I've visited this second hurdle is much larger than the first... The government owns the telco, thats the only way to get internet, period.
But assuming I'm wrong about the regulatory landscape, and assuming o3b will have reasonable pricing, it almost becomes interesting to attempt to setup a wifi based ISP in some underserved country...
This is a very international effort: Nope (Score:2)
It's barely more an international effort than when the US launches a US built sat from the Cape on an Atlas V (using Russian RD180s): French Guyana is as much of France as Hawaii is of the US so both the sats & the launch location are French.
But this is a post from Timothy so we all know that accuracy and absence of bias in the extract are too much to expect...
Re: (Score:2)
And aren't all Three Worlds well-covered by Inmarsat's BGAN already?
If by "well-covered" you mean, "100mb of data transfer at speeds comparable to pre-56k dialup for about $450.
Saying "all Three Worlds are well-covered by Inmarsat's BGAN" is kind of like saying, "T-Mobile has excellent coverage in rural America, because GPRS works just about everywhere".