Posted on 01/09/2008 11:33:49 AM PST by ShadowAce
NEW YORK (AP) - A satellite due to launch in three years promises to expand high-speed Internet services to rural Americans who cannot get access through cable or phone companies.
ViaSat Inc. (VSAT) bills its forthcoming ViaSat-1 satellite as the world's highest-capacity broadband satellite. The company said the new satellite should provide at least 10 times the capacity of those in orbit today, largely by using the spectrum more efficiently.
That means each customer could get faster speeds and more customers could be served in any given area, Chief Executive Mark Dankberg said.
He said satellite broadband providers have been reaching their limits in some of the more populated rural regions, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania - places where people are more likely to know others with broadband and thus would want it, too.
ViaSat announced a contract this week for Loral Space and Communications Inc. (LORL) to build the new satellite, to be launched in early 2011 and serve the United States and Canada. A European counterpart, Eutelsat Communications' KA-SAT, is set to launch in late 2010 using similar technology.
The cable and phone industries now dominate the U.S. broadband market, each having a market share of more than 40 percent, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. But there are many rural stretches where Americans have access to neither. In other places, they have only one option, keeping prices high.
ViaSat plans to resell satellite broadband capacity through existing Internet service providers. ViaSat will handle the basic data flow; the ISP will handle sales, billing and added services like e-mail.
Dankberg said the satellite could handle Internet traffic in both directions, so customers could send, or upload, data at speeds comparable to cable and DSL. Some satellite systems send data in one direction only, meaning customers need a regular - and slow - dial-up modem for uploading.
Take that! Digital Divide.
Of course, such innovations won’t stop a President Hillary of Obama from creating another Rural Internetification Authority but it’s nice to have...
I’m not all the worried about speed. Try improving the latency times. You can have a 10 GB connection, but if the lag time between me clicking on a link and the information being sent to me is 2 minutes, it doesn’t feel very fast.
But will I get a $40.00 coupon from the government for the equipment?
;)
I had satellite for about four years because of my location. It's head and shoulders above dial-up.
It will never be comparable to DSL or Cable (or even rural wireless, which is another alternative they failed to mention) because of one thing: Latency
Latency keeps you from doing (or hinders greatly) stuff like:
Carolyn
So consumer satellite dishes are powerful enough to send data to something in orbit? I didn't know this was possible.
That’s nice, but you’re still going to have a 250ms minimum ping time, rendering this USELESS for online gaming.
Exactly. Latency is a huge killer. I would never use sat broadband unless I absolutely had to.
DirecTV has been selling this for several years. The equipment isn't free or cheap.
Yes, check out DirecPC.
I had it several years ago. Quite fast, but latency was annoying. It cost about $400 for the dish + modem, plus $65 per month.
You mean by curving space-time or something?
Latency makes VOIP impossible, not to mention gaming.
Then there’s that little $49.99, 7500MB per-rolling-30-days bandwith limit that strangles you in no time, especially if the “city cousins” with high speed cable internet send you big files. You want more bandwith, you pay a lot more.
WB’s reliability has been very good, but a couple of months after I signed up they slashed the bandwith by 25% without an appropriate reduction in price. I’m still steaming over that one.
Verizon EVDO is supposed to be alive and well in my area. I’m not sure it’s a good compromise.
You mean by curving space-time or something?
Speed of light: a blessing and a curse.
I’m on satellite internet (hughesnet) and I can’t even update windows. They have something called a fair access policy and if I download like 300 megs within 24 hours they cut me off for 24 hours.
I could upgrade to the business service but even there I can only download 1GB or so.
limited unlimited internet sucks. I can deal with high ping times but this just sucks.
I used a satellite link at a remote location a few weeks ago (we were on vacation, and it was all that was available.) The speed was painful. Then I was trying to complete some work, and even though this cabin is used very seldom, somehow, there is a broadband limit imposed during a 24 hour period (obviously it’s not a monthly limit, or cumulative in that it rolls over if not used.) I evidently exceeded it and was shut out completely until the start of the next 24 hour day. I told my husband, rural living is nice, but I could never deal with the internet issues, or the cell phone issues (we couldn’t get reception.)
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