Broadband Over Satellite

[andydrage]

Hello, not sure I've posted in the right section here but I wanted to ask if anybody here knows about receiving a broadband internet connection using a satellite dish. It's so bad over the phone lines here and doesn't look like it will improve any time soon as the BT engineer says we're as far from the exchange as you can get! Thanks in advance for any help

[jack08]

Originally Posted by andydrage

Hello, not sure I've posted in the right section here but I wanted to ask if anybody here knows about receiving a broadband internet connection using a satellite dish. It's so bad over the phone lines here and doesn't look like it will improve any time soon as the BT engineer says we're as far from the exchange as you can get! Thanks in advance for any help

you could try a 3 dongle m8

[unadkat]

For general Surfing any connection would do in all honesty.

If hes a heavy down-loader then a Dongle would be useless as they have Download limits from what am aware off. Unless am Mistaken.

[TheCoder]

There's two type of sat internet system generally used.

1/ Download only. In this system you use a standard phone modem for upload and you receive the reply via the sat download. For this system the equipment cost is minimal (basically a standard dish/lnb and a very standard dvb-s card in your PC)

2/ Download/Upload. Here you use the sat for both up and download. The equipment cost is fairly high and you tend to need to use a much bigger dish.

Both systems tend to be very slow as your signal has to travel to the sat and back at least once (twice for system 2). The 72,000km (144,000km) round trip takes at least 250mS (500mS). The data serialisation and queueing (all users get a timeslot in a serial data stream) can also add significant latency often of around another 250mS or so. This basically means the system is extremely unsuitable for any realtime system as there's usually half a second or more of lag (usually 1-1.4 seconds if you factor in total round-trip delays). In comparison, even slow dialup services tend to have a lag of only 200-300mS.

There is a way to improve the signal times but it tends to be pretty expensive. Thats to use low-orbit satellites instead of the normal geo-synchronous ones. Globalstar/Iridium have LEO's with signal delays of only 40mS or so. Generally, these services would be priced way above normal consumer type products.

Sat system broadband also tends to have some pretty nasty restrictions in terms of bandwidth with most offering less than 500Mbyte per day. A typical sat transducer can handle about 40Mbit/sec but this is often shared between 100-5000 users (depending on your service level) so contention can be pretty damned high (effectively, if your sharing with 5000 other people you get the equivelent of an 8kbit/sec line - far slower than a dialup modem).

[lincsat]

There is Tooway that do a duplex sat system, I believe they have a tight cap. You may also find a wireless system like this one in Lincolnshire - http://www.linpop.co.uk/