Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space

Post by bahmboo » Thu, Feb 18, 2016, 3:08 AM UTC

ViaSat works great. Yes there is actual packet latency but practically speaking voip/videochat just works. Download speeds are fast, absolutely no problem watching streaming HD.

The biggest problem is that you get a fixed amount of traffic. They are starting to come around to throttling once you go over, but so far not for everyone.

Edit: need to amend - As a technology it works great. - I use it at a remote cabin and it's fine for weekend use. - Getting the Internet in middle of nowhere, yes+++. - If I had to live with it for day to day use I would not be happy because of the traffic limits.

tl;dr geo sync internet without traffic limits would get the customer 99% where they wanna be.

Post by adamkaz » Thu, Feb 18, 2016, 4:14 AM UTC

SEJeff wrote: post #16

oxalo wrote: post #12

Has anyone figured out how to deal with the issue of latency for space-based internet? Things like online games and video calls will just not work if the traffic hits space. I could see an ISP offering a service where traffic that needs low latency gets routed on land, while web pages and the like get routed through space. At a cost, of course.

All of the past versions of "space internet" have been geostationary orbit, which is around 25,000-26,000 miles above sea level. The new iterations, such as SpaceX's idea, is to use many many more microsats and put them in LEO. Low Earth Orbit is closer to 750 or so miles above sea level. Since the ping latency of geostationary sat internet is around 500-700ms, it would be massively less for low earth orbit. The two…

As someone who has worked in this industry and seen a lot of these ideas fail first hand - another big challenge is going to be ground entry points. For GEO satellites, each satellite serves many customers and may only need maybe 2-3 (for redundancy) groundstations.

For LEO constellations, each satellite can only see a small portion of customers at any time and will quickly move out of coverage of a single point on the earth, requiring many groundstations.

Alternatively, the satellites can crosslink and eventually hit a groundstation, but these handoffs and trip lengths quickly get back to the ping latencies of making a single trip to GEO.

Re: Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space

Re: Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space