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.
This would be great - we only have dialup here, unless we spend major dollars.
Carolyn
I am in the same boat here with dialup we did go into the broadband card with our laptop from AT&T it connects faster and the speed is faster than dialup plus we can operate from the car or take on trips and use if WI FI isnt available.
Last summer I was camping in Canada and the site had wireless internet fed by a satelllite.
The satellite was so low on the horizon that when a train passed on a near by track it blotted out the receprion. Talk about a lag......
Ping times on the better systems are around 600-700 msec. Not great, but it makes everyday internet access workable. Some SSL-based VPNs can work reasonably well, IPSec VPNs, not so much. Citrix Metaframe remote access clients also work very well over certain satellite-based internet connections.
I've done over 350 of these installations over the past few years. This technology has been a great enabler for small business / rural-based businesses, and for those who need remote access to do their jobs.
I believe the major problem with VPN and satellites is that in order to get the speed satellite compresses/encodes, and since the VPN data is encrypted, it can’t do anything to compress it and speeds crawl to dialup.
I read somewhere some time ago of a method to get around this. I believe in involved creating tunnels on both ends instead of using PPTP.
What’s your view on the VPN problem?
Correctamundo. There are appliances that can provide end-to-end VPN acceleration. Good solution if that's what you need. I've got some of these items listed here.
My friend has HughesNet and I find it to be the most frustrating thing on earth next to dial-up. 600K my butt. If you test the connection on speedtest.net, the latency counter only has 3 digits and it always shows the latency times as 999 so who knows what it really is. Geo orbit is like what 26,000 miles or so, speed of light 186,282 mph, so .14 seconds or so to go up and the same down, everything else involving latency times is just switching equipment and ground hops. No need to bend space-time to improve latency though, just upgrade to better, faster equipment.
Encore Networks has a good solution to high-latency VPN issues, and there’s another that I’m looking at right now.
Fact is, business is starting to move away from VPNs and towards solutions like that those offered by Citrix Sytems and by Windows Remote Workplace - both are non-VPN-based. VPNs, quite frankly, are a big pain in the rear. I like Citrix a lot.
The satellite service I was frustrated with was hughes.net.
>>That’s nice, but you’re still going to have a 250ms minimum ping time, rendering this USELESS for online gaming.<<
I doubt it would be that good.
((26 200 * 2) / 186 000) * 1 000 = 281.72043
So 282 ms is the theoretical best if there are no other latency sources.
Thanks very much for the info.
Problem for us is we’re quite small - too small for Citrix?
And we’re a Mac shop. No Windows on the network.
In the United States, we should be installing fiber optic cable to every home, school and business.
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