ViaSat Delivers 12 Mbps+ Via Satellite 245
An anonymous reader writes "Last Thursday, ViaSat announced pricing for its new home broadband service, which is set to deliver 12 Mbps+ download speeds (3 Mbps+ up) beginning next week for $50 per month. Engadget just dropped by the company's demo home just a few feet from the Engadget trailer at the Las Vegas Convention Center parking lot to try it out, and posted their review." The comments there, understandably, wail for information about how much data that $50 buys.
lots of land, no line (Score:5, Informative)
Re:lots of land, no line (Score:4, Informative)
Caps can be an issue, but if you are rural these speeds and prices are an instant upgrade.
Yep, with Hughes and WildBlue being around $80/m for 1.5 down these speeds are quite welcome.
Re:lots of land, no line (Score:5, Informative)
ViaSat is actually linking their Via-1 Sartelite with WildBlue so customers of that service should get the better value as soon as this goes live.
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ViaSat is actually linking their Via-1 Sartelite with WildBlue so customers of that service should get the better value as soon as this goes live.
I would imagine to take advantage of this at the very least the customers will need a dish repoint to Viasat-1 at 115.1 W if not an all new modem/TRIA to be able to take full advantage of the speeds.
What, you don't think the company would just upgrade a customer's speed at no cost do you? Hah!
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Re:lots of land, no line (Score:5, Insightful)
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Totally off topic
Quit interrupting.
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Re:lots of land, no line (Score:4, Funny)
I recently assisted a gentleman on HughesNet with a ping of 1008.
what's hughesnet? from your description is a nsfw video chat thing, and I don't want to check on my work computer.
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Only if efficient spectrum use is a concern. Years ago, dishes were needed mainly because satellites could only transmit weak signals. Now, dishes are mainly to allow spectrum reuse by adjacent satellites (combining highly-directional transmission antennas and relatively small spotbeam footprints with high-gain receiving antennas that attenuate strong signals from adjacent satellites). If you have continent-wide spectrum, you can live without dishes as long as spectrum reuse isn't a concern -- just look at
Re:lots of land, no line (Score:5, Interesting)
Caps can be an issue, but with satellite links it's rate-limiting that's the main issue.
For example the TooWay service in Europe can sustain 10 Mbps downlink, but if you use more than 500 MB in any one hour, or 2GB in a week [tooway4you.eu] then your data rate will be throttled for the remainder of the "fair access" window.
This was the main reason I had to stay with a flaky, wind-affected ADSL connection instead of moving to satellite. Although the data cap was generous, trying to use it was penalised.
Ping (Score:3, Insightful)
Download speed is nice, but for gaming, latency is God...
Re:Ping (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ping (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever try to load Gmail over a high latency connection? Anything with a lot of redirects will cause an issue - and that is a lot more stuff than you think...
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Re:Ping (Score:5, Interesting)
Ever try to load Gmail over a high latency connection? Anything with a lot of redirects will cause an issue - and that is a lot more stuff than you think...
Good -- maybe all the rustic folk out in the hinterlands will complain enough to get a few sites to use less than 19 external sources of javascript tracking bugs, and to only have four or five layers of external scripts that load external scripts that load external scripts.
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It isn't a normal high latency connection. The software is sophisticated enough to anticipate web requests before you send them. The latency doesn't multiply over things like redirects and referenced images. Of course, that only works over web pages that the accelerator understands. Web browsing is actually quite comfortable. VOIP is basically impossible. Gaming is fine with the exception of first-person shooters.
What kills you are the transfer caps. That's what makes it intolerable.
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Try having VOIP with 600ms of latency, or just a video chat. It is incredibly annoying.
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Try having VOIP with 600ms of latency, or just a video chat. It is incredibly annoying.
Back when new carriers were starting in long distance telephony, about 25 years ago, I used "Satellite Business Systems" for a carrier. The latency was a little annoying, mostly because it gave you the feeling that the person you were talking to was a bit stupid, because they were so slow to respond. But I got used to it. It wasn't ideal, but the price was right. Life's all about trade-offs.
Re:Ping (Score:4, Funny)
I ouldn't agr more.
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Try having VOIP with 600ms of latency, or just a video chat. It is incredibly annoying.
Much less annoying than having to route all of your communications through a short-wave radio. I'll take VOIP (or even video chat) over a terrible VSAT connection any day. In fact, I do. It's all a matter of perspective.
Re:Ping (Score:5, Insightful)
1 second is still a disaster for complex sites: You load the page. The page includes some javascript file. Said javascript file includes some more. Then it makes a couple dozen web service calls... and that's if we hope the browser is smart enough to request every link in the page at once.
I've seen many a custom business apps that was tested with pings of 0-10 be a bit slow with 80s, and a total disaster when used from another continent. A 1 second ping makes a connection from the US to India seem like a LAN.
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Re:Ping (Score:5, Insightful)
The question, however, is how much people care. Gamers don't seem to realize that most people don't give two shits about MP games, and there probably aren't many gamers living in rural areas anyway, as 20-somethings generally live in metro areas.
Re:Ping (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not saying the technology is worthless. I'm saying I live in a rural area (40 mins to closest large town, 20 mins or more to a motorway). I get a maximum of 2MB/s 'broadband', but my ping is reasonable (twice most others, but still reasonable). I'd prefer this to 10MB/s download speed and double the latency...
Not everyone is a gamer, but in my original comment, I simply stated that for Gaming (COD, L4D etc) latency is more important than download speed. And it is.
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Sorry, it's just annoying when this topic (satellite broadband) comes up, because it seems like a whole raft of gamers jump on and start bashing it because their gaming is oh-so-important and the technology is useless because it has too much latency for their application, so my response was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction.
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It is important to mention, though. Someone who has not taken a physics course may not be aware of what they are getting, until after they have already sunk huge costs into equipment and con
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We orcs have much cooler names than those trolls.
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Depends; Olog-hai have themselves some neat non-debased Black Speech names.
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The question, however, is how much people care. Gamers don't seem to realize that most people don't give two shits about MP games, and there probably aren't many gamers living in rural areas anyway, as 20-somethings generally live in metro areas.
Yeah but there are still a lot of 11-18 year olds still living with mom and dad.
Re:Ping (Score:4, Insightful)
Gamers don't seem to realize that most people don't give two shits about MP games
According to Wiki: "Modern Warfare 3 went on to gross $1 billion throughout the world in 16 days of availability, beating Avatar’s record of 17 days, according to Activision."
None of those millions of buyers are playing online?
There are currently 3,015,146 players on steam - http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
Re:Ping (Score:4, Insightful)
But when it comes time for the family to decide whether they're going to pay $50/month for 12Mbps satellite broadband which allows the parents to watch Netflix and do all the normal things they do on the internet, or the same amount (or more) for some local ~1Mbps service with low ping times so junior can play his games, but is useless for Netflix, I wonder which one they're going to choose. And if junior has a sister, she's going to be rooting for the Netflix too.
Re:Ping (Score:5, Informative)
I understand the thrust of your opinion here, but wanted to clarify regarding your dismissive statement, "And if junior has a sister, she's going to be rooting for the Netflix too" -- a 2004 survey by the Entertainment Software Assoc. had females comprising 25% of console gamers and 39% of PC gamers [wikipedia.org].
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~1Mbps service...is useless for Netflix...
False. 0.5 Mbps is good enough [roku.com].
Re:Ping (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, if you want the most terrible encoding of the video. Their lowest quality video makes 240p on YouTube look high def by comparison.
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But people who have a local high speed provider of any kind are VERY unlikely to consider satellite at all. The primary market of satellite-based ISPs are the rural dwellers who have no other choice. For them, this is a tremendous improvement of 15-20 year old technology that they have been stuck with up until now.
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Yes, that's true, most of them probably only have dial-up as an alternative. I only mentioned the 1Mbps thing because another poster here said something like that was his only choice, and that barely qualifies as "high speed" (e.g., good luck watching Netflix with that without it looking like YouTube on a bad day).
As for 15-year-old technology, it's more like a 15-year-old technology that's trying to squeeze the most out of a 60+-year-old technology as it can. It's sorta like trying to build a computer wi
Re:Ping (Score:4, Insightful)
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With what money? His allowance? Junior's an adolescent still living at home. And while not all rural people are poor or on a tight budget, the typical ones don't have a lot of extra money for dual internet services to spoil their kids with.
Re:Ping (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, you are really out of touch with reality. Rural life does not equate to uneducated hicks. If you were to get out of your little shell and actually meet people in rural areas you might see that we live out here for a reason. Not because of education or lack of revenue but because we do not feel the need to surround ourselves with people all the time.
I really have more to say but I will leave it at that.
P.S There are quite a few more gamers than you think out in the country.
Re:Ping (Score:5, Funny)
There are quite a few more gamers than you think out in the country.
Cow-tipping is not a game.
It's a sport! :)
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Cow-tipping is not a game.
Its a way of life!
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This is very true. In fact my father lives in the mountains next to some extremely wealthy celebrities and lawyers... Some very famous celebrities you all know.
And yet, internet service is garbage in that area. The wealthy people have paid the teleco and comcast to run lines to them but comcast refuses to run lines to the "regular folk" who are neighbors with the celebs, unless they too want to pony up the cash the wealthy folks did.
It really boils down to cost for these companies, and they dont care about
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My point is, you cannot blame them for not wanting to run cables to your house, if they are not going to make money off it. I am in the same situation (my city is one of the top for internet speed in the country, but I live in an inexplicable not-spot). Countless phone calls to the cable company (the only people who do fibre, apart from a few small niche companies) end in the same result: it is not economically viable for them to cable my street, despi
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Re:You don't consider Farmville gaming? (Score:4, Funny)
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In terms of up and down this whips the hell out of what I have living in the middle of a city both in terms of bandwidth as well as cost, but the latency and likely caps are deal breakers. Which is really sad considering I live in one of the most connected cities in the country.
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You've got to realize that latency of a second isn't as widely acceptable as you're making it out to be. Take your standard webpage these days - it probably has close to 100 items on it
Sat systems often have proxies to help cover RTTs on the ground so fewer end up translated through the sat link.
Still sucks but when you have nothing better the new ViaSat is a big deal.
Cisco IP phones sitting on the desk in their home office, and that phone call is going to sound like garbage with >1000ms of latency.
Packet loss not latency is what makes VoIP links sound like garbage. Latency without packet loss has NO effect of any kind on audio quality.
The only difference is humans having to learn a little patience to cope with prop delay.
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yeah... you're looking at 250ms for a round-trip at light speed to a geostationary satellite. I've had better latency on dialup in the 90's.
As others have said though, perfectly fine for browsing on facepalm
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Who the hell games on a satellite connection?
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I disagree, games are a great time to unwind and let my problems solve themselves in the background while I'm distracted. Granted spending too much time doing that is also problematic, but gaming is something that helps a lot with critical thinking and prioritization. Plus if you choose the right game it's just like working in that patent office.
Actually there is something else I would like to k (Score:2)
Actually there is something else I would like to know. Ping time. For gaming, that is what matters most and there can be huge differences depending on your ISP. And yes, I might seem spoiled but the difference between 33ms and 300ms is far bigger to me then whether a patch takes 5 minutes or 50 minutes.
Re:Actually there is something else I would like t (Score:5, Interesting)
I was on Wild Blue Satellite for 1 full year. They do a "rolling" average for bandwidth that depends on your package. I had 17GB per month. If I used 400MB today, that would "roll off" in 30 days thus making it available again.
My latency was a solid 2000ms or higher at all times. I lost connection any time there was heavy storms between Virginia and New York. I was paying somewhere around $70/mo. I had trouble staying connected to Steam, so I stopped using it and favored retail single player games for that year.
I'm now on a more restricted local ISP and haven't really looked back. Instead of being on a rolling average I'm on a hard 600MB/day plan. I am paying more than under satellite, but I'm able to achieve 30ms pings (the ISP is actually WISP).
My fondest memories of satellite are: turning off prefetching webpages, clicking a link and then waiting many seconds for anything to happen and often wondering if I actually clicked it, and checking the bandwidth monitor logs to make sure I wasn't about to go over my limit.
Seriously, fuck satellite internet.
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Only latency-sensitive games, actually. Anything that's either turn-based or not simultaneous would run fine (that includes a whole bunch of casual games, turn-based strategy games, etc.).
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That's something I wondered about. This would be great in SE Alaska - faster and cheaper than my DSL line but given the tendency towards constant rain (last year I measured 97 inches at my house) it probably wouldnt be very useful.
Oh well.
Re:Actually there is something else I would like t (Score:5, Informative)
Acceleration is the key there. When I was Network Guy(tm) for a satellite provider, we could easily push 15-20Mbps of a single stream of TCP traffic over the bird using TurboIP boxes from Comtech/EFData. It did tricks with TCP windows and ACKs that let you overcome TCP slowstart.
And I don't understand the whole "OMG 520ms latency kills VOIP!" argument. We had hundreds of Cisco IP phones out at the end of our VSAT links and nobody complained one bit about it. It takes about 15 seconds for your brain to realize "Oh, there's a bit of lag" and adjust. i think people are complaining about jittery connections that have latencies that bounce around between 520ms and 3000ms because of how you're sharing both the uplink and downlink channels with everyone else. Our systems could detect SIP calls and switch you from a shared channel to a dedicated channel big enough to handle your call + additional overhead.
Re:Actually there is something else I would like t (Score:4, Informative)
I was also worried about not just data latency of VoIP but also the voice latency which tends to interrupt conversations since the pauses are too long. The TCP spoofing and VoIP audio data compression (and QoS on a shared link) really do go a long way in overcoming not just data latency but that oh-so-annoying satellite voice delay.
I had no idea, but VoIP over satellite really works. Something in the math makes the delay short enough to help your perception of the other caller's intentions (did he stop talking so I can start now?) We've all seen the funny interruption cycles on CNN with people via satellite, but when it's just VoIP, it really isn't a problem.
Ka-band in the rain is a completely different story--actually, it's a tragedy. If I were provisioning a remote site that only had satellite internet for telephones, I'd try to pick Ku-band FSS over Ka-band for VoIP traffic just to minimize the rain fade problem.
Still, satellite internet is still one of those need-it-because-we-can't-get-anything-else technologies. It's that pesky speed of light problem that gets in the way.
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If you want rain-fade-free-reliability, C-Band is the only way to go. Our C-band links rain faded twice in the 4 years I was there. Once because of a 6-inch-per-hour springtime thunderstorm and once because of a hail storm. The latency on those links were about 750ms because they were long-path hops to transatlantic birds down into Africa and yet they ran constant VOIP, HTTP, and SMTP traffic.
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Ku usually has a serious problem with rain-fade more because dishes are sized just large enough for clear-weather communications. Throw a Ku-band LNBF on a nice big 3 meter (C-band) offset dish, and I bet your rain-fade problem will be history.
Re:Actually there is something else I would like t (Score:5, Interesting)
Ku usually has a serious problem with rain-fade more because dishes are sized just large enough for clear-weather communications.
Depends on who's engineering the link. Our Ku VSAT links could close the link with a 7-8db Eb/N0 on a 90cm dish, but we opted to go for a 1.2m dish for the extra rain fade margin. We also opted to spend a little more on the space segment to be able to transmit a hotter signal.
Throw a Ku-band LNBF on a nice big 3 meter (C-band) offset dish, and I bet your rain-fade problem will be history.
If your C-Band dish is Ku-capable, sure. That means no mesh dishes, and stricter manufacturing tolerances. Satellite owners get cranky when you splatter across 2 or 3 birds because of a dish that is out of tolerance for what it is being used for. Plus there's the potential problem of overload. I've had instances of having to pad down a signal because the system was engineered for 1.2m dishes all around and someone pops up with a 4.5m dish because that's what they had already. The receiver would overload and we couldn't turn the transmitter down far enough to not splatter all over the transponder.
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Valid points. I was really just trying to make the point that Ku isn't inherently unworkable with heavy rains. The same probably can't be said about Ka.
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That sounds like a situation crying out for another intermediate layer protocol with some redundancy so you can tolerate the loss of a few percent of the packets with no retransmits. (Or is it only as high as 98% now because they're already doing lots of such tricks?)
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What really makes the dropped or clashed packets or aks painfull is tcp's backoff. Especially in a situation with hidden transmitters. The killer is, back off is exponential.
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Speed of light says the latency will be bad. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Speed of light says the latency will be bad. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Speed of light says the latency will be bad. (Score:4, Funny)
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I actually like pre-cognitive commands, makes things interesting. It's why I switched form neutrinos to tachyons actually...
That's why the pre-crime unit loves you guys. You give yourselves up before they come to arrest you for a crime you haven't yet committed. Very efficient of you.
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A lot of people will mention gaming, but this could make it pretty difficult for VOIP, Skype, etc. Basically any kind of application that requires latency to be less than 100ms. Last time I was on satellite I saw ping times above 500ms. That just won't work for most of what I do.
Latency is not just an issue for gaming, it can be a deal breaker for quite a few things.
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A lot of people will mention gaming, but this could make it pretty difficult for VOIP, Skype, etc. Basically any kind of application that requires latency to be less than 100ms.
On a good day it's 220ms from our AU office to one of our other US offices... Skype works just fine, thanks.
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Actually, there IS something that can be done about it, only problem is that no satellite internet provider has actually done it yet.
Replace one geostationary satellite with a constellation of LEO satellites. This significantly reduces the path time of the signal. It's been done for voice services on satellite already, we just need the data services to catch up. There are of course other advantages to this idea too, it would allow omni-directional antennas that don't need to be aimed at any specific point i
Why no LEO? (Score:3)
I wonder why they aren't putting network satellites in LEO instead of geostationary. Just how hard would it be to use a phased array antenna instead of a dish and track the orbit? Would that negate the lower cost of only going to LEO? After all, with the satellites in lower orbit you could launch more of them, which ought to improve bandwidth. And the improvement in latency would make this arrangement competetive with any other broadband offering.
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Nice to know where your needing remote communications, what your saying and where your packets are going, 24/7.
Safe for long term tracking.
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I don't think the geostationary distance is responsible for the latency. It probably has a lot more to do with the task of transmitting and receiving broadband data from a satelite. The phased array would increase their investment in launches, as well as ground based hubs. In addition, most customers would be priced out of the service since the hardware would need to track the satellite; not an easy or cheap task for something you mount on your roof and never service again.
In summary, geostationary is the o
Re:Why no LEO? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think the geostationary distance is responsible for the latency
Err, do a calculation before saying stuff like this..
geostationary orbit is about 40,000km from surface of US, more or less. Speed of light is 300,000km/s. So ping due to speed of light limitation is 40*4/300 = 533ms. Remember, packet has to go from base station to sat to your residence then ACK has to go from your residence to sat to base station.
Now add another 100+ms for you equipment latency and base station, and you have in excess of 650ms. And that's not accounting for even errors in trasmission.
So yes, geostationary distance is most of the latency issue.
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My guess would be better coverage of the intended area with fewer satellites. A geo-stationary orbit would yield constant coverage with a single satellite. Whereas in LEO, the satellite orbits every 90 minutes so it would be out of contact every 45 minutes (probably more) while it's on the other side of the earth, requiring more (expensive) satellites to be launched.
As for ping times:
LEO: ~350km (approx height of ISS) = 350km/c = 1.16ms * 2 = 2.32ms
Geo-Stationary: ~35,000km = 35,000km/c = 0.116s * 2 = 0.23
Because a phased-array antenna CO$T$ (Score:2)
A phased array antenna is substantially more expensive to make than a dish-and-horn. More electronics in it, and in particular more PIECES, which means more pick-and-place time.
Economy of scale might bring it town to something comparable a couple years into a big deployment. But it will still cost a bunch extra at first - which is when you are trying to recover startup costs and simultaneously underbid the competition. And then you need a bunch of satellites rather than one or two.
So a new player would f
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Just how hard would it be to use a phased array antenna instead of a dish and track the orbit?
The issue isn't so much that it's hard - nor is it for the convenience of the NSA like one of the Tinfoil Hat Brigade suggested elsewhere. It's cost and reliability.
That fixed VSAT .75m or so dish you get installed outside your house for satellite TV or Internet is a reliable kit with no moving parts that costs at wholesale anywhere from $100 to $300 (excluding the satellite modem) for most configurations. (Some areas or situations require larger dishes that can run into the many hundreds or thousands of $$
Re:Why no LEO? (Score:4, Informative)
A phased array antenna, however, has LOTS of moving parts
Maybe you don't quite understand how a phased array works... No physical movement is needed for repointing the antenna, but an apparent movement is done by introducing phase shifts between the various parts of the antenna surface. These phase shifts are introduced electronically, no physical movement needed.
It also costs anywhere between $5000 and $30000 depending on your specifics
Although such antennas are more expensive than normal fixed antennae (due to the additional electronics), the difference is nowhere as big as you make it.
Some satellite providers are designing such phased array antennae right now, for the purpose of receiving from multiple orbital positions (formerly this has been done either by multiple antennae, or one dish with multiple LNBs). So, the technology can't be that expensive (once it is mass-produced), or else it would never be able to compete with multi-LNB dishes.
especially given that you need to bump up the transmitter power vs. an equivalent GEO radio to get equivalent data rate
A LEO satellite will be much nearer, thus less loss due to distance, so you'd actually need less transmitter power rather than more.
Top that off with the fact that you're going to lose your connection everytime the LEO bird your dish was tracking goes over the horizon and it needs to lock onto a different satellite.
Make it so that your system can lock on to several satellites at once, and you can start looking for the next satellite long before the previous one goes under the horizon.
Never mind that I'm unaware of any commercial LEO data systems available today that provide greater than 9.6 kbps data rates...
Probably, this has more to do with the fact that there are no mass-market LEO constellations available yet, and the few fringe players have to save costs due to their small user base.
Once a major player gets into this market, prices will drop, and bitrates will go up.
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Hmm (Score:2)
Potentially useful. Does anyone have a link to a map detailing which areas of the earth are covered?
What they don't talk about. (Score:4, Informative)
As a Wildblue subscriber on the highest teer package, who gets slowed down to dialup speed a couple times a year for using more then 17 gigs in a month (yes that is the current highest residential cap) I've been following this story pretty close. There are a few facts that are definetly getting downplayed so far both here and in the Engadget piece. For one Viasat isn't just partnering with Wildblue, they now own them, or at least a pretty big share. And they have been talking this kind of speed since Viasat 1 was still in design, so even though it's great to see it in practice, that is nothing new. And most blatantly absent is the caps themselves. From all reports (not publicly confirmed, but much evidence to back up) the $50 package that he mentions will only be for 7.5 gigs combined down and up. The next level is 15 gigs combined down and up for $80, and the top tier is 25 gigs combined for $130. And after that it's $10 a gig, or a significant slow down, like they have now.
You can find discussion about this on Wildblue's own forum http://wildblueworld.com/forum/
Like I mentioned earlier, Viasat has been talking this up as a real competitor to DSL for quite some time, so many of us existing customers hoped (assumed) that that meant they would give us some realistic caps to go along with the speed, but it appears that is not the case. So although the speed bump is cool, remember that at the lowest level, 1 Netflix movie along with normal browsing will probably put you over for the whole month.
Should have been a dupe (Score:2)
I'd love an "emergency backup" subscription plan (Score:2)
I have outages at least once or twice a year, where I lose my power, cell phone, land line, cable and of course Internet. Power I can get around with a generator, but the others not so much. I don't miss the cable TV, but no phone service of any kind is definitely a problem when it last more than a few hours.
I'd love a cheap plan that only let me subscribe when I needed it, no charges for a month I don't use the satellite, or at the very least a sub-$20 package that isn't fast or has a lot of data that I
High Speed 2-way Satellite (Score:2)
Re:Bandwidth has to be shared with all users (Score:5, Informative)
What's the total bandwidth of the satellite? If you can get 12Mbps when nobody else is using it, that sounds great until they have about 5 customers.
140 Gbps/1 satellite [viasat.com] - approx 12000 users downloading at full capacity in the same time.
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What's the total bandwidth of the satellite?
If you can get 12Mbps when nobody else is using it, that sounds great until they have about 5 customers.
140 Gbps/1 satellite [viasat.com] - approx 12000 users downloading at full capacity in the same time.
Unless the downloaded data originates on the satellite.. it has to be transmitted up from the ground first so actual user capacity would be about half that. Not great when you consider the area one satellite covers. It would be interesting to know if they are using some sort of advanced caching or multiplexing routines when it comes to things like netflix.
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Bandwidth is capped, and capped hard.
Oversubscription is likely to kill performance even before you hit your cap as well. One of their satellites can service roughly 6k subscribers simultaneously at advertised rates. They are talking in the neighborhood of a million subscribers.
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The Slashdot crowd seriously underestimates